Personalized Shopping Experiences With Adobe Commerce

Today's customers want an experience that is as unique as their preferences. A one-size-fits-all approach to shopping and marketing simply doesn't cut it anymore.

How can retailers lean into e-commerce personalization? By understanding customer journeys and preferences and partnering with personalization experts.

Modern Customers Crave Personalization

First, a basic understanding of personalization: A personalized shopping experience is tailored to customers and considers their unique needs and concerns.

Think of personalization as a continuum. The starting point is a single global experience where all customers experience the site the same way (content, journey, media). As brands mature in their personalization efforts, they create varied experiences for a small number of customer segments, such as creating different experiences for new and returning customers or different demographics. Further along the continuum is hyper-personalization, which serves many more segments with unique experiences. For some retailers, that goes as far as providing each customer a completely unique and tailored experience.

Personalization has become an essential capability for modern digital experiences and it’s not just a passive digital commerce capability. Customers notice when the experience is personalized and actively seek out personalized experiences, with 81% of customers saying they prefer companies that offer personalized experiences.

But it’s not just for customers. Personalization also benefits merchants with improved KPIs across the board. Personalized emails see a 139% increase in click rate over static sends, and 76% of customers are more likely to purchase from a personalized experience. All of those boosts lead to a 10–15% increase in revenue from personalization while also lowering customer acquisition costs, increasing marketing ROI, and boosting customer lifetime value. Simply put, personalization is something merchants can’t afford not to prioritize.

Elements of a Personalized Commerce Experience

The customer purchasing journey includes many touchpoints that are great candidates for personalization - copy, imagery, product recommendations, pricing, offers and promotions, payment and checkout methods, emails, and so much more. All of these elements of the experience are personalization levers that can be pulled to deliver a more seamless experience, reduce friction, and improve the path to purchase.

We think about personalization options in the following broad categories:

• Content including the copy, images, media, and calls to action on the website to create an aspirational and connective experience with customers.

• Pricing is increasingly varied by customer segment - this includes offers, promotions, and pricing for certain types of customers, either around certain seasons or events, or varying levels of motivation.

• Search and recommendation personalization, often an entry point for merchants into personalization can be tailored by customer’s preferences, profile, and past purchases to boost or recommend products that are relevant to that customer segment

• Shopping assistance like guided commerce and interactive chat can be personalized to help customers find exactly what they need.

• Marketing Automation like email campaigns can be customized to engage customers differently based on their segment by changing workflow, content, or frequency of communication

• Journey & Check out can be modified to accommodate personal preference. It is established that limiting decisions and options can decrease abandonment. To this end, merchants can personalize payment options and shipping options for customers, or can address common concerns around being able to afford an item or having it arrive on time by providing messaging

Where To Start With Personalization

Most retailers understand the importance of personalization. A common hang-up is knowing where to start.

Effective personalization starts with testing and experimentation to ensure your personalization assertions are accurate. Tools like Adobe Target or Optimizely can run experiments to validate how customer segments behave. Which experience converts better for which customer segments? What elements of personalization drove better results? You may find that focusing on a personalized search experience leads to higher sales than personalized homepage copy.

Rightpoint advocates always centering personalization efforts on the customer journey, identification of core personas and their pathway to purchase will be an important lens to inform which personalization levers to pull - because they will be different. In addition, personalizing and experimenting this way will help you learn much more about your customer.

Aligning experience and content to persona requires understanding how different personas make purchase decisions. Focusing on a specific journey - reduce factors that detract from a customer purchase and improve factors pulling customers through the journey.

Detractors include:

• fears (“will I get my item on time?”, “is the item going to last?”, “will it fit?”),

• distractions (“let me find a coupon on the internet”, “why did the shipping costs change”),

• frustrations (“why can’t I find the dimensions”, “why is this out of stock”).

Attractors include:

• relevancy (“This is exactly what I was looking for”)

• clarity (“I’m always clear on the next step”)

Combining the purchasing model with persona journeys and experimentation is key to unlocking lift in the business and understanding your customers

Adobe Commerce Makes Personalization Possible

Adobe Commerce provides a set of powerful features that enable personalization out of the box.

• Segmentation Engine: Customer Segments can be created based on customer attributes, purchase history, explicit group assignment (e.g. rewards), location, and many more factors. This will enable targeted experiences based on segment.

• Personalized Content: Content can be personalized based on customer segments and deployed across the site from home page, category landing page, product detail page, to account and cart.

• Promotions: Pricing and promotions can be varied by customer segment and customer group. There is a powerful native personalized pricing engine available. Cart price rules offer configuration to target specific customer segments, where a promotion is applied to the cart once the customer is recognized as being within the target segment (+ any other matching conditions). This can also be tied to Real Time CDP audiences to bring in data from across the organization into the segmentation.

• Product Recommendations: Adobe Sensei is a merchandising engine that curates the products displayed for the different related product sections (or custom sections if added within the theme). A merchant can leverage customer segments for rules to determine what products are displayed or build more robust rules within Adobe Sensei.

• Partners: Beyond native personalization capabilities, there is a rich ecosystem of partners that have elements of personalization baked in .

By integrating and leveraging the broader Adobe Experience Platform, merchants tap into a powerful set of enterprise personalization capabilities.

• Adobe Real Time Customer Data Platform collects, normalizes, and organizes first-party customer profile and activity data from across the organization and channels, models and builds audiences, identifies lookalike audiences and patterns, scores audience purchasing propensity,

• Adobe Journey Analytics provides valuable insights leveraging every customer touchpoint, allowing the merchant to explore complex journeys in real time and understand their customer.

• Adobe Journey Optimizer builds rich, omni-channel campaigns and supports flexible journey configurations including next best offer

Adobe Commerce integrates into the Experience Platform by incorporating real-time Audiences so that dynamic content and on-site promotions can be based on audiences.

Ready to get started on your personalization journey? The first step is to reach out to Rightpoint as your personalization partner. Our experience delivering commerce results can help your company dive into the world of personalization.