The right content at the right time

Vinay Gopinath ends his typical workday with a team standup meeting. As he signs off for the day from Singapore, his teammates in Mexico, Canada, and the US are just getting started.

Gopinath is the director of global advertising platforms technical product owner at The Coca-Cola Company, and the daily standups are part of a finely tuned system of connected collaboration across time zones that’s key to the company’s global marketing strategy and impact. With Coca-Cola’s customers making billions of transactions every day, delivering on customer expectations is a monumental task — and in today’s fast-evolving business landscape, personalized experiences have never been more important.

“Seventy percent of shoppers are multitasking. According to research, Gen Z’s attention span is just eight seconds, and Millennials’ is only four seconds more,” says Gopinath, who’s worked at Coca-Cola for three years. “If we want to drive revenue, we have to capture the attention of our consumers at the right time with the right content. We have to customize their experiences.”

When Coca-Cola set out in 2022 with an ambitious goal to build a personalization strategy across ecommerce and marketing touchpoints, it needed a place to start. With information fragmented across systems and the risks of deprecated third-party data increasing, Coca-Cola needed a fresh approach to understanding its consumers before it could effectively personalize omnichannel customer journeys based on shopper actions.

Gopinath and his team saw an opportunity with Coca-Cola en tu Hogar (CCETH), the company’s Latin American brand and largest regional business unit in terms of B2C revenue. CCETH had significant website traffic and customer data, along with a variety of products on its website, making it an ideal candidate to pilot a personalization strategy.

Over the next two years, the team worked with CCETH to build an innovative data, commerce, and customer engagement foundation using Adobe Real-Time CDP, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Adobe Commerce. That allowed them to create personalized shopping experiences at scale — and led to an 89% conversion rate among re-engaged shoppers.

“There’s a broad array of capabilities you can unlock when you’re sharing data seamlessly across your platforms,” Gopinath says. “You’re not just sending emails or push notifications — you’re orchestrating a truly omnichannel experience. It’s incredibly powerful.”

A strategic foundation

Working with implementation partner Bounteous, a digital transformation services consultancy, Gopinath and his team created a personalization strategy for CCETH that involved four key steps:

1. Setting the team structure to enable collaboration
2. Centralizing data to gain a clear picture of customers
3. Defining use cases to serve as a strategic foundation
4. Executing on the strategy through the use cases

Gopinath, who has a deep background in digital marketing, knew the technology team needed to be involved from the beginning. Rather than a traditional handoff approach in which the business team sends ideas to the technology team to execute, he brought everyone together for joint planning, execution, and iteration throughout the process. That also meant designing a system for cross-continental collaboration with team members on the other side of the world.

The next step was to break down silos by centralizing data from multiple sources. The team needed a way to combine ecommerce data from Adobe Commerce — including behavioral actions like adding items to a cart, back-office data like order history, and profile data — with information from other sources like the company’s ERP and CRM. They used the Adobe Commerce Data Sharing extension to flow the data into Experience Platform and Real-Time CDP, where it was standardized into unified customer profiles.

“With the Commerce integration, we’re able to capture every consumer touchpoint,” Gopinath says. “It helps us build a true consumer profile from the moment they first land on the site.”

Equipped with the ability to create rich customer profiles, Gopinath and his team were ready to dive into personalizing customer journeys. They prioritized the possible use cases according to consumer interactions, marketing initiatives, and personalization tactics, producing a framework of three pillars:

1. Use cases that would drive revenue
2. Use cases that would boost engagement and retention
3. Use cases that offered the opportunity to analyze what worked and iterate

A true omnichannel experience

The team started by tackling a classic engagement use case — cart abandonment. Before the data integration, they had to wait up to 48 hours for data to indicate whether a CCETH customer had finished checking out. With data now flowing in real time, they were able to start sending immediate, personalized email reminders to users who didn’t check out within an hour, resulting in increases of 36% for email open rates, 21% for click-through rates, and 8.5% for conversion rates.

The team was also able to go beyond email, delivering reminders through pop-up messages on the website and with push notifications, including a new WhatsApp integration. Journey Optimizer helped determine the right frequency and channels for communication based on customer behavior, AI propensity scores, and other information.

“Journey Optimizer has unlocked a lot of channels,” Gopinath says. “It’s empowered us to orchestrate a true omnichannel experience.”

Access to real-time information also allowed CCETH to use Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to better understand the ordering behaviors of its bottlers and warehouses. In addition to immediately seeing which products were running low, Gopinath’s team could trigger customized communications through Journey Optimizer to bottlers based on postal codes where they expected demand to increase because of seasonal factors.

The team also used analytics to understand purchase trends and correlate them with product recommendations that drove more revenue. “The products we recommend have to be backed by revenue numbers — otherwise, it’s difficult to justify what we’re doing,” Gopinath says. “Customer Journey Analytics made it easy for business stakeholders to visualize what we were accomplishing through the dashboards we created.”

Customer Journey Analytics also helped the team find new ways to re-engage and delight low-frequency customers — for example, by sending personalized coupons during a customer’s birthday month or in response to a potentially negative event, such as an attempt to use an expired promo code. At the same time, the team could also understand which customers were least likely to make a purchase so they could be more efficient with media spending.

The power of personalization

Gopinath and his powerhouse global team created a playbook for personalization that’s reshaping Coca-Cola’s strategy in markets worldwide. They’ve already started rolling it out to the Coca-Cola Store in the US, where personalized product discovery powered by Adobe Sensei , Adobe’s AI and machine-learning technology, has delivered immediate value.

Early results showed that 1-to-1 product recommendations based on behavioral actions and shopper affinities drove a 117% increase in clicks and a 36% increase in revenue. The store also saw a 17% click-through rate for its “Frequently Bought Together” cross-sell recommendations. Conversion rate from on-site search hit 19%, with the top three results generally containing what customers were looking for.

Gopinath’s team plans to finish expanding to the US Coca-Cola Store, followed by the African market and other global brands. They’re also looking beyond cart abandonment to other use cases, such as using AI to generate propensity scores that predict customer behavior and inform customer experiences in Journey Optimizer.

“I feel lucky to be part of such a large global brand like Coca-Cola that encourages innovation,” Gopinath says. “The empowerment I get from my managers and senior leadership really inspires me to keep pushing boundaries so that our team can achieve great results.”

Read about how Coca-Cola scales to deliver real-time personalized messages to customers with Adobe Experience Cloud.

Learn more about the power of personalization and how to personalize your customer experiences with Adobe Journey Optimizer.

Then, watch the Adobe Summit session: Coca-Cola: Unlocking Data to Create Consumer-Centric Commerce Experiences.