Personalisation has evolved — with Audience Activation, you can too
Over the past few years, ecommerce personalisation has evolved from companies designing experiences based on large demographic segments like region, age and gender to real-time personalised experiences that reflect each customer’s unique context and behaviour. Customers across B2C and B2B industries have come to expect highly tailored experiences that reflect not only who they are but also their moment-to-moment interactions with a brand (e.g., purchases, clicks the site, searches, loyalty status).
Personalisation has evolved from undifferentiated, static experiences to real-time one-to-one personalisation at scale.
While 90% of consumers are influenced by ecommerce personalisation, only 20% of retailers are prepared to offer real-time personalised commerce experiences. So what stands in the way?
- Siloed data prevents actionability. Brands are struggling with siloed customer data and segments, spread across multiple business systems (e.g., commerce platforms, ERP systems, point-of-sale systems). That messy data prevents companies from creating unified customer profiles and hyper-personalised experiences. In fact, 75% of companies cannot act on their data in real time or encounter hurdles in doing so.
- Companies are unable to consider buyer context. Many companies don’t gather historical and behavioural data that provides valuable shopper context. Among those that do, data is rarely activated to personalise content and promotions that drive customers down the purchasing funnel.
- Legacy tech tools limit instantaneous responsiveness. While companies can manually create personalised experiences for a small subset of their customers, scaling up requires the right tech solutions to avoid a flood of manual work. Today 58% of companies don’t have the right technology they need to support their personalisation strategy. As a result, they can’t use automation to scale up personalisation or deliver experiences in real time.
To achieve real-time personalisation at scale, companies need a single source of truth for customer data, granular segmentation powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and automated experience delivery at scale. Audience Activation, a new integration between Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Adobe Commerce delivers the solution, helping merchants create and activate their data foundation for personalised commerce experiences.
Hyper-personalisation starts with the data foundation
The first step to creating personalised site experiences is a complete understanding of each individual shopper or buyer. That means having a single source of truth with a clean, compliant and actionable profile for every customer that captures each interaction with the brand across channels, like in-store, web, mobile, email and social. Each profile must be updated in real time to reflect customers’ moment-to-moment actions, such as site or page visits, clicks, add-to-basket events, historical purchases, order status and more.
Adobe Real-Time CDP unifies customer data to create clean, compliant and actionable profiles.
Adobe Real-Time CDP unifies customer data
Adobe Real-Time CDP allows companies to unify their customer data across the organisation and create a single, actionable source of truth. Real-Time CDP ingests both known and anonymous user data from across all business systems (e.g., Commerce, ERP, CRM, point of sale) and channels (e.g., first-party web, app, media). Then Real-Time CDP stitches that data together for a comprehensive view of each customer, ready for segmentation and activation.
Adobe Commerce data is a critical piece of the puzzle
No customer profile would be complete without high-intent, first-party data from Adobe Commerce. Commerce data fills in the complete picture of each customer, showing each person’s interactions and experiences with the brand.
That valuable Commerce data includes click-by-click behavioural events, such as add to basket, view product, checkout, create account and search results. It also includes order status data, such as whether a customer’s order was placed, returned, delivered, cancelled and more. These inputs all provide a valuable window into each customer’s unique experience.
The new Data Connection extension empowers merchants to get Commerce data flowing back into Adobe Real-Time CDP in just hours, without any customised development. It has now become effortless to enrich customer profiles and provide the behavioural cues that trigger different experiences for different customers.
Granular AI-powered segmentation is the trigger for activation
With the strong data foundation in place, Real-Time CDP uses Customer AI, powered by Adobe Sensei, to create granular segments based on the likelihood of customers to convert (take a specific action) or churn, called propensity models. Real-Time CDP not only determines those likelihoods, but it even shows the reasons for the scores, helping marketers understand key drivers and how to design experiences and segments based on them.
Propensity scores and factors driving each score are created using Customer AI in Adobe Real-Time CDP.
For example, a telecommunications retailer could determine customers’ propensity scores for buying higher margin premium phones based on behavioural triggers, such as browsing those product pages, past phone purchase history and loyalty status. And with only a few clicks, they can then create a new segment for shoppers of premium phones. That segment could then be shown curated content highlighting the newest devices.
Alternatively, the same company could create segments based on propensity to churn — for example, customers who have passed their usual upgrade cadence without visiting the site or have experienced order delivery delays or cancellations. The company can then deliver unique promotions and campaigns to re-engage those customers.
Merchants can also define rules to create precise segments based on shopper behaviours and all other available data. Best of all, everything is supported by Real-Time CDP’s patented out-of-the-box data privacy and governance framework to ensure adherence to data usage policies.
With the solid foundation complete, it’s time for activation
Audience Activation, a new extension in the Adobe Commerce marketplace, connects Real-Time CDP with Commerce, allowing companies to activate their customer data. While Real-Time CDP serves as the single source of truth for customer profiles and audiences, Commerce is the platform through which merchants can deliver and monetise personalised experiences. Specifically, merchants can now deliver personalised site content and promotions in real time, tailored to AI-powered segments built and managed within Real-Time CDP.
Data flows in a round trip, enriching profiles, segmenting customers and personalising the experience.
Personalised content. Merchants can now show different content to each shopper in real time based on a shopper’s in-session actions. Let’s look at two examples:
- When a clothing shopper browses for a specific brand of jeans, a retailer can immediately deploy new banner content on the home page showcasing that denim brand and place content blocks showcasing the latest products from that brand across the jeans category page.
- A sports retailer can use personalised dynamic content to increase the number of items in shoppers’ baskets. When someone shops for tennis rackets, they can place a dynamic content block on the tennis racket category page and product detail pages showcasing tennis balls, sweatbands and shoes.
Personalised promotions (basket price rules). Merchants can also deliver hyper-personalised promotions to convert shoppers while retaining margins. Here are two more examples:
- A merchant can use Customer AI in Real-Time CDP to determine shoppers with high propensities for upsell. The merchant can then create an “upsell” audience and show those shoppers a 20% discount on high-margin accessories to drive upsell and boost order value.
- A retailer can deliver targeted promotions for known loyal shoppers, such as providing a spend X, get Y% discount offer for a new seasonal clothing collection.
Audience Activation empowers merchants to deliver site content and promotions to shoppers in context, so each experience feels organic and maps to their previous behaviours and future propensities.
Personalise content and promotions in real time with Audience Activation.
Audience Activation provides powerful benefits for personalisation at scale
Audience Activation brings together the best of both Adobe Real-Time CDP and Adobe Commerce to provide several key benefits:
- Personalised experiences in real time. Merchants can now personalise content and promotions in the moment a shopper is engaging with the site to drive conversion and contextualise the shopper experience.
- Centralised segment management. Rather than struggling with siloed data across sources, merchants have a single centralised platform for building and managing all their customer data, profiles and segments, including behavioural shopping and back-office data from Commerce. This allows merchants to deliver personalised content and offers based on all sources, such as loyalty status (e.g., offering a discount to "gold tier" loyalty customers), call centre engagement, CRM data and more. It also provides a consistent set of profiles and segments to deploy across all marketing interactions for a consistent experience across any channel.
- Richer AI-driven segmentation. Real-Time CDP has built-in Customer AI, empowering merchants to create sophisticated segments using AI propensity models, including likelihood to convert or churn. For example, a “high propensity to churn” customer could be delivered a unique promotional offer to re-engage them with the brand.
- Real-time segment qualification. All of this is happening in real time, with the ability to process segment qualification on the edge. Mobility from one segment to another is automated based on in-session shopper behaviours and happens within milliseconds for in-the-moment personalisation.
This new extension powers personalisation at scale. Tackle data challenges with the Real-Time CDP unified profiles and segments and share data easily to and from Commerce and Real-Time CDP with no customised development work needed. Then create and activate granular segments for personalised content and promotions in Commerce.
Explore Audience Activation to create personalised experiences at scale.
Check out Audience Activation to learn more
To learn more about Audience Activation, check out our documentation. Then visit the Marketplace to download the extension, exclusively for Commerce and Real-Time CDP customers. If you want to know more about brand-new personalisation features in Commerce and see a demo of Audience Activation, watch Personalising the Commerce Experience from Adobe Summit .
Go create powerful personalised experiences with Adobe Commerce and Adobe Real-Time CDP.
Rohan Bhatt is a product marketing manager at Adobe, specialising in personalised commerce experiences. Prior to Adobe, Rohan spent over five years in technology and payments consulting, advising some of the world’s largest technology companies on product and go-to-market strategies. Rohan has an MBA and MS in design innovation from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.