Retailers embracing Omnichannel & Unified Commerce

• • HUBSPOT DEFINES IT AS:

    “The ability to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across channels, while factoring in the different devices that consumers are using to interact with your business.

”

• GOOGLE DEFINES IT AS:

  “ensuring [retailer] marketing strategies are geared toward enabling customers to convert on any channel.”

Ultimately it’s important to have a strategy in place that defines how the customer will journey with your brand, and then determine what needs to be done at the channel level and in the back end to facilitate the experiences and information needed to complete the different options.

What’s driving omnichannel?

As always, omnichannel is being driven by changing the expectations of consumers. As the oldest millennials reach 37 years of age, Gen Z is now dominating the profiles of younger buyers aged 21 and under.

What’s interesting is that these buyers influence their parents just as much as themselves, as they are seen as the digital experts and “in the know”, so their reach is beyond what is typically expected.

This group are more heavily influenced by external factors, such as social media, lifestyle association and brand presence than their predecessors. .

This, in turn, drives the need for seamless interaction online, such as creating wish-lists from Instagram posts that can then be turned into purchase in store. .

The ultimate achievement of “Omni-Channel” is to create an experience for the consumer that is convenient and gives them exactly what they need. What if customers want to sip coffee in the instore café while building a wish list on a tablet which you can then take to a staff member? .

Creating a seamless link between the online and offline, suited to how different groups shop and the experiences demanded will create a retail offering suited to today’s consumers.