From online to in-store — powering personalized retail journeys

Emma, a fashion enthusiast, gets a text from EcoLite Threads, a brand she just discovered. It’s an exclusive 20% discount offer for new loyalty members, redeemable in store. Clicking the link, she spots a cozy knit sweater that she adds to her virtual cart. She then uses the app’s store locator to find the nearest EcoLite Threads location. She stops by on her way home from work only to find that the sweater she wants is out of stock and the staff isn’t aware of the online offer. Emma gets frustrated and leaves, hoping for a smoother shopping experience elsewhere.

Retailers are challenged to deliver connected customer experiences across touchpoints, but they often lack data integration from these channels and cohesive communication across teams. This results in missed opportunities to provide a cohesive and personalized shopper journey. With disconnected data management, retailers risk delivering inconsistent messaging, confusing promotions, and disjointed experiences that deter customers from converting and becoming loyal brand advocates.

Creating the seamless experience consumers want isn’t impossible. With a strong customer experience management (CXM) solution in place, retailers can centralize all data, convert it into actionable insights, activate relevant and consistent experiences, and analyze the results to deliver personalization at scale — in real time, across digital and physical touchpoints.

Unify and activate data to personalize engagement

To orchestrate personalized shopping journeys at scale, retailers must be able to understand their customers, increase engagement, and extract valuable insights to tailor experiences for each shopper. When retail businesses take a holistic approach to data management, engagement, and measurement, they eliminate siloes and can deliver connected, actionable experiences and campaigns across channels.

The right CXM solution should be able to:

• Manage data throughout the entire customer journey — collecting insights at each touchpoint to identify customers across channels and devices to build complete customer profiles
• Act on insights by identifying high-value customers and audiences to deliver relevant offers and content on the right channels at the right time
• Analyze results to continually enhance experiences, reducing the timeframe from insights to activation

And it should be able to do all this in real time, so teams can capitalize on the moments when customers are showing the most interest and engagement.

By leveraging automation and AI, retail marketers can create a continuous loop of insights and optimization that results in relevant and personalized shopper journeys, higher retention, and increased customer lifetime value. Here are the three essential data-based capabilities you need to orchestrate personalized customer journeys at scale.

3 key capabilities for powering customer-centric experiences

1. Understand your shoppers with connected data

Delivering highly customized experiences requires data, including demographics, interests, shopping patterns, and engagement history. But the shopper’s journey is complex, and it can be difficult to track and connect information when it’s flowing in from multiple channels and devices.

At the heart of this data-driven journey is the customer data platform (CDP). It acts as a central repository for real-time customer profiles that provide a holistic, customer-centric view that extends across all channels. These profiles are primed for activation and set to power experiences that resonate with customers. Throughout the process, customer data is safeguarded by strong privacy and governance management.

Imagine Emma browsing items on her mobile app and then checking products on the website. A CDP that updates in real time recognizes that Emma is interacting on two devices, tracks each of her clicks, and combines them into one view to create a unified experience across channels. Retailers can dynamically adjust what a person interacts with based on their current searches or behaviors, creating a more engaging experience.

EcoLite Threads can also use known profile information about Emma — like her preferred sizes and colors and the store location she usually shops at — to proactively refine and prioritize which products she sees. As Emma adds a sweater to her cart, she is also added to relevant segments, like the "high intent to purchase" segment, in real time. This makes her eligible for category-specific offers and incentives redeemable in store and online. Connecting all these bits of information ensures the most engaging, relevant, and seamless experience from the get-go — and one that’s more likely to result in conversion.

With a CDP, you can group customer profiles into audiences based on common traits and use predictive modeling for more personalized engagement. You can also manage both known and pseudonymous profiles. When you supplement your first-party data with partner data, you get even better profile accuracy and more comprehensive insights.

2. Activate data to execute personalized campaigns

Relevant content based on a customer’s profile and preferences needs to be available every time a shopper connects with your brand. To be able to send this curated messaging, it’s important to activate data in your CDP to launch intelligent campaigns across channels. This allows you to tailor individual journeys with trigger-based engagement for each shopper and helps you determine the best time, format, and device to show your customers the offers they’ll love.

And it’s not just one-size-fits-all decision-making. Journey orchestration can be managed at scale, helping businesses reach millions of unique shoppers based on criteria such as customer-defined priorities, offer-ranking formulas, or the predictive capabilities of AI models. This way, your shoppers don’t just receive generic messages — they feel understood with “just for me” messaging. And you build lasting connections that drive loyalty and advocacy across your entire customer base.

In an ideal scenario, Emma wouldn’t waste time searching in store for the sweater she wants. She would receive a text letting her know exactly where she could find it in the store. And with AI powering its personalization strategy, EcoLite Threads could take it one step further and generate an image of the sweater with complementary accessories, shoes, and jeans based on in-store availability and Emma’s preferences. Then, Emma assembles the perfect look, arrives at the register, and the sales associate instantly pulls up the offer and applies the discount.

3. Analyze and learn from your data

In crafting these one-to-one experiences across channels, it’s also important to analyze the data from customer interactions as they happen to continually optimize your CXM strategy. Where are shoppers most engaged? Where are they most likely to drop off? How many touchpoints does it take to make the sale? From website and store visits to emails and ad clicks, each touchpoint should be meticulously tracked, visualized, and studied to provide a clear roadmap for refining strategies that improve the customer journey and increase conversion. The ability to analyze these metrics and improve engagement closes the data loop that powers personalization.

With AI-enhanced analytics, you can visualize the entire customer journey across multiple channels and in sequence, so you have a richer understanding of how touchpoints impact each other. You can see how a piece of content performs or influences cross-channel behavior to identify the most effective tactics.

As you strive to guide shoppers from curiosity to conversion, advanced machine learning algorithms can make the process faster and more efficient. When driven by AI, these algorithms help you understand various metrics and discern which marketing endeavors contribute most significantly to sales, fueling informed decision-making and strategic planning. By learning from your engagements, successes, and even missteps, you continuously fine-tune your customer engagement strategies and deliver greater value.

Real-time data solutions for meaningful customer journeys

Customers shop in whatever way is most convenient, and retailers are expected to meet them wherever they are with a uniquely tailored experience. Delivering on this level of personalization requires digital tools to help you craft unique encounters for every interaction, execute a seamless shopper journey, and continually analyze and optimize your strategy.

Using data-first solutions like Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, you can gain the insights you need to deliver the truly noteworthy experiences customers enjoy.

Learn how Adobe products work together to drive continuous real-time insights and engagement.

Marta Frattini is the director of industry strategy and marketing – retail for Adobe's Digital Strategy Group (DSG), working as a passionate thought leader to unlock experience-driven growth for Adobe’s retail clients.

Frattini has spent over 15 years in marketing and digital innovation, and she has spearheaded successful digital transformation and personalization programs for major global retailers. She has a strong understanding of the strategies, tactics, and technologies required to execute digital excellence at scale, and brings a global perspective shaped by personal and professional experiences across North America and EMEA.