Today's furniture shoppers switch between online and in-store experiences, seeking a seamless blend of digital convenience and the in-store, tactile experience. Your goal as a retailer is to meet those expectations. Here are four tips to help you create a smooth omnichannel experience.
4 Ways to Optimize Your Furniture Omnichannel Strategy
To optimize your furniture strategy for omnichannel retail, consider these four tactics that leverage the power of omnichannel product listings, data-driven personalization, mobile-first design, and consistent cross-channel promotions to create a seamless and engaging customer experience.
1. Sync Product Listings Across All Channels
Furniture shoppers do their research and expect to see consistent product information no matter where they shop — whether online or in-store. A recent survey found that nearly 87% of shoppers research online regularly, but this doesn’t reflect where shoppers begin their buyer’s journey.
According to Home News Now, almost half of the people start their buying journey in a physical store. This blend of online and in-store behavior means inconsistent experiences between channels can frustrate customers, leading to lost sales and damaging your brand credibility.
No matter where customers start or finish their shopping journey, product information remains key. Blueport’s platform lets you create and enhance your product listings by leveraging vendor catalogs and providing a robust Product Information Management (PIM) system to easily customize data. The result? Robust product data that helps your customers research and learn about your products, letting them be more confident in their buying decisions whether they are browsing online or in-store.
2. Personalize Interactions
Personalizing interactions is key to delivering highly relevant experiences. By leveraging shopping behavior such as browse clicks, purchase history, and style preferences, you can create highly targeted promotions and recommendations that align with the intent of each individual shopper.
With Blueport’s omnichannel ecommerce platform, you can take this one step further by incorporating geolocation technology. This allows you to deliver a fully localized online experience, showing shoppers products, pricing, and promotions aligned with what they’d see in their local store.
Blueport’s patented OneView technology further enhances personalization by connecting the dots between online browsing and in-store visits. Shoppers can pick up right where they left off, no matter which device they use, ensuring a frictionless experience across all touchpoints.
3. Create Mobile-First Shopping Experiences
With 90% of U.S. adults owning a smartphone, it’s no surprise that mobile research has become a crucial part of the furniture buying process. Simply having a website isn’t enough—it needs to be optimized for mobile from the ground up. Blueport’s mobile-first approach ensures your site is fully responsive, delivering a fast, user-friendly experience on any device.
Here are four tactics to provide the experience mobile shoppers expect:
Implement Responsive Design
Your website should automatically adapt to different screen sizes, providing a consistent and user-friendly experience across all devices. Navigation menus, buttons, and form fields should all be optimized for touch interactions on smaller screens. Finally, use flexible layouts and images that resize proportionally to fit various screen dimensions.
Optimize for Speed and Performance
Website images are essential for selling your products, but they can also significantly reduce speed and performance. All images should be compressed and use modern formats to reduce load times without sacrificing quality. In addition, use lazy loading for images and content below the fold to improve initial page load speed.
In-Store Mobile Experiences
One additional way to integrate mobile experiences into brick-and-mortar stores is through QR codes on furniture tags, allowing customers to access your website with detailed product information on their mobile devices in-store.
4. Promote Special Offers Across Multiple Touchpoints
Discounts, sales, and promotions should be consistent across all channels, but ensuring this kind of consistency can be a challenge, especially when local sales and promotions vary.
With the right retail promotion management solution, you can maintain this consistency while managing complex promotion rules — including combinations and exclusions often seen in physical stores. Additionally, offering robust financing options helps create a seamless shopping experience that encourages customer loyalty and repeat business.
Optimize Your Furniture Strategy With Blueport
Ready to revolutionize your furniture retail strategy across both online and in-store channels?
Leading furniture retailers trust Blueport to create seamless omnichannel experiences that exceed customer expectations and drive sales. Discover how they use our platform to enhance their online and in-store strategies.
