Consumers are now looking for the fastest and easiest ways to access product information, enjoy customized experiences and ultimately, find and buy products with zero hassle. 

They expect businesses to recognize them as independent shoppers and therefore curate their experience to their exact needs and preferences. Research shows that 87% of customers believe brands should put more effort into providing a seamless omnichannel experience. 

With this in mind, let’s take a look at what omnichannel Ecommerce is and how your business can implement a solid omnichannel Ecommerce strategy.

What is Omnichannel Ecommerce?

Omnichannel Ecommerce focuses on providing customers with a smooth and consistent shopping experience, whether they’re in a physical store or shopping online. 

Successful omnichannel Ecommerce allows your customers to switch between channels and still receive the same great experience.

So, whether you’re browsing products on a website, your smartphone, or walking into a store, the idea is to make it all work together seamlessly, like different parts of the same shopping experience.

3 Core Benefits of Omnichannel Ecommerce

There are several benefits to utilizing an omnichannel Ecommerce approach. From enhanced customer satisfaction to increased traffic and sales, having multiple touchpoints to interact with your customers is crucial in today’s consumer landscape. 

Let’s look at the top three. 

Enhanced Customer Experience and Satisfaction

Personalization is essential to the modern consumer. 

They expect every interaction with your brand to be personalized to their preferences and expectations. For example, let’s say one of your customers finds your product via their smartphone, pop it in their basket, but later decide to visit your physical store to make the final purchase. 

With an omnichannel approach, the transition between these channels would be smooth, and the customer would experience a consistent product display, pricing, and promotional information. 

More Sales Opportunities

Following this, omnichannel strategies create multiple touchpoints for customers to explore and purchase products. Whether online or in-store, businesses can capture sales opportunities through various channels, expanding their reach and maximizing revenue potential.

Your customer could start their journey on your social media channel, and then end up purchasing from your mobile store. As long as their experience is consistent throughout their journey, they won’t mind where they make their final purchase (and neither will you!).

Increased Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention

Having a strong brand presence across multiple channels helps create trust between you and your audience. However, it’s not simply a case of being omnipresent on every channel. Everything from your messaging, imagery, payment options and branding has to be consistent to gain this trust.

If your brand isn’t consistent across every channel, it can break down that trust and lose potential customers to competitors. A consumer research report in 2022 discovered that 46% of customers who had chosen to buy higher-priced options did so because they preferred to pay a higher price for a brand they trusted.

How your brand is perceived through your various channels is absolutely essential for not just sales, but customer retention.

How to Implement an Omnichannel Strategy

There’s a lot that goes into structuring an omnichannel Ecommerce strategy. 

But don’t get bogged down in the intricacies, it doesn’t have to be that complicated. The key is to build a strong foundation to base your strategy. From here, you can begin implementing your omnichannel strategy with a clear and strategic approach. 

Here’s how to get started:

Identify Your Audience

You can’t expect to turn scrollers into buyers without first knowing who you’re targeting, right? 

So, before you start strategizing, you’ll need to conduct some thorough market research to identify customers’ demographics, behaviors, and preferences. 

Analyze data from your existing customer base, utilize tools like Google Analytics, and gather insights from social media platforms (if you’re using any).

You might also find it useful to create a buyer persona using this data. From here, you can create your ideal customer (or customers depending on your audience segmentation) to create campaigns and strategies that specifically target and align with their needs. 

All of this enables you to be better equipped to create content, promotions, and interactions that resonate with your customers.

Understand Your Customer’s Journey

Knowing how your customers are exploring and interacting with your online store can help you create a solid omnichannel strategy. First, pinpoint the different touchpoints your customers are interacting with through their buying journey.

This includes their journeys on mobile, your website, social media and even physical stores. Each touchpoint should be seamlessly integrated to guide users toward their desired goals. 

If, at any point in their journey, they encounter challenges or obstacles, it becomes your responsibility to pinpoint the issues and implement solutions for a smoother and more enjoyable user experience.

Understanding the stages of customer journeys will help you align your omnichannel efforts and ensure that every interaction contributes positively to your users’ experience.

Make Your Online Store Mobile-friendly

Most users who shop online do so using their smartphones. In fact, smartphones today now account for 87.2% of mCommerce sales (sales through mobiles and tablets).

So, it’s pretty important that your online store is mobile-friendly. 

This means talking to your managed hosting provider or web developer to ensure that things like load speed, site layout and design, responsiveness and UX (user experience) are all running smoothly on mobile. 

Additionally, as an Ecommerce business, your mobile site must have an easy payment option. For example, payment solutions like Apple Pay, PayPal, SumUp, Square and Klarna are not only widely trusted forms of payment, but they’re incredibly user-friendly. 

As opposed to having to manually type out their card details, users can use face recognition or PINs to purchase items swiftly and securely.

Create Engaging and Personalized Content For Your Channels

While you may find success on one platform for a particular piece of content, it doesn’t mean you’ll see the same results on another. Each piece of content you create should be tailored to specific channels. 

For example, social media platforms like Instagram typically thrive on visually appealing and snappy content, whereas platforms like LinkedIn often prioritize more in-depth and long-form content.

By creating engaging and personalized content for each of your channels, you not only maximize the impact of your messaging but also ensure a consistent brand experience tailored to the expectations of your users.

Engage Your Audience With the Right Tools

With there being thousands of engagement tools floating around, finding one that’s tailored to your needs might seem a bit difficult.

However, top of our list are chatbots and/or live chat. In a recent survey, 31% of US B2B marketers are using AI for chatbots, coding, and design. The main benefit of this technology is that it offers instant personalized support to your customers when you’re not able to. 

For example, if a customer has a question about returning an item, they can ask the chatbot and it will provide them with a response tailored to their specific request.

On the other hand, live chat support allows you to speak directly with your audience in real-time. This is a far more personalized support service and allows you to get straight to the query at hand. However, the only downside is that this does require you to be available whenever a customer sends a message.

Ultimately, the choice between chatbots and live chat depends on your specific business needs and resource availability. If you’re a corporate multinational business driving hundreds of thousands of visitors each week, chatbots might make more sense. Whereas SMEs and startups may have more time to answer customer messages personally.

Test, Assess and Repeat

To ensure all your hard work is paying off, you’ll need to dive into your analytics to see what’s working and what needs improving. Google Analytics should cover your customer demographics, behavior and interactions but there are other ways to optimize your online store.

A/B testing is one of the best ways to evaluate and compare different versions of your landing pages. For example, you could experiment with different product descriptions, images or CTA buttons (call-to-action) to see which yields the best results. A/B testing allows you to switch up certain elements of your landing pages based on your customers’ preferences.

You may also want to invest in heat mapping tools like Lucky Orange, as they are great for gaining visual insights into how your customers are interacting with your website. 

Tools like this can identify hotspots where they’ve clicked and also areas that might need improving. From here, you can chop and change elements that are stunning your customer’s journeys to make their experience easier and more enjoyable. 

Conclusion

Customers have come to expect a shopping experience that’s fast and simple, and anything that derails these two pillars can see them leave and never return. Being able to provide a personalized and seamless omnichannel experience is crucial to keep up with this increasingly demanding industry. 

The good news is that there are plenty of tools and helpful information to keep you up to speed with the (often volatile) consumer landscape.

It’s the lead nurturing process that sets the stage for conversion and cultivating meaningful customer relationships. Keeping your customers engaged at every touchpoint keeps your brand living rent-free in their heads.

But how do you achieve this? Multichannel marketing.

Sticking to one channel isn’t going to cut it anymore, not in this wildly evolving digital landscape where your customers might be using several channels. 

The risk of sticking to one channel is that it makes it harder for your leads to find you. This means fewer leads, more missed opportunities, and slower growth. 

We’re going to explore the benefits of utilizing a multichannel approach to nurture your leads and enhance the results of your inbound marketing strategy.

First, You Need to Understand Customer Behavior and Preferences

Understanding your customers’ behavior and preferences is the key to forging meaningful connections. Blindly assuming you know who your customers are is one of the biggest lead-generation mistakes.

The more you know about your customers, the better. Everything from their age, income, and even education level can help predict their behavior. From here, you can create content that aligns with their needs and preferences.

The first and most obvious method to achieving this would be to utilize an analytics platform, like Google Analytics. This would help you understand your customers’ behavior by tracking their website interactions, identifying traffic sources, and identifying their demographics.

For example, if you found that most of your visitors were coming from organic search and converting primarily to blog posts, you might want to invest more time and energy optimizing this area.

Another way to understand how your customers are behaving and interacting with your business is through live chats.

Yes, live chats have received their fair share of criticism over the years, but they’re at a stage now where not only are they useful, they’re essential. In fact, 52% of online users are now more likely to remain loyal to a company that offers live chat support. 

Additionally, 60% of younger consumers (18-34), prefer to and regularly use live chats for customer service. Combine this with the insights you’ve gained from your analytics platform and you can understand your audience better before engaging with them on the live chat. 

To make your life even easier, you could also invest in a platform designed to identify your target audience and deliver a constant and relevant flow of leads.

Next, Create a Cohesive Brand Experience

At its core, brand cohesion is all about consistency. 

A lack of brand cohesion can confuse your customers and create a jarring experience every time they interact with your brand in a different space. In fact, studies show that consistent visual branding can increase revenue by up to 33%.

Your business needs to have a cohesive brand experience across every channel. This includes your:

• Website
• Social media channels
• Design
• Messaging

Even the functionality of your systems needs to be cohesive and authentic, with 88% of users claiming that authenticity is a key factor in deciding what brands they trust and support. For example, if your customers are on your website and hop over to your Instagram, the transition should be seamless. 

The first port of call is to define your brand identity. A good starting point might be to ask yourself what words you’d use to describe your brand. 

Are you cutting-edge? Transparent? Luxurious? Eco-friendly? Answering these questions will help you hone in on what you stand for and how you want to be perceived. 

Take transparency, for example, 74% of customers say transparent communication from brands has become more important post-pandemic. 

Next, why does your business exist? How do you plan to make your customers’ lives better? What is your mission statement? 

Your mission statement shouldn’t be about what you’re offering, but why.

For example, Apple sells computers and phones, but so do thousands of other companies. What makes them different is their ideology. Apple’s slogan, “Think different” taps into a deeper level than “We sell nice computers that are easy to use”.

Your brand’s ethos, its belief, and its ‘why’ should resonate with your target audience.

Leverage Multiple Communication Channels

A multi-channel approach involves utilizing various marketing channels and networks.

By strategically choosing the right channels based on your target audience, you can capture your users’ attention even if they stop interacting on one platform. For example, if one of our customers stops interacting with our website, we could capture them again on our LinkedIn.

Deciding what platforms to be on depends on your audience. Graphic designers and illustrators might prefer to use Instagram to showcase their work, whereas SaaS businesses may prefer LinkedIn to outreach to prospective clients.

The average person bounces between seven different social networks per month. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be on seven platforms, but you should certainly consider being omnipresent across more than just your website.

Testing different channels and continually optimizing based on results is the key to success. Setting clear targets and monitoring performance ensures that you allocate your budget effectively and drive meaningful results.

Implement Marketing Automation

Marketing automation allows you to ping relevant messages across multiple channels to nudge your leads further along the sales funnel. 

By analyzing your leads’ behavior, interests, and preferences, you can adapt your messaging to align with whatever stage they’re at in the customer’s journey.

What automation strategy you choose to use depends on your goals and KPIs. Do you want to drive more traffic to your content? Increase email open rates? Or simply build trust between your leads and your brand? 

Here are a few key notes to consider:

Identify your audience

Without knowing who your audience is, how are you going to effectively communicate with them or understand their pain points? Research your audience, create audience avatars, and invest in a software solution that can deliver high-quality leads straight to your sales team.

Follow them on their journey

The most important part of marketing automation is following your lead wherever they go. 

If they’ve left your website, you need to know where they’re heading next. Is it your LinkedIn? Instagram? Or somewhere else? Knowing this will help you map out their journey and match your marketing automation to relocate them.

Review and adapt when necessary 

Reviewing your marketing automation strategies is crucial. The data provided will offer super valuable insights into campaign performance, customer behavior, and lead progression.

If your product or service changes, or even your customers’ preferences, your automation should change with it. 

Analyze and Optimize Performance

In Eric Ries’ book on Lean Analytics, he states that your marketing activities should be constantly evolving by testing different hypotheses, measuring the results, trimming what isn’t working, and doubling down on what is.

This involves analyzing the initial marketing automation targets and lead nurturing goals you set.

See how your expectations line up with the hard data. What worked? What didn’t? And what needs changing, and how? These metrics will serve as benchmarks for measuring success. 

Here are the most important elements to consider when analyzing your performance:

• Use analytics tools to gain valuable insights into website traffic, customer behavior, and engagement metrics. 

• Monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns across your channels, such as email marketing, social media, and paid advertising. Analyze metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement levels to see where your biggest wins are.

• Experiment with A/B testing across different elements of your campaigns, like subject lines, visuals, and calls to action. See what works well and focus on this.

Continuously optimize your strategies based on data insights and customer feedback. Refine your campaigns, messaging, and targeting approaches to enhance results.

A Multichannel Approach is the Way Forward

Implementing marketing automation into your multichannel approach will make your business ventures considerably easier. While it might take some time to put your strategies together, in the long run, it will save you a lot of time, energy, and money.

As long as you know who your audience is, what your goals are, and what channels to use to achieve those goals, you’re on the right path to success. 

Remember, don’t be afraid to dedicate time to testing your campaigns and automation on different channels to see what works and what doesn’t. 

Thankfully, there are web development tools that make these integrations easier and faster to achieve. Below we have listed the 8 tools you need to build a great online service business website in 2021.

1. Chrome Dev Tool

The Chrome Dev Tool is arguably the most popular cross-platform browser available, which is exactly why it’s top of our list. 

The Chrome DevTool is the tool you need to inspect and tweak your website. It boosts productivity, analyses load performance, and helps enhance the user experience – all key aspects of a great website.

Built directly into your browser, the Chrome DevTool is free and easy to use. You will be able to inspect page tags, edit CSS directly from your browser, see your website on mobile, identify load speed issues, and much more. If there’s one tool you need for your website build, it’s this one.

2. Lambda Test

Before displaying your finished service business websites to your customers, it’s important to ensure that it is compatible with different browsers. Depending on the coding language you have used (CSS, JavaScript, HTML) your website should be tested beforehand. Lambda Test is one of the best ways to check that your website works in any browser, even after you have introduced code changes.

Lambda Test ensures your website is easy to navigate, fast-loading, and interactive, despite the coding language you have chosen. It is a fantastic tool for checking core web vitals and ensuring everything is working as it should be. Lambda Test is intuitive, easy, and fast to use.

3. Bootstrap

Mobile responsive websites are more important than ever. With over 52% of all website traffic generated from mobile, it’s essential your website is fully optimised to load and work well, whether it’s been accessed from a mobile phone, tablet, or desktop.

Bootstrap is the best way to achieve a mobile responsive service business website. The open-source toolkit offers multiple templates and designs that include buttons, navigations, dropdowns, tabs, alerts, carousels, and more with smart drag and drop functionality. So, even if you are new to web development, it couldn’t be easier.

4. KWFinder

If you want to grow your online service business website into a powerful and authoritative online presence, you need keywords. Ranking your website for the right keywords has a huge impact on your website success.

The KWFinder tool makes keyword research easier than ever before. Now you can find keywords with low SEO difficulty and high search volume to target on your site. This intuitive tool makes targeting the right keywords easy, convenient, and effective. Keyword research doesn’t have to be rocket science and KWFinder proves this. Rank your website high in the search results and attract more visitors, increase engagement, and boost conversions.

5. ProofHub

ProofHub has been built specifically to help you manage the design of your online service business website. 

If you are collaborating with multiple teams on the different aspects of your web development process, ProofHub is a great way to keep track of this work and meet any set deadlines. It’s hassle-free communication, editing, and collaboration that will ensure your website is proofed and finished to the highest standard.

6. Photoshop

Photoshop is a tool that everyone has heard of and it’s arguably one of the most vital for perfecting the visual elements of your website. 

The colour options and gradients allow you the opportunity to create stunning digital artwork for your website that will help you stand out from the crowd. With a tool such as Photoshop, you can create highly impressive, professional designs quickly and to a higher standard than ever before. 

If you want your service business to stand out visually online and make a great first impression, Photoshop is the tool you need!

7. Material Design

If you want to develop an online service business website that looks modern and is familiar to users, Material Design is the tool you need. A combination of good design with technological innovations, Material Design helps you create a flexible website foundation.

“Backed by open-source code, Material streamlines collaboration between designers and developers, and helps teams quickly build beautiful products.” – Material Design

By utilising Material Design, you will develop a responsive online service website that is scalable across multiple platforms and devices reaching a wider customer base. 

Whether you are an experienced web developer or not, Material Design provides an intuitive foundation that you can build upon over time.

8. Adobe Dreamweaver

If you are keen to build a website that looks and functions exactly the way you want it to, you may need to build it by code. Thankfully, there are tools that help you do this successfully. Adobe Dreamweaver is one such tool that allows you to code your website directly. And what’s even better is that you don’t need to know much about programming!  

While coding your website is a little bit more effort, Adobe Dreamweaver uses a combination of visual and HTML editing which means it’s not such a steep learning curve for most people. What’s more, you can produce a responsive design and optimise your website to display beautifully on both desktops and mobile devices without risking or limiting the user experience. If you want to build a site that looks and works the way you envisioned, Adobe Dreamweaver is the web development tool you need.

Final Words

There you have it; the 8 tools you need to build a great online service business website. Of course, there are hundreds of different tools out there and so many more that we could have mentioned. However, these are some of the tools we like best.

This article will advise you on how to make your online business more sellable so that when the time comes to sell, you’ll get the best price.

1. Make a Sale Plan

If you want to make your online business sellable, you need to start with a plan. Even if you find a buyer today, you will need time to get your accounts, finances, staff contracts, premises, brands, products, and intellectual property in order.

The best place to start is by making a sales plan. Prepare for each stage of the selling process so that you can feel confident in your decision and ensure you don’t forget something important.

Seeking business-selling advice from an expert can maximize your chances of success. Most business owners only get to sell their business once, so having a detailed plan and the advice of an expert can help you put your best foot forward.

2. Know Your Sale Figure

Did you know that 90% of your wealth could be tied up in your business?

How much would you like to sell your business for? Knowing your sale figure before you start the selling process could make all the difference to a successful sale.

The last thing you want, after all, is an interested buyer asking your price only to find you stuttering around and pulling numbers out of the air. The value of your business is whatever a willing buyer is prepared to pay.

Your business is yours (at least, for now), so it’s up to you to find out how much it is worth and how much money you need to live post-sale. But don’t let vanity get in the way. It can help to have a range to work within – a maximum offer and a minimum offer.

Remember you aren’t just selling a company name, often you’re selling intangible assets that have increased in value over time (your company website) and trust formed with your audience which has increased brand and reputation value for however long you’ve been in business. 

Be sure to understand the following when deciding on your sale figure: 

• Social media channels: How many followers do you have? What is your organic reach like? How much engagement do you receive from your online audience?   
• Website domain: How authoritative is your domain compared to competitors in your niche? How much traffic does your website receive on a monthly basis? How much evergreen content is drawing traffic to your website?

If you don’t feel this is a decision that you can make on your own, consider speaking to your accountant. They may be able to offer some advice. Whichever route you choose, it is essential to know your sale figure so that you can sell from a position of confidence.

3. Hire An Expert Seller

To get the best sale price for your business, it is important to hire the help of an expert seller. Unless you have connections already interested, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to sell your business by yourself.

Choosing a seller can be a complicated process, so be sure to take your time because the right person can mean a big difference in your final figure.

We recommend choosing a seller who knows your business or is a specialist in your sector and knows the market well. Approach them with a list of questions, speak to their previous clients, and be transparent. Whoever you choose to sell your business should be able to get your asking price at least.

4. Getting Involved

Hiring experts to sell your business does not mean you can put your feet up and relax – far from it.

As the business owner, your role is to be at the forefront of all aspects of the selling process. Attend the meetings. Read all the documents. Ask any questions you may have. Be over-involved if you want to.

It is far better to get involved in the sale of your business and ensure it goes the right way than to sell your business for the wrong sum at the wrong time because you made an impulse decision.

5.   Organise All Your Accounting Information Clearly

When a buyer is interested in purchasing your business, they want all the relevant information to be presented to them in a way that’s easy to understand and quick to read through.

The important word in that sentence is relevant. If you are running your business out of your personal account, stop now. The last thing a buyer wants is to route through irrelevant financial information to find out whether your business is making a profit.

One small mix-up, such as a missing expense or an overlooked cost can mean the difference between a sale or not.

By keeping your books in order, you are providing evidence to potential buyers that your business is profitable and that all taxes are taken care of. When your business is in order, it is far easier for buyers to assess the true value of your business and offer a price.

6.   Create a Standard Operating Procedure

A Standard Operating Procedure is essentially a manual detailing the different operating aspects of your business. Buyers want to buy a business that works like a well-oiled machine and having an SOP is a great way to prove that yours is worth the investment.

Creating an SOP means it is a lot easier for potential buyers to see opportunities in your business for further growth. Although an SOP can take time to create, it could secure a valuable sale once in place.

Final Thoughts…

Making the decision to sell your online business isn’t something to take lightly. It takes a lot of time and planning to get the most value out of an offer.

By following the steps outlined in this article, you will be setting yourself up for a successful exit. even if you decide not to sell at this time, our points will help you improve, organise, and automate your business so that when the time does finally come to sell, you’ll be ready.