The pandemic completely changed the way consumers shop. E-commerce was already on the rise before COVID hit. But the pandemic helped the eCommerce space take off at an astronomical rate. In fact, Shopify reported that e-commerce experienced 10 years’ worth of growth in just three months during the pandemic. Although the growth of eCommerce has slowed post-pandemic, it’s still growing modestly. And businesses continue to adjust their marketing and sales strategies to maximize its impact on the bottom line. In 2023, global e-commerce sales totaled $6.3 trillion and that number is expected to grow to $8.1 trillion by 2026.
Want to ensure your business is staying on top of your E-Commerce strategy in 2024? Well that's where Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Personalization comes in.
Overview - Marketing Cloud Personalization:
Marketing Cloud Personalization provides real-time, scalable personalization services for Marketing Cloud. Using real-time, cross-channel personalization, and AI, Personalization complements Marketing Cloud’s robust customer data, audience segmentation, and engagement platform. Increase loyalty, engagement, and conversions using tailored interactions with customers and prospects. Deliver more relevant experiences during interactions across the customer journey.
The hidden gem - Unified Profiles:
Personalization helps you understand each visitor by building a centralized individual profile from different data sources. Personalization provides a visual representation of all the data about a single visitor, including preferences and affinities. Use this information to decide on how and when to best interact with them on the channels they use. You can roll this profile up to the account level to view the relationships among visitor behaviors associated with the same account.
What this means:
Customer 360 has been taken to the next level. No matter the customer touchpoint, it's personalized - including most of the channels in which customer interactions take place:
- Websites
- Mobile apps
- Emails
- Web apps (like a SaaS application)
- Online ads
- In-store/in-branch communications
- Online chats
- Call centers
What kind of information can be acted on to tailor experiences in those channels? It’s basically an unlimited list that contains any information a company can collect about its customers and prospects. Some of the most common include:
- Geolocation
- Source (such as search, email, social, paid ad, referring site, etc.)
- Firmographic information for B2B (such as industry, company, revenue, employee count, technology stack, etc.)
- Buyer persona
- Buyer status (e.g. customer or prospect)
- Time of day
- Browser or device type
- Number of site visits, logins, or pages/screens viewed
- Active time spent
- Time elapsed since last visit, email open, call center interaction, etc.
- Purchases made, articles read, videos viewed, etc.
- Lifetime value (LTV)
- Mouse movement (scrolling, hovering, inactivity)
- Affinity toward content and products along with their characteristics (categories, tags, brands, colors, keywords, etc.)
- Email opens and clicks
- Push notification dismissals or click-throughs
Marketing Cloud Personalization in practice - what does it look like?
- A B2C shoe retailer that features nursing shoes on its homepage only to visitors that have shown an interest in nursing shoes is using personalization.
- A financial services site that displays content recommendations based on each visitor’s individual interests is using personalization.
- A retailer that sends emails to remind a shopper of an item left in his cart and suggest other products he may be interested in is using personalization.
- A SaaS application that displays a message offering real-time tips to eliminate user confusion at the moment is using personalization.
- A site that highlights the most relevant products for each individual (based on the colors, brands, and styles they usually shop) in its search results is using personalization.
Ready for what’s next in E-Commerce?
Whether personalization is obvious, as in the case of Spotify and Netflix, or more subtle — as in some of the examples provided above — it provides a better experience for the customer by surfacing important, valuable information. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization's real-time interaction management solution can help you provide more individualized customer experiences. At Alipes, we’re ready to take your business there. Reach out to learn more about how we can help!