Personalization in B2B Commerce with Adobe Commerce

Personalization is everywhere. Over the past few years, personalization has become pervasive in the digital world, becoming a critical part of many of the services we use and products we interact with every day. Personalization has transformed the user experience and forever changed the expectations of customers. Companies like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Pandora, and Facebook use what they know about you and your behavior to show you what products you’d want to buy, movies you’d like to see, the music you’d like to hear, and posts that would interest you.

Can Personalization Drive Revenue?

So, granted personalization is everywhere, how can it affect the bottom line? Research shows that customers expect it, according to Segment, which helps companies manage data and derive insights about their customers. Here are some key findings:

• Personalization drives impulse purchases: 49 percent of customers bought items they did not plan on buying due to a personalized recommendation from the brand in which they were doing business.
• Personalization leads to increased revenue: 40 percent of U.S. consumers say they have purchased something more expensive than they planned to because of personalized service.
• Personalization leads to loyalty: 44 percent of consumers say they will likely be repeat customers after a personalized shopping experience.

Different for B2B?

Analysts from Forrester and Gartner now say adopting the “best practices” from B2C will be critical not just for B2B success, but for many B2B businesses to survive. A big part of this is because your B2B customer is also a B2C consumer and spends most of their time outside of work living/interacting/doing business in the B2C world.

Why Adobe Commerce?

There are several platforms you can leverage to enable your B2B Experience for your brand. Adobe Commerce, previously known as Magento Commerce is an excellent choice and has a full suite of B2B functionality offered “out of the box.” They are a driver in the commerce space and were named a “Leader” for B2B eCommerce by Forrester in 2017.

How Could it Work?

In order to create effective personalization, you need to know your customers. Often this starts and ends with your data. This is no different than for B2C. You already have a wealth of data stored in Adobe Commerce (customer data, order history, customer segments) and your analytics platform (Google Analytics), and any backend system you have (ERP, CRM).

Getting your data into one place would be the next step. You can do this with Adobe Commerce Business Intelligence. With Adobe Commerce BI, you can run reporting across your entire data landscape to help drive personalization decisions taken back in Adobe Commerce.

Virtuous Cycle

Once you’ve got the bones in place, you experiment and let the data guide your path. You make a model based on the data you have, try it out, and iterate based on how the data says you performed.

We can think of “personalization” as being made of up Personalization Capabilities that enable Personalized Experiences. Adobe Commerce BI and Adobe Commerce help you utilize your data in meaningful ways to create those Personalized Experiences.

Conclusion

Clearly, the world is changing fast for the B2B merchant and competition is coming harder and from more directions than ever before. However, the roadmap is there from those who already did the hard work. All we have to do is learn from them and we can take the first steps towards true digital transformation.

Bounteous specializes in solving these complex problems for B2B businesses. Are you attending Magento Imagine? Let’s have a conversation about how we can leverage personalization to help you drive your own digital transformation.

Interested in more information on personalization?  Check out this post from my colleague "The Practitioner's Guide to Personalization."