While the pandemic transformed aspects of our lives ranging from how we communicate to where we work, it also had a lasting impact on our shopping habits. In 2020, US ecommerce sales leapt by 43% year on year to $815bn (£640bn), according to the United States Census Bureau. The bureau’s latest figures indicate that the total still grew by nearly 8% last year, exceeding the $1tn mark for the first time.
Online shoppers have also become considerably more demanding since the depths of the crisis. Studies suggest that the post-Covid consumer has come to expect more personalised etail experiences. Data published by software firm Monetate, for instance, indicates that merchants stand to boost their sales by as much as 20% by offering such features. Moreover, 80% of shoppers polled by management consultancy Epsilon said that they were more likely to buy from etailers that could provide a personalised experience.
Not every online merchant is sufficiently well equipped to offer personalisation, though, especially as customer journeys are becoming ever more complex. More than half of etailers lack the advanced tech required to do so, according to a recent study by Forrester Research.
Personalisation backed by data
At the same time, not all digital shopping experiences are made equal – and personalisation means different things to different companies. Bloomreach, a leading cloud-based ecommerce experience platform, defines personalisation in ecommerce as the practice of “using commercial data responsibly to get to know, guide and impress” shoppers by offering them “relevant and contextual” experiences.
Jordan Roper, the General Manager and Head of Product of the Discovery product at Bloomreach, explains that this requires creating a holistic ecommerce personalisation strategy “driven by real-time, first-party data”. It must also be available on all digital channels and encompass both “anonymous and known customers, including personalised messages, content, site layouts, products and much more”.
With the primary goal of helping brands connect customers to relevant products using AI and ML, Bloomreach is enabling global brands to apply the wealth of digital information they’ve been gathering even prior to the pandemic-driven acceleration of ecommerce personalisation.
This is fuelled by real-time data and artificial intelligence, which “connects customers with what they want to see by understanding their digital behaviour”, Roper says. “In doing so, we can make businesses more successful and drive measurable increases in conversion rate and revenue…”
Bloomreach has two advanced tools designed to turbocharge segment personalisation and ensure that its clients can understand and meet their customers’ ever-changing needs. Bloomreach Engagement is an omnichannel marketing platform that enables users to create personalised campaigns spanning every channel. Bloomreach Discovery is an e-commerce search and merchandising solution powered by rich data and self-learning AI, offering enhanced SEO capabilities and recommendation engines.
The AI in Bloomreach Discovery intelligently ranks search results across an entire site or app, which according to Roper, “can give clients a 5% to 10% increase in revenue per visitor on average, but there are examples where companies have experienced a 50% uplift in revenue.”
Bloomreach Engagement, meanwhile, offers a customer data platform (CDP) that provides a single customer view, which allows brands to analyse customer journeys and deliver personalised marketing campaigns in real-time.
Segmented search
Additionally, clients can use the customer data within Bloomreach Engagement to personalise high-level segments within search. As Roper explains, “The segments, for example, could be groups like gender, style or territory. We’ve discovered that finding those segments with customers who have enough behavioural similarity in their online shopping patterns gives sufficient data to feed our Discovery algorithms to provide personalised ranking for customers in those segments, which helps deliver the right products for the right people at the right times.”
Bicycle retailer Jenson USA is one firm that realised that it was in urgent need of a definitive AI personalisation strategy. Owned by riders, it had been selling bikes, parts, clothes and accessories for a quarter of a century. In a crowded market, the business was facing some big barriers to growth. With an online catalogue containing more than 30,000 products, it knew that it had to improve its site search capabilities and introduce distinct segment personalisation.
“Jenson USA noticed that there was a major difference in segments between people wanting to buy road bikes as opposed to mountain bikes, which meant that customers were embarking on different journeys on the site. For example, someone who purchased a mountain bike and another customer who bought a road bike would buy completely different replacement tyres,” Roper says.
Optimisation
He adds that, with Bloomreach’s help, Jenson USA’s marketing and brand team “identified distinct customer segments and a set of criteria to ‘bucket’ visitors. The road and mountain bike segments were relatively easy to discern. But, using the Bloomreach Engagement tool and our customer data engine, Jenson USA was able to collect data on how shoppers across many segments behaved. This helped it to fine-tune and optimise the customer experience. Then, when road bikers and mountain bikers go on the site, Bloomreach Discovery shows only the bikes, parts, accessories and apparel associated with their preferences.”
Having optimised its search capabilities through understanding these customer segments, Jenson USA saw a significant additional uptick in sales, with revenue per visitor increasing by 8.5% - beyond the improvements they already saw by implementing the base Discovery product..
And the secret? “Artificial intelligence makes it truly possible. AI is the bridge between taking the data on what a customer is interested in and predicting what’s most likely to interest them next,” Roper says. “This technology has been key to our offering for the past decade, and is the heartbeat of ecommerce personalisation.”
It’s a view shared by the hundreds of firms that have turned to Bloomreach to power their ecommerce personalisation efforts so far – and no doubt, thousands more in the future. And that will inevitably equate to millions of satisfied customers.
Learn more about how ecommerce companies are seeing immediate revenue lift with Bloomreach Discovery
