How often do you meet a person who is reachable only on a landline or only on mobile voice calls? It seems to be a distinct past when our great grandparents used to communicate over letters only. Today is the generation of multiple touchpoints, a person is available to meet or greet over WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Facebook, mobile SMS, Snapchat, and the list is almost a bottomless pit! Similarly, customers expect businesses must have e-commerce options across multiple channels or applications through which they interact with the customer such as mobile apps, tablet apps, kiosks, browser-based websites, and more! This omnichannel approach is empowered by the adoption of headless commerce solutions. Let us learn how. If you are new to this subject and are yet to learn what headless commerce is and how it works, please read our previous blog here. It has a detailed explanation.
1. Onsite personalization for customers
1.1. Personalization revolution
The biggest differentiator any e-commerce store has compared to an offline store is the personalized experience it offers. Technology remembers you with your login ID and once you log in from anywhere, you can pick up your shopping from right where you left the last time. Your preferences, requirements, reminders, and preferred payment methods are remembered like it was your personal valet!
As the customer evolved, e-commerce companies started to appear in multiple forms to reach out to customers in their preferred mode, keeping the user experience constant in terms of personalized content across all these channels became both a challenge and a key differentiator for an e-commerce business.
Personalized experience for customers
1.2. Built on a solid back-end
If you are a brand, planning to offer Direct to Consumer (D2C) e-commerce services then you have to cater to today’s customer needs, which is to have multiple ways of accessing your site and keep the experience consistent across them! And headless commerce is no doubt the best available architecture to implement such solutions.
The major advantage of headless commerce is that it is an API-driven system, and hence it integrates easily with the back-end platform to ensure that a shopper’s experience stays uniform across all the platforms.
A Headless unified API platform architecture (Source: Amaro Tech)
1.3. Beyond the screen
Going omnichannel is not just a fad or a routine, it is all about your brand speaking directly with your customers wherever they encounter. Other than the obvious personalization here are a few benefits that D2C brands get from headless commerce in terms of omnichannel customer experience (CX):
- Content
Headless commerce allows you to keep your content and language consistent across all the channels. One update in the back end is all it takes for the APIs to pick up these changes and reflect them on the respective screen. Brand’s colors, logos, and taglines resonate with the shopper so much that it is difficult to miss, even if you are subtle! Moreover, the obvious advantage of going digital, of giving an Audio-Visual experience to your customers can also be used on special occasions. All in all the brand message and content are delivered uniformly across all channels driving strong brand recall.
Headless commerce keeps your content and language consistent
- Inclusivity
Headless commerce is all about keeping your customer engaged and accessible across all platforms. And hence, a brand need not prioritize one over the other. Once a solid architecture is built, the integration is seamless and no matter where your shoppers visit you, they see you the same. Such inclusivity is important for new brands anyway, but more so for the older brick-and-mortar brands that are looking to go D2C, because their wide customer base looks for validation. They want to understand if it is the same brand or a copycat! Hence, the more consistent the brand tone, the faster your customer accepts this new channel.
Headless commerce keeps customer engaged and accessible across all platforms
- Loyalty
Another generous advantage that seamless integration brings is the loyalty points. When brands first went mobile, businesses had a hard time updating the loyalty points across platforms, leaving the customer frustrated. There were many instances where a brand lost its loyal customers because of such hiccups. Headless brings back the same valet convenience to the businesses making sure they treat the customers with respect and maintain trust. This is important because a brand is nothing but trust to deliver products or services that meet a customer’s expectations.
Better loyalty points program
- Accessibility (Mobile first)
In today’s world more than mind share, a brand competes for the mobile space of their customers. Given an iPhone or several android phones that come with limited memories (256 GB or 512 GB) having your brand native app on mobile is a big achievement. If you can keep up with consumer preferences, then you lose that space! Hence, keeping the mobile app interesting is a dedicated job, and going headless makes it easier for developers.
Accessibility (mobile first)
- Communication
Omnichannel experience brings forth certain advantages to the brands. For example, a customer might prefer to buy or browse through lingerie in a mobile app rather than a website. You need not push the sticky ads of such products everywhere the customer goes, it is embarrassing! Hence, brands can channelize certain communications and notifications through specific channels. This is called omnichannel marketing, and AI-powered headless commerce architecture can distinguish such communications.
Omnichannel marketing
2. Best practices for creating a good strategy for omnichannel experience using headless commerce
Besides choosing a well-versed partner, such as Kaynon Digital, to successfully implement headless commerce, there are certain other practices you must keep in mind to make it successful.
- Understand your customer preferences: When it comes to loyal customers, one thing is clear, they love giving feedback. So leverage this connection, ask questions, provide options and even conduct surveys and pools to give them what they want to keep them loyal.
- Select the right channels: Not all channels will suit your brand voice. Choosing a channel is as important as choosing a brand ambassador. Make sure you choose the ones that resonate with your brand perception.
- Make them secure: when customers choose to shop with you they trust you and the platform you have offered them. Make sure you do not compromise on security! Make every touchpoint as secure as possible and keep them up to date security-wise. There are umpteen surveys that clearly state that data breaches hurt brand loyalty. Choosing an experienced partner (not the most affordable) who shares your vision for security and cares for your brand is important in such a scenario. Because recovering a loyal customer post a data breach can be quite an uphill task.
- Create feedback: Make sure your customer feedback or help strategy is as seamless as the interface experience you are willing to offer. If a customer feels that getting help on a mobile app is tougher than a website, then you have failed on your headless architecture.
Practices to create good strategy
3. Conclusion
Headless commerce is a powerful technology solution that can be used to benefit your brand. It boosts your e-commerce journey by offering a seamless way to launch multiple channels and synchronize them.
It is easy to implement if you get small things right and find an experienced digital transformation partner who avoids the don’ts and resonates with your customer expectations across the channels. Whether you are an existing e-commerce business looking to expand your channels that can boost your revenue or a brand looking to enter the e-commerce space to retain customer loyalty in these testing times Kyanon Digital is the right choice for you.
Our diverse team always understands your needs, customer expectations, and your brand voice before commencing e-commerce development. In other words, we build simple, dependable, secure, and beautiful-looking solutions that resonate with your target audiences. We also offer 24×7 best-in-class support to make sure your brand is always within reach. Taking your brand headless is only a call away! Get in touch with us now!
