CX Education 03: How to personalize the commerce experience with Brian Walker from Bloomreach

Key insights

• The three pillars of the commerce experience

  According to Brian, Bloomreach provides different standards for customers to use diverse combinations of their solutions and the solutions in the market. "The first pillar is discovery, which is where we power search merchandising, product recommendations, and personalization on sites. It's an AI-driven solution. […] The second pillar is content, and it speaks for itself. It's the experiences that we, as consumers or B2B buyers, are interacting with. We power the sites and applications of customers with content solutions, and, again, we are doing targeting and personalization through that product as well. And then, the last is engagement, which is, of course, where we also partner with Sinch. And engagement is an AI-driven engagement solution focused on marketing automation, channel optimization, and marketing optimization. Again, focused on personalizing the channels, the content, and the marketing that a customer receives through email, text, in-app notifications, social, and advertising."

• Digital is a critical part of the business

  With COVID, everything changed, and digital became more present. Brian notes that digital grew as an important piece but not necessarily the prime driver. "The trends that we now see really playing out in a more important way were already happening pre-pandemic. The pandemic dramatically accelerated the importance of digital as a way to engage with, inspire, and convert customers. And obviously, there was a point during the pandemic when it was essentially the only channel, and businesses that really hadn't focused on digital, of course, had to accelerate the way they were leveraging those channels dramatically and then, also link together their channels more effectively."

• Customer acquisition has become a lot more expensive and less effective

  The pandemic and changes in data privacy protection led to massive changes in marketing strategies. Brian explains how these changes impact acquiring new customers and building relationships, and he notes that bringing in new customers today is more expensive and less effective. "There's been a pretty profound shift over the last few years. The combination of those factors is propelling a shift toward a more sustainable marketing model, which is focused on the customer relationship — and some would call that retention marketing, or customer relationship marketing — which is really about personalization and using the right channel, the right offer, and engaging with the customer in order to, from a marketing perspective, keep your file healthy and reactivate those customers. If you're able to do that effectively, your marketing costs, your customer lifetime value, and the costs associated with marketing to your customers will be a lot healthier as well. And it's a lot more sustainable."