Customers are mobile-first: Buyer's journey in omnichannel [part 2]

Omnichannel marketing is a multichannel sales approach that provides customers with an integrated shopping experience. The customer can be shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, via phone or in a brick-and-mortar store, and the experience will be seamless.

Journey n°2 - Aspiring Anton

1. Creating brand awareness and visibility with Anton

Born in the late 1990s, Anton is a young consumer. Having recently finished studying and now in steady employment, he only now has the disposal cash to spend on anything other than basic necessities.

Surfing on his smartphone, he reads a news feed on eyewear e-commerce. His eye catches your ad announcing discounts on new stock of well-known eyewear brands including Police, Oakley, Ray-Bans, Persol and Kirk Originals. Some of those are cool names his friends wear, so driven by the offer he visits your linked e-commerce website for further information about the products and the promotion.

2. Supporting Anton – however he reaches out 

After a night of sleeping over the information Anton creates a customer account on the way into work the next morning. He surfs some product pages that interest him and adds a few cool pairs of glasses on to his wish list.

At the end of the day, Anton returns home and returns to your website, this time using a tablet. He logs into his user account and finds the wish list created earlier. Value conscious, he reads the customer reviews about every product. These reviews are essential to build his confidence in both the product and in your store. He also looks at the images of the glasses, especially the 360° views to see the pairs from all angles and fully appreciates the quality of the high-definition frame packshots.

3. Provide Anton with a disruptive shopping experience

The advantage of your website, in addition to offering high-quality images, is that it also provides an augmented reality experience with a virtual try-on of glasses. Using the FitMIX Virtual Mirror, Anton can virtually try any pair he likes before buying them. This feature transforms the online experience of Anton. He can now see how he will look as he switches through the virtual eyewear, gaining a realistic first impression of which will look best and coolest.

4. Delivering to Anton

Fully immersed with this new shopping experience, Anton decides to add a pair of glasses to the shopping cart – carefully checking to see if the discount promotion applies. He is in luck, it does! So, he continues his shopping journey until his order is validated and his delivery details recorded.

A few days later, he arrives back from work to find his new glasses waiting. Trying them on in the mirror, if anything, he looks even sharper than he managed. Later, on, he returns to your website on his smartphone and writes a positive customer review about the glasses and about the shopping experience he had thanks to virtual try-on.

Why this works as an omnichannel buyer journey?

Anton never visited your physical store, but he touched several of your channels. His interest was sparked by an online ad, so he visited your website via smartphone. Later he surfed the website and, convinced by its technical features, he made a purchase referring back to your original online ad. Convinced by the smooth and seamless user experience, Anton later returns to your site and writes a positive review, which helps to convince yet more customers about the quality of your services.

What could be improved from your perspective is loyalty. Anton is a new customer motivated by a discount. Even if he found the customer experience positive, he is not yet a loyal customer like Charli, who we will meet in the next journey. Once the deal runs out, it will be hard to keep Anton as a customer.

Keep in mind:

To increase your chances of keeping Anton as a customer, you need to show him that he is not only getting a good deal, but he also gets amazing customer service bundled with his purchase, such as free return on the glasses if they do not meet his expectations – no questions asked.

Anton illustrates why all of your online content needs to be optimized for mobile use. This is because many customers will explore your website while on their smartphone or tablet. This is also true if they are engaging on social media and follow a link back to your site. If your online content isn’t properly optimized for mobile, then it may not load properly or be displayed properly and that represents a lost sales chance.