How On-Site Personalization Enhances Your Omnichannel Strategy

Every marketer knows there’s no such thing as a constant in ecommerce, but there is one thing you can bank on: the expectations of customers are ever-increasing. 

A few years ago, marketers could get away with campaigns that had a few personalized touches to entice a shopper to click through to their website. But today’s shoppers are looking for more than just their name in the subject line of an email. They want comprehensive personalized experiences with the brands they give their business to.

However, while modern businesses are getting better and better at utilizing multiple marketing channels and building out omnichannel campaigns, that comprehensive experience is still not quite fully realized. Far too often, personalized campaigns don’t follow through on their complete promise. 

Once a customer lands on your website, your job as a marketer isn’t done — you need to offer a personalized journey from start to finish, complete with an on-site visit that continues the individualized experience that you offered your customers when they clicked through from your email, SMS, or ad.

Here’s how you can accomplish the personalized omnichannel experience your customers are looking for with targeted campaigns that connect seamlessly to your on-site personalization — which is a level of personalization only possible with Bloomreach.

Why Omnichannel Campaigns Suffer From a Disconnected On-Site Experience

Almost every online shopper has experienced the scenario we’re talking about: the SMS, email, or ad you get served says one thing, but when you click through to the website, it says another. It’s as if the website is completely separate from the campaign you were just served. 

That’s still the case with too many ecommerce brands. The start of an interaction is personalized to entice customers and stand out in a crowded inbox or social feed, but the elevated customer experience you expected from the targeted and tailored messaging suddenly vanishes as soon as you get to the website. 

That’s because businesses have taken some initial steps toward a personalized experience, which are important in their own right. Many are readily utilizing tools like customer segmentation and dynamic content to tailor the messages they send to their audiences on competitive key channels (as they rightly should). But once a customer clicks through to your ecommerce store, you can’t drop the ball and cut that personalized experience short.

If your email offers a free shipping incentive, for instance, your on-site experience needs to reflect that offer as soon as your email recipient clicks through — they shouldn’t have to hunt for that offer once they get to your website. 

The same goes for a specific sale, recommended item, or product collection you highlight in a campaign. Your channels and your website need to be fueled by real-time data so that your audience’s journey builds on each new interaction, guiding their experience toward purchase from one click to the next. 

Thankfully, a throughline of personalization is possible with Bloomreach Engagement. Our omnichannel marketing solution allows you to tailor your on-site experience and have it sync up with your marketing channels using powerful, targeted weblayers — and you can do it all from one comprehensive platform.

Read This Next: 5 On-Site Weblayers To Boost Customer Engagement

The Tools It Takes To Create a Truly Personalized Experience

Before we dive into orchestrating an end-to-end personalized experience, we first need to make sure we have all the tools to make it happen.

To achieve the next-level personalization that your customers expect, you’ll need complete access to your data. True personalization isn’t possible without a 360-degree view of each customer, as well as a rich product data set with all the product attribution and categorization needed to connect the right customers to the right products.

This is what Bloomreach does better than any other platform available. Our built-in customer data engine translates every known and anonymous interaction into a user profile, so you always have a rich understanding of all events, customer properties, actions, and predicted behaviors. Combine this with a thorough understanding of your product catalog and each item’s attributes, and you have the deep knowledge you need to fuel incredible customer journeys. 

But fuel is only the first step. You also need to weave all your real-time data together and make the right connections to craft an omnichannel journey that extends from marketing campaigns to your on-site experience. This is where AI becomes a necessity — and it’s the reason our platform is powered by Loomi, our AI built for ecommerce.

With the power of Loomi, your data can drive your omnichannel campaigns and your site experience in real time. Fueled by our customer data engine and connected to all your channels and touchpoints, Loomi is purpose-built to solve the specific challenges of ecommerce. It’s the intelligence that translates data into seamless experiences across every workflow, from automated omnichannel marketing campaigns to on-site personalization, so your customers keep coming back for more. 

This is the key to building end-to-end ecommerce experiences and executing them at scale. And if you’re wondering what this looks like in practice, we have the perfect example to show you just how game-changing this level of personalization can be. 

How Bloomreach Connects Targeted Campaigns With On-Site Personalization

Let’s dig into the details and see what this comprehensive personalized experience looks like using the free shipping incentive we mentioned above.

A personalized free-shipping incentive is a tried-and-true use case that marketers can employ to entice their customers to increase their order value. To do this effectively, you’ll want to invite customers to take advantage of the deal through coordinated campaigns across marketing channels.

With Bloomreach Engagement, you can create a weblayer that personalizes the on-site shopping experience of your customers by offering a free shipping incentive on orders over a certain amount (for this case, we’ll say $100). This weblayer can be customized to remind them of the incentive on category, product, and checkout pages as they shop around your site, and it can highlight how much more they need to add to their shopping cart to hit the free-shipping criteria. 

This weblayer is a beneficial addition to any visitor’s on-site experience, adding a level of personalization that uniquely speaks to their real-time customer journey and invites shoppers to purchase more.

Plus, with our unified platform, you can make this personalized experience a comprehensive one. You can use this weblayer as a jumping-off point to build omnichannel campaigns that target the ideal audience for this free-shipping use case.

For this particular incentive, it would be worthwhile to target customers who have recently shopped around your ecommerce store and abandoned their shopping carts. Customers that added items to their cart totaling just below $100 in the past month, and then abandoned their shopping journey, would be the ideal audience. These customers could return to your site, put one more item in their cart, and trigger this promotion, so it would be an especially beneficial offer. 

In Bloomreach Engagement, you can easily build a hyper-relevant audience that targets customers with this ideal criteria — customers who have added items to their cart for less than $100, abandoned that cart, and haven’t made a purchase in the past month. 

 

With this targeted audience, you can craft an email, SMS, or ad campaign that speaks directly to where they left off in their shopping journey with your brand — and most importantly, as soon as they click through to pick up where they left off, the incentive you offered them in your campaigns will be waiting for them on your site, continuing the personalized experience they expect from your messaging.

This is what a truly personalized customer journey looks like, and it’s that easy to achieve with Bloomreach Engagement. 

More On-Site Marketing Examples You Can Connect to Omnichannel Campaigns

Your personalized customer journeys are only limited by your imagination. With Bloomreach Engagement, you can craft the perfect customer experience for any audience, no matter how nuanced their preferences are or how specific you want your campaign goals to be.

The on-site marketing example above is just one of the many use cases that Bloomreach customers can use to make online shopping a more personal journey. Here are some additional out-of-the-box Loomi-powered use cases you can employ to personalize your site experience and connect your website with omnichannel campaigns:

• Personalized Recommendations Based on Purchasing and Browsing History: With the power of Loomi, you can inspire customers with suggested items based on their browsing history and past purchases. These recommendations can be shown during a shopper’s on-site experience via weblayers that highlight items based on real-time events, keeping your recommendations hyper-relevant to your audience’s current shopping session. Plus, these recommendations can also be used in email and MMS campaigns to invite customers back to your site and continue their personalized shopping journey.
• Price Drop Alerts: Loomi can act as your customers' friendly neighborhood watchdog, monitoring price drops on items they’ve favorited or added to their cart. When their favorite products drop in price, a triggered on-site notification, email campaign, and SMS campaign can alert your customers and invite them to purchase.
• Back-in-Stock Alerts: Loomi can automatically keep tabs on the inventory status of a customer's favorited product and notify them when it's back in stock. An email or SMS campaign can be triggered as soon as this item is available, as well as an on-site alert that reminds them while browsing your ecommerce store.

Looking for more ideas to help you craft a complete end-to-end customer journey? Visit our site to learn how Bloomreach can help you personalize your entire customer experience, from email marketing campaigns to on-site personalization. And be sure to check out our full use case library, where you’ll find everything you need to build connected and personalized customer journeys across every channel, at scale.