Creating experiences that can adapt to a range of consumer requirements, across 140 countries

The automotive sector is currently undergoing a triple revolution, radically overhauling its existing economic and industrial models.

This revolution is first and foremost an energetic one. Not only because of the development of electric models, but also because of the vast range of services linked to the energy sector, all made possible thanks to these same models.

It is also commercial – there has been a shift from ownership to use, in that customers are more interested in benefiting from a mobility service than owning a vehicle. The focus of the sales model is shifting towards services and flexibility.

The revolution is digital, too. Although 87% of new vehicle buyers start their purchasing journey online, going to the dealership remains essential for 82% of customers, according to a study by Spinpart. Nissan fully understands that. Consumers expect a differentiating digital and physical experience – which is intended to be enjoyable, simple and omni-channel – from the brand.

“The complexity lies in offering customers the option of starting their journey online and then continuing it either online or in the dealership. We at Nissan are working to make these hybrid journeys simple along the entire purchasing funnel, across 140 countries in 5 regions of the world,” explains Christophe de Beaumont, Digital & Customer Experience Director at Nissan AMIEO.

Nissan’s approach is to design a localized shopping experience from a single technological base. For over 15 years, the group has been developing a global digital platform, which covers Africa, the Middle East, India, Europe and Oceania (AMIEO). In other words, 140 countries, with disparate digital maturities, varied cultures and different consumption patterns. “Flexibility and scalability were major challenges. That’s why we chose to rely on Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Campaign to build the technological base and easily activate our CRM,” elaborates Jean-Philippe Sainsot, Head of E-commerce at Nissan AMIEO.

A shared technological framework and local experiences

Adobe's CMS is used in ‘full headless mode’, to handle the specificities between markets, which do not all offer the same range of products. In combination with the campaign management solution, Adobe Campaign, this allows Nissan to localize its digital experiences and orchestrate its marketing campaigns.

The global platform is made up of a multitude of modules that can be activated on demand. Each local entity can create its customized offer, and therefore adapt to the specificities of its market and its objectives, while respecting the brand’s regional vision. One market can enable the sale of accessories, while another can enable upselling or focus on the sale of services. With this distributed model, more than 150 ready-to-use functionalities are available in different countries. “For the launch of a vehicle, 8 to 10 pages of content are produced, then translated into in at least 10 languages,” reveals Orianne Arnoul, Associate Director for Nissan Europe at Razorfish, who has been supporting Nissan in the development of its digital strategy for over 15 years.

This first step allows Nissan to get ready to roll out its digital strategy across the globe. Access to a single technological base allows all countries, irrespective of their market size and investment capacity, to benefit from the same functionalities and content. For Nissan, this approach is synonymous with optimizing development and maintenance costs, while harmonizing its digital strategy across several countries.

Favoring a hybrid e-commerce approach

The car manufacturer's platform is rounded off by Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Commerce. “Nissan’s digital promise is about the ease of interacting with the brand, either online or offline at the dealership. Our hybrid commerce approach consists of supporting the customer throughout their journey and therefore integrating the transactional component into the digital platform,” says Rémy Garnier, Managing Director of Razorfish.

The decision to rely on an Adobe ecosystem is based on 3 criteria:

1. the flexibility of the solutions, which enables Nissan to have a solid technological base capable of managing the multiplicity of products and services and activating them or not, depending on the local specificities of each market;
2. the scalability of these solutions, i.e. their ability to support scaling and to be easily deployed internationally on a large scale; and
3. the ecosystem concept, which simplifies interoperability between solutions in a perfectly open and controlled environment.

E-commerce has become a springboard for accelerating Nissan’s digital strategy and involve all employees and dealers in the project. The group is breaking down boundaries and promoting agility throughout its organization, to facilitate its positioning as a challenger in the automotive sector and is asking itself: ‘How can we rethink our business model to deal with increased competition and new consumer expectations?’

In this new hybrid transactional experience, the customer can configure their car, see which models are available in stock, add services or accessories, and make an appointment at a dealership to continue their journey offline.

Continuous optimization of platforms and offers using data

“We combine transactional and relational dimensions, because we want to build strong relationships with our customers. This implies that we know them, that we know how to identify them, and that we can follow their journey to assist them when they move from the digital platform to the dealership,” reports Jean-Philippe Sainsot. Adobe Analytics helps Nissan to understand differences in consumer behavior depending on the country and region, and to identify areas for improvement. “Real time is important to us because we follow a campaign logic around our products. We need to monitor traffic in real time in order to adapt, especially given that we are in a transactional environment. If customer satisfaction drops on one page, we can then take that page offline while we resolve the issue,” he adds. These data analyses are also used to enrich and multiply customer journeys.

Finally, Nissan feeds its dealer network with qualified leads and provides it with all the necessary information on the customer’s digital journey, in order to fuel the discussion with customers and assist them in choosing a vehicle. The physical sales cycle is therefore enriched by knowledge of the customer journey on the digital platform, in a hybrid e-commerce approach. “The challenge is less in the development of these customer journeys than it is in our capacity to deploy these hybrid experiences on a scale of 140 countries,” Jean-Philippe Sainsot specifies.

Immediate and promising tangible results

To date, Adobe Commerce has been rolled out in 9 key markets in Europe and Australia. It is currently being introduced in 7 other markets. The benefits for Nissan are immediately tangible, as visits have increased by 44% in just one year. With no fewer than 690K leads generated, Nissan estimates that 17% of sales are influenced by a digital journey, whether it is to request a quote, book a test drive or order a vehicle. In addition, when the premium Z Nismo was launched in Australia, Nissan sold 50 cars 100% online in under an hour. “There will be a significant increase in digital journeys in the future, because customers are ready. Our conversion rate on transactional journeys is 3x higher than the best past conversions,” Jean-Philippe Sainsot adds. The manufacturer’s goal is for 20% of sales to be generated through the digital platform by 2025.

This ambition has already been achieved thanks to an advanced digital model for Sweden, where Nissan controls the entire sales chain. Much can be learned from this direct-to-consumer pilot model in terms of strengthening customer engagement when they interact online. “We have a unified view of the conversion by tracking the customer journey from start to finish. We can therefore identify ‘key-buy actions’, i.e. all the customer actions that show commitment to the brand,” explains Jean-Philippe Sainsot. These actions include the configuration of a vehicle, the 100% online drafting and submission of a financing request, the addition of services or accessories, and the immediate estimation of the vehicle’s resale value.

Towards large-scale personalized journeys

The main indicator for Nissan is customer satisfaction, which has become the cornerstone of the manufacturer's digital strategy. The success is clear, as the average score given by more than 36K users in 2023 was 4/5.

“Being customer-centric may seem obvious, but it requires great vigilance in order to best support each and every customer / prospect in their relationship with the brand in a personalized way,” says Vincent Gaubert.

Nissan’s digital strategy, which is used throughout the AMIEO zone, is a corporate project that mobilizes all functions around a common objective. This involves providing information on results in real time and making it accessible to everyone. It also means making the organization agile with a "test and learn" approach, which involves prototyping, adjustment, real-life testing, and project termination in the event of failure or transformation in the event of optimization. It is also an incremental approach. Having made an initial offer, the ramp-up is progressive, market by market, feature by feature, with a need for continuous improvement. “In this type of large-scale program, we are continuously building prototypes and testing. We then adjust the quote, depending on our success,” summarizes Rémy Garnier, Managing Director of Razorfish.

Nissan is now aiming to strengthen conversion and customer engagement with improved targeting and segmentation. “In the future, the challenge will be to simplify the processes of creating content and implementing features, in order to truly achieve personalization on a large scale. We are relying on AI to help us accelerate the personalization of journeys and content,” reports Jean-Philippe Sainsot.