How to create an omnichannel customer experience with Magento 2
The term “omnichannel” is often overused and misunderstood, creating an omnichannel vs multichannel debate. When it comes to ecommerce and retail, creating shopping experiences across multiple channels for the modern consumer is important. But to truly connect with consumers and turn them into repeat customers for your brand, you need to integrate these channels and unify the offline and online commerce experience. This is what omnichannel commerce is all about.
As experienced Magento developers of award-winning ecommerce stores, we create strategies for ecommerce businesses to meet their customers’ expectations and deliver cutting-edge personalisation and integrated shopping experiences.
Space 48 founder Jon Woodall discusses how to create an omnichannel customer experience with Magento 2:
Create continuity across channels and devices
The key to successful omnichannel ecommerce strategies is that they’re not only customer focused, but customer led. The priorities of today’s consumers should drive your ecommerce website strategies and look to align with your business goals, not the other way around.
Magento 2’s functionality enables businesses to integrate multiple channels, customise the experience to deliver continuity across channels and devices, and optimise channels to ensure a streamlined and relevant user experience any time consumers connect with your brand.
Research from IDC found that consumers shopping via multiple channels have a 30% higher customer lifetime value (CLV) than single-channel shoppers.
Acquiring new customers is important for growth, but maintaining existing customers is crucial and cost-effective. A great way to increase CLV is by enabling customers to shop with your brand across multiple channels, ensuring they enjoy a consistent customer experience on each channel.
A study from Kampyle found 87% of customers want brands to work harder to provide a more consistent customer experience across channels.
Although you should deliver continuity across channels, you still need to optimise user experience for different channels and devices. Due the ever-increasing popularity of mobile shopping, you should make sure UX for mobile devices is suitable for consumers looking to browse and buy on the go. Processes must be streamlined and user-friendly to prevent consumer frustration.
Our Head of Insight, Oliver Lees, wrote a piece about the strategic ways you can improve ecommerce store performance. He talked about going further than optimising for mobile devices by building and developing ecommerce stores “mobile upwards” – designing UX on online stores with mobile users in mind, before ensuring tablet and desktop versions are fully responsive with appropriate usability.
Shift in browsing and buying trends
Today’s consumers want to browse for products whenever they want, wherever they are. Smart technology and mobile devices makes this possible. Forward-thinking brands ensure that their shopping experiences meet their customers’ expectations.
Modern consumers demand more of their brands and expect the ability to browse and buy at their fingertips, as quickly and easily on mobile devices as on desktop or on the high street.
85% of customers begin the purchase process on one device before finishing it on another. (Source: Google digital trends study)
The high street is far from dead. Consumer trends show shoppers like to have flexibility around when and where they browse, how they chose to make purchases and their delivery/fulfillment options.
This flexibility includes browsing online and buying in-store, and vice versa. Customers also want to browse products online and have them delivered to stores, or even buy products in-store and have them delivered to home. Savvy pure-play brands have opened physical stores for the prime reason of allowing customers to try products in-store and buy online later (or pick-up from another location).
Establish a single customer view
Magento 2 allows you to create a single customer view, which is vital for meeting these flexibility expectations and manage customer activity efficiently and effectively.
Magento Commerce Order Management on Magento 2 enables businesses to combine multiple databases and establish a single view of customer orders and product inventory. This helps you to increase efficiency, deliverability and order fulfilment. This combination of data creates a greater depth of insight for communicating with and nurturing customers – with offers, incentives and personalisation – for a more tailored customer journey.
Magento 2: A unified commerce platform
Magento 2 was built with lessons learnt and customer needs and expectations at its heart. The result was a revolutionary fluid coding architecture that has significantly increased the performance capabilities of ecommerce websites and enabled businesses a vast level of scalability and customisation. Combined with Magento Commerce Order Management, this creates a unified commerce platform. Magento 2 is suitable for ecommerce businesses of all sizes, but certainty for ambitious retailers aiming to grow, increase retail revenue with omnichannel commerce and deliver an integrated commerce experience for customers.
Magento 2, as a unified commerce platform, gives you the tools to connect with your customers on whichever channel or device they’re using and wherever they’re browsing and shopping. This progressive ecommerce platform unifies offline and online commerce, creating synergy across channels and immersive customer journeys, where you brand delights its customers and keeps them coming back.
Fraport were awarded Best Ominchannel Experience at Magento Imagine 2016. Check out Fraport’s success story. It’s one of the strongest omnichannel examples to use as inspiration for your ecommerce business, as it really demonstrates the unified commerce experience in action.
Wrap up
We hope this blog was useful in showing you the importance of creating an omnichannel strategy to improve the overall customer experience on your ecommerce store and how Magento 2 enables brands to do this – unifying online and offline commerce.
Space 48 is a UK-based ecommerce consultancy, comprising of Magento specialists and Magento 2 developers. If you want to learn more about Magento 2’s key features and functionality and discover why the platform could be right for your ecommerce business, learn more about our Magento services.
