5 Ways to Boost Your Ecommerce Omnichannel Strategy

Modern consumers typically hit multiple online and offline pit stops as they shop, while using devices to get from point A to point S (the shopping cart). Connecting this multi-touchpoint, multi-channel retail journey into something seamless and relevant across all the many stops that consumers make along the way, is what we mean when we refer to a good omnichannel shopping experience.

Your ecommerce omnichannel strategy should be focused on meeting consumers along this omnichannel journey, no matter where they happen to start or end. Personalization is a big part of what makes this happen because it’s easy, it resonates with shoppers, and it makes sense. 

Effective personalization uses data to eliminate obstacles for customers. That means you need to truly understand customer segments so you can connect their interactions across channels, and create relevant messaging, product suggestions and offers for each shopper. Core elements like automation, testing and optimization should complement your broader omnichannel approach. In this article, we’ll explain the key components of an effective ecommerce omnichannel strategy and include five important strategies to help retailers implement it effectively.

What is an Omnichannel Ecommerce Strategy?

An omnichannel ecommerce strategy connects all customer touchpoints to create  a single, unified shopping experience. It requires meeting consumers wherever they happen to be – whether they enter your sales funnel through social ads, email campaigns, or your ecommerce website. Omnichannel retail brands excel at blending these channels together so transactions can flow seamlessly from initial outreach to final conversion.

The truth is – most brands fail to achieve true continuity. They may entice customers with personalized messaging tailored to their interests and behaviors. But when those shoppers click through to the website itself, they’re faced with a disconnect.  For example, the free shipping offer promoted in an email is nowhere to be found. Or the specific product collection used to catch their attention doesn’t match what they see on the website.

This disjointed experience happens because marketing campaigns and on-site content operate from different data sources and teams. The website doesn’t dynamically reflect the real-time context that incoming traffic brought with them. An omnichannel strategy requires brands to maintain context across channels. 

5 Omnichannel Ecommerce Strategies to Boost Your Business

Now that we’ve covered the foundations of an omnichannel approach, let’s explore 5 advanced tactics focused on achieving effective omnichannel  personalization in retail. Each strategy plays a role in creating a that continuity we mentioned above – creating a truly seamless buying journey for your customers. 

1. Personalize Your Content Across Platforms

To deliver relevant experiences, you need to tailor your messaging and product recommendations based on customer data and context. This means personalizing content across every platform – from email and SMS to your website and mobile apps.

For example, if a customer clicks on a backpack in an Instagram ad, the landing page should showcase that same backpack or similar styles. Taking it a step further, you can leverage tools like automated personalization to dynamically serve additional  items frequently purchased with backpacks (a water bottle, sunscreen, hand sanitizer, etc.). This creates a hyper-relevant flow that moves shoppers toward conversion.

Some benefits of personalizing experiences across platforms include:

• It provides a continuous experience that builds engagement at every touchpoint.
• Customers are more likely to purchase when content reflects their interests.
• A unified brand experience increases trust and loyalty.

The to achieving omnichannel personalization is centralizing your data, content, and automation so this information flows seamlessly regardless of channel. This allows you to scale relevant messaging as shoppers transition from social, to site, to mobile app, and back again. An automated personalization engine can help you do this by transforming disjointed experiences into cohesive and consistent buying journeys.

2. Utilize Automation Tools to Save Time

Personalization engines like Monetate offer critical automation tools for managing omnichannel experiences at scale. These technologies handle manual and repetitive tasks so the humans on your team can focus on strategy and creativity.

Monetate’s automated personalization feature dynamically determines the optimal page layout and content to serve each visitor to boost conversion rates. It uses machine learning and AI to create personalized experiences to every customer across every touchpoint. 

Key benefits of ecommerce automation tools include:

• They save you significant time compared to manual execution.
• They allow you to scale personalized experiences across channels.
• They work in real-time, continuously optimizing experiences based on real-time data and analytics.
• They increase relevancy and engagement for shoppers at an individual level.

Robust personalization platforms with built-in automation have achieved up to 300% ROI for some ecommerce marketers. That equals millions in incremental revenue through AI-powered personalization.

Choosing the right platform is integral to this strategy. It’s what allows you to centralize data, surface insights, automate workflows, and personalize touchpoints. Plus, it’s scalable, facilitating the 1-to-1 journeys consumers have come to expect across whatever touchpoint they happen to be using.

3. Make Customer-Informed Decisions with Segmentation

Segmenting your customers into groups with common traits is an important part of creating personalized experiences. Platforms with built-in targeting and segmentation capabilities automatically identify and create segments like high-value shoppers (e.g., “VIP shoppers”), new customers, and Instagram followers.

Tailored content can then be aligned by segment to keep experiences consistent across channels like your website, email campaigns, and physical stores. Monetate has over 150 out-of-the-box targeting criteria to help you start segmentation quickly. 

Effective segmentation brings key benefits including:

• Personalizing messages based on shared preferences.
• Serving relevant offers, incentives and recommendations.
• Uncovering sales opportunities within micro-segments.
• Consistently improving performance through better targeting.

Segmentation helps inform strategic decisions around how you plan your omnichannel campaigns and website experiences. 

4. Map the Customer Journey to Understand Buying Behavior

Journey analytics tools allow you to map full customer journeys to gain clarity on buying behaviors. They let you examine every touchpoint from an email click to final purchase across devices.  

Monetate’s journey analytics feature incorporates interactive diagrams that highlight key pages and conversion rates, allowing you to evaluate end-to-end customer behavior. Journey analytics also let you filter journeys by criteria like buyer types to uncover segment-specific insights so you can see exactly how different testing variants impact behaviors across the entire experience.

Some of the benefits you get from mapping end-to-end journeys include:

• Gaining holistic visibility into behaviors across touchpoints. 
• Discovering friction points impacting conversion performance.  
• Making better targeting and personalization decisions.
• Optimizing and improving weak points in the journey based on real-time test results. 

With journey analytics, you can answer questions like: Where are customers dropping off? How do high-value buyers navigate our site? Which paths indicate product affinity? The customer intelligence and testing ideas uncovered across a multi-touchpoint shopping journey allow you to continuously improved your customers’ experiences.

5. Test Your Strategies for Optimal Results

A/B and A/B/n testing tools like the ones built into Monetate’s platform allow you to validate key parts of your omnichannel strategy – no need to rely on intuition or guesswork. You can test messaging, offers, page layouts and more across digital touchpoints and get results quickly. 

For example, test a personalized email campaign focused on abandoned cart recovery. Deploy it to a percentage of users to evaluate engagement and sales impact before sending it widely. Use machine learning to automatically shift more traffic to the best performing version.

Effective experimentation brings key omnichannel benefits including:

• Validating channel initiatives to boost KPIs like conversion.
• Enabling data-driven optimization across experiences.
• Reducing risk for major investments like personalization and design updates.
• Ensuring you provide the most relevant CX to all shoppers.

Testing and optimization should inform all omnichannel retail strategies. Confirming ideas with real user data leads to better performance and ROI across personalized journeys. Experimentation gives brands the confidence to scale key initiatives.