A great way to look at your omnichannel strategy is to view your sales channels as slides leading to the same pool. One day, a visitor may want to go down a fast and exciting one, whereas, on another, they choose the closest one because they don’t feel like walking. There’s no such thing as the ultimate slide; the fact that the pool has options is what makes it worth a visit. It also doesn’t matter which slide the visitor chooses; they’ll end up in the same pool. And the fact that they chose a particular slide today doesn’t mean the other slides are not doing their job.

In this analogy, the pool is your bank account and the slides are sales channels. There’s no right or wrong sales channel, as they all come with their own benefits you should elevate. Online sales channels come with the benefit of search and availability. It’s easy for your buyers to visit your site and find exactly what they need at the click of a button. In your store, however, they benefit from space, touch and human connection. Both add value to the customer experience, meaning both can make or break a sale. Hence, you should always try to remove barriers between channels so that customers are in control of where they click “pay”. In fact, multiple channels can actually help them make purchase decisions.

One of the omnichannel strategies I like belongs to Coolblue, a Dutch e-commerce company that started off as a 100% digital business. In all of their advertising, they promise they’ll do everything to make you smile, and so far, they’re doing a great job living up to that promise. After the first few years of being in business, Coolblue noticed its buyers missed a human connection with its employees. They also found that, for some items, buyers prefer to go into brick-and-mortar stores so they can touch the product and talk about it with the staff. In the name of making people smile, Coolblue chose to open stores throughout the Netherlands, and they now benefit from an omnichannel approach where all channels add to the customer experience.