1 Commerce: It’s always personal

DEMAND MORE ROI

Commerce: It’s always personal How context-driven content fuels sales growth

2 Commerce: It’s always personal

It’s no longer enough just to convert—to stay competitive, you need to turn prospects into lifelong fans of your brand. But with commerce channels and buying behavior changing so fast, we all know that’s easier said than done.

What were once communications channels are now becoming commerce channels, with consumers making purchases on their TVs, on Twitter, and by text message. In the past, commerce and content data and experiences sat in their own silos. Those days are gone.

In this new world, content has a direct impact on commerce. Useful, engaging content fuels customer interactions, but that content will be far more useful and engaging if it’s delivered in the context of the customer’s latest interaction with your brand.

The combination of personalized content and commerce experiences can be powerful. But to do that, you need context. You need to understand the customer journey, and understand every individual customer: Where are they on their journey? How did they get there? And where will they go next?

The new rules of conversion

3 Commerce: It’s always personal

Once you’ve got context, you can connect…

Read on to discover why personalization matters, how you can get it right, and how one company uses context-driven customer experiences to deliver outstanding commerce results.

…so you can go beyond conversion to build valuable, long-lasting relationships.

BUY

the right customer...

to the right content...

at the right time...

in the right way...

to inspire commerce

3 Commerce: It’s always personal

4 Commerce: It’s always personal

Engagement is the key to conversion and customer retention, and relevance is the key to engagement.

People engage with content that’s totally relevant to them at the exact point it’s delivered. They don’t engage with content that appears random or disconnected from their current problems, desires, or readiness to buy. The rapid rise of ad blocking, for example, shows an increasing frustration with irrelevant messaging in the digital experience. Customers don’t want to be shouted at—they want to be engaged with. On their own terms.

This is why personalized experiences—combining content and context—are so important. When prospects are engaged, they’ll convert into customers. And when customers stay engaged (when they feel they’re “known” and treated as an individual, with unique needs), they’ll bring far more lifetime value to your business, through ongoing sales and brand advocacy.

By tailoring the experience for each customer at every stage of their journey, from awareness to conversion and beyond, businesses can increase attraction, retention, and wallet share. But ensuring content and commerce experiences are truly personalized can be easier said than done.

What’s the value of delivering personalized experiences?

Engaged customers are 23% more valuable than the average customer…

…but disengaged customers are 13% less valuable.

Source: State of the American Consumer, Gallup, 2014

5 Commerce: It’s always personal

The right content, delivered in the right context, is what drives great commerce results.

To identify which content works best for which type of customer, at which stage of the buying cycle, and through which channel, it’s essential to have a deep understanding of the overall customer journey.

But understanding the journey customers take on the path to purchase is just the start. Next you need to understand how each individual customer gets there. The trouble is, they all take different—and seemingly unpredictable—routes.

And without a complete view of all customer data, you’ll never really know who they are or predict how they’ll respond to your content at any given time.

So how do you do it?

5 Commerce: It’s always personal

6 Commerce: It’s always personal

Customers expect you to know who they are, no matter through which channels they choose to interact with your business (and they get pretty angry if you don’t). Nobody likes to feel as if they’re just a cog in a commerce machine —they want to feel valued as individuals.

But when customer data is spread across multiple channels that aren’t talking to each other, marketers can’t make connections between customer interactions—which means they can’t deliver personalized experiences. They see the customer’s email activity, and their web activity, and their activity over social channels, but they don’t see the whole customer.

The walls between commerce and CMS (or WCM, whichever acronym you prefer for your content platform) need to come down. Once you’ve got a single repository of all customer interactions from every channel, you’ll have discovered the Holy Grail of marketing: a comprehensive, unified, real-time view of every individual customer.

With a behavioral database sitting at the heart of your commerce platform, it’s possible to achieve this single view of the customer and identify where they are on their journey.

The vital role of data

7 Commerce: It’s always personal

Of course, as a brand with thousands or millions of customers, you’re not personally using these individual customer profiles to “handcraft” the experience for each one of them. Your experience management system needs to be able to harness all that customer knowledge, and automatically deliver

customized content, offers, and pricing to each customer on your behalf. By automating the communication process across channels, you’re able to improve conversion by consistently providing more relevant offers, to every visitor —every time.

The essential importance of automation

8 Commerce: It’s always personal

A single view of the customer puts content in contextA complete view of the data helps you understand the connection between content relevance, customer experience, and commerce, so you can:

• Respond to shopping behavior in real time with personalized content

• Predict what content customers will want, based on their profiles, interests, and actions

• Test, validate, and fine-tune your approach

8 Commerce: It’s always personal

9 Commerce: It’s always personal

Context-driven commerce in action

10 Commerce: It’s always personal

Danone-Nutricia knows how important context is for a successful commerce platform.

The manufacturers of formula milk and baby food had a clear vision of how combining content, context, and commerce could help it continue to lead its market in Europe’s Benelux region.

The challengeSelling exclusively through third-party retailers meant Danone-Nutricia had no interaction with its customers at the critical point—when the buying decision is made.

With in-store merchandising and promotions dominated by private label products, the retailers had complete ownership of the point of conversion. Danone-Nutricia needed to take control of its relationships with its end-customers, without damaging its relationships with retailers.

A new direct sales channel seemed an obvious way to stay in contact with customers throughout their journey, but the company still had to overcome the fact that it’s prohibited from promoting its flagship product (formula milk) directly to its target audience (expectant and new mothers).

Danone-Nutricia

“We knew we needed to be closer to our customers— to really understand them—and begin to build meaningful relationships with them all the way during the first 1,000 days of the life of their child.”

Max Goijarts, Technology and CX Manager, Danone-Nutricia

11 Commerce: It’s always personal

As part of a broader digital transformation, designed to ensure the company retains its market leadership into the future, Danone-Nutricia embarked on a content- led personalization program called “Mother’s Journey.”

Technology and CX Manager Max Goijarts and the team mapped out the customer journey to identify the “moments of truth,” and the emotional responses associated with them, that mothers experienced from the moment they know they’re pregnant through the baby’s first 1,000 days.

By combining detailed customer insight from its Sitecore® Experience Database™ with a thorough understanding of the customer journey, Danone-Nutricia is able to deliver personalized content to create and nurture customer relationships at each stage of the journey.

Personalized post-natal exercise advice, feeding plans, and even 24x7 access to fully qualified pediatric dieticians provides mothers with valuable content at exactly the right time, while encouraging sales through the company’s new online store.

Connecting the behavioral database to its new commerce platform allows Danone-Nutricia to take an experience-first rather than a sales-first approach to commerce. By delivering content in context, the company encourages more customer interactions, reinforces its brand message without directly promoting products, and builds direct and indirect sales.

The solution

12 Commerce: It’s always personal

“When we began thinking about an e-commerce platform, we started from the point of view of the customer experience—and that’s critical. By delivering personalized content in context of the mother’s journey, we’re able to build relationships that are valuable to us and to our customers.”

Max Goijarts, Technology and CX Manager, Danone-Nutricia

13 Commerce: It’s always personal

The results

“The results of our online store have been incredible. And the great thing is the business can now clearly see a direct link between digital marketing and actual sales.”

Max Goijarts, Technology and CX Manager, Danone-Nutricia

Since launching its online store, Danone-Nutricia has seen some fantastic results:

Average monthly growth: 75%

Average monthly repurchase growth: 140%

7 Lessons from visionary Context Marketers

Context Marketing visionaries like Max understand that effective personalization requires a shift in mindset.

Find out what it takes to bring context to your marketing.

14 Commerce: It’s always personal

When you put commerce in context of the customer experience, you’ll see more conversions. Here are five things to keep in mind.

Connect commerce and the customer experience

To grow commerce revenue, you need to bring together everything you know about every customer and deliver personalized experiences to grow revenue. That’s how your customers become your fans—and bring others along with them.

Make commerce a seamless continuation of cross-channel conversations

Different channels shouldn’t mean different experiences. And once the buying decision’s been made, your commerce platform shouldn’t feel like entering a new world. Commerce needs to be integrated with the entire customer experience across every channel, online and offline.

1 2

Five top tips for context-driven commerce

15 Commerce: It’s always personal

Gain actionable insights to keep conversations going

Commerce data should be fed back into your behavioral database to generate insights you can use to attract, nurture, and retain customers. When shopping data informs your cross-channel marketing, customer interactions become far more relevant— and more profitable.

Identify and optimize paths that convert

By analyzing detailed commerce and customer experience data, you’ll understand how customer journeys lead to a purchase, so you can guide customers down the right path to maximize conversions and minimize cart abandonment.

Test and refine your content

Your content needs to be continually tested and fine-tuned to ensure it delivers the best results. And each time you test and tweak, you’re adding to your context knowledge bank, helping improve personalization and make future interactions more valuable.

4 5 3

15 Commerce: It’s always personal

16 Commerce: It’s always personal

Whether you opt to go all-in with a complete CMS, commerce, and customer experience management platform or decide to use a behavioral database as the core of a best- of-breed architecture, the important thing is that everything must work together and talk to each other.

A single, integrated platform for content and commerce enables you to deliver the personalized experiences that drive up conversion, wallet share, and retention.

At Sitecore, we believe great commerce results start with great customer experiences. That’s why we integrate Sitecore Commerce with the Sitecore® Experience Platform™—and it’s why our Sitecore® Experience Database™ integrates with so many of the leading commerce engines on the market.

Data silos are the enemy of commerce

16 Commerce: It’s always personal

17 Commerce: It’s always personal

Take an in-depth look at how the Sitecore platform enables context-driven commerce and how you can get started in our white paper:

Thinking beyond, and before, the abandoned cart

Learn more about context-driven commerce

DEMAND MORE ROI

Thinking beyond, and before, the abandoned cartHow context-driven commerce drives revenues across lifelong customer relationships

18 Commerce: It’s always personal

Sitecore is the global leader in experience management software. The Sitecore® Experience Platform™ manages content, supplies contextual intelligence, and automates communications, at scale. It empowers marketers to deliver content in context of how customers have engaged with their brand, across every channel, in real time. More than 4,400 of the world’s leading brands—including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, easyJet, and L’Oréal—trust Sitecore for context marketing to deliver the personalized interactions that delight audiences, build loyalty, and drive revenue.

Visit us at sitecore.net

Published 10/15. © 2001-2015 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners.