/Insights/Migrated Bloomreach & Codal: Implementing multi-channel personalization for eCommerce merchants

Bloomreach&Codal:Implementingmulti-channelpersonalizationforeCommercemerchants

Jun 26, 2023

5 min. read

As an enterprise consultancy specializing in eCommerce , Codal designs and develops data-driven, multi-channel user journeys—powered by a modern ecosystem of custom and third-party tools—to help our clients drive conversions, streamline operations, and scale for the future. To accomplish this for businesses across industries, we partner with leading technology providers that provide off-the-shelf solutions to some of our clients’ most common challenges.

When addressing the challenge of personalization, we turn to our partner, Bloomreach —a platform that helps merchants unify customer and product data from various channels, then leverage that data to craft personalized online shopping experiences.

In this article, we discuss Codal’s partnership with Bloomreach, why we decided to join forces, and how we deliver value to mutual clients.

The impact of personalization in eCommerce

To succeed in the current eCommerce landscape, brands must deliver fast and seamless user experiences, where individual customers are met with personalized product recommendations, promotions, and other content—based on their age, gender, location, browsing habits, purchase history, and a wide range of other granular details.

Over the past few years, this has gone from being just a competitive tactic among tech-savvy eCommerce companies to a widespread expectation among consumers. According to a 2021 survey, 64% of online shoppers feel like most brands don’t truly know them, and 50% are more likely to revisit a website that offers personalized product recommendations. This data represents a big opportunity for eCommerce merchants in competitive spaces.

Personalization involves tracking user interactions on your site or app, collecting and storing critical information, gaining clear insights into customer wants and needs, and allowing data to dictate the products and content your individual customers are presented with—whether it be on your site’s homepage, in the customer’s shopping cart, part of an email campaign, or on a banner ad.

Setting up the technical systems necessary to deliver this kind of personalized customer experience may feel like a daunting task—but don’t worry, you’re not alone. 53% of digital professionals don’t feel equipped with the right tools for personalization, and 50% of marketing leaders are willing to allocate more funds toward the implementation of such technologies .

With recent advancements in automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), merchants now have access to third-party SaaS products that allow them to get personalized online shopping experiences up and running quickly and effectively. When our clients have a need for personalization, we often recommend Bloomreach.

What is Bloomreach?

Bloomreach makes personalization easy. Users can collect, store, and track data from different channels—including their website, mobile app, POS, CRM, and marketing campaigns—then activate that data across the eCommerce experience to show customers what they want to see, when and where they want to see it. Businesses deliver personalized content and product recommendations to customers through website merchandising, email marketing, digital advertising, and so on. Harnessing the power of AI, this entire process happens in real time and at scale.

By way of example, let’s say you own an online clothing store, and use Bloomreach to power your eCommerce experience. It’s the middle of the winter, and an online shopper from Chicago visits your site. Weeks ago, they visited your site and searched for winter clothing, which led them to view a product detail page (PDP) for a scarf. Now, as they land on the homepage of your site, they’re presented with recommended scarves and other winter products.

The AI-powered system knows this user is likely looking for winter clothes, given their geographical location, the time of year, and their browsing history. Since they’ve already shown an interest in your scarves, the product recommendation can be narrowed down even further. Later down the road, when your company is offering a 50% discount on scarves, the system—based on a set of predefined rules and triggers—automatically sends an email or text message to the customer, notifying them of the promotion.

When consumers shop at a clothing store during the cold season, the business puts forward jackets and beanies before tank tops and sunglasses—using the little information they do have to provide the smoothest possible customer experience. Bloomreach’s omnichannel marketing, product discovery, and content management features are designed to help businesses achieve this level of personalization in an eCommerce environment.

Bloomreach + Codal: Enabling composable commerce and driving conversions

Many businesses are adopting composable, API-driven, and headless architecture to gain more control over their customer experience, better utilize data analytics, maximize personalization, lower their cost of ownership, and improve scalability. But without the right tools and resources, migrating from a traditional, monolithic eCommerce setup can be a long, complicated, and financially draining process. For successful legacy modernization, businesses must evaluate both custom and third-party solutions against their goals and requirements, create a migration strategy with a timeline and budget, conduct staff training on new technologies and workflows, run tests, deploy updates, and track their performance.

Codal guides businesses in their journey from rigid legacy applications to more flexible, composable commerce solutions like Bloomreach. With the Bloomreach platform providing a technological foundation, our team provides the resources and expertise necessary to fully modernize internal workflows and the customer experience. We achieve this through data-driven UX/UI design, conversion rate optimization, system integrations, API development, proactive website maintenance and support, and more.

Personalizing multi-channel experiences in the automotive space

Codal recently helped launch a new composable commerce system for a car parts company that owns and operates 14 separate brands. We implemented a hub-and-spoke model for the client, leveraging Shopify Hydrogen as the headless eCommerce platform and Bloomreach for content management, search, and email marketing. Under this new system, core features and functionality are managed from a centralized dashboard, or “hub,” then replicated across each unique storefront, or “spoke”—saving the client immeasurable time, money, and effort when adding new websites and updating existing ones.

Through the process described above, Bloomreach’s customer data and marketing automation capabilities are helping the client better segment customers and deliver tailored content and product recommendations. Moreover, Bloomreach’s search solution is perfect for a car parts site with hundreds of SKUs—as users can simply type in long-tail queries like “Engine for a 1975 Pontiac” into the search bar and receive immediate results, without having to manually select filters in a drop-down menu. Since 30% of site visitors use the search box, and visitors who use on-site search engines are more likely to convert, this implementation is helping to boost customer engagement and sales across our mutual client’s 14 online storefronts.

A new approach to eCommerce

To craft a personalized, multi-channel customer experience, your business needs powerful third-party platforms like Bloomreach that speed up and simplify the process of collecting, tracking, and activating user data. Codal can help you implement such technologies, as well as establish a composable infrastructure that guarantees long-term flexibility and scalability moving forward.

“With the strength of Bloomreach’s technology and Codal’s dedication to helping businesses see the long-term benefits of composable infrastructures, this partnership will drive immense value for our customers. Together, we’re going to bring flexible, personalized eCommerce to even more businesses around the world,” said Rachel Fefer, Director of Partnerships, Americas, Bloomreach.

To learn more about the benefits of Bloomreach, whether your business should implement a composable architecture, how to start personalizing the customer journey.

Topic

Experience design

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