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CX Education 03: How to personalize the commerce experience with Brian Walker from Bloomreach

Join Brian Walker and Heather Garand as they discuss the importance of personalization and optimization of the commerce experience.

How to personalize the commerce experience with Brian Walker from Bloomreach
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About this episode

The pandemic changed everything in our lives — from how we communicate and work to how we shop. COVID-19 brought millions of people into a new working environment; the home office has become a universal reality. Digital is a core part of most businesses.

While some companies successfully adapt to digital transformation, others get left behind and struggle with adopting new tools and processes. Customer needs are constantly growing, and to keep up with them, developing a change management strategy and a digital transformation strategy is crucial – these are some of the challenges of going digital.

In this episode of CX Education, Heather Garand welcomes Brian Walker, Chief Strategy Officer at Bloomreach. Heather and Brian get into how the digital experience impacts relationships, explain the importance of personalization and optimization of the commerce experience, and discuss changes in data privacy protection.

Image for Brian Walker, Chief Strategy Officer | Bloomreach

Guest Speaker

Brian Walker, Chief Strategy Officer | Bloomreach

Brian is a long-time member of the e-commerce and digital marketing community that started when e-commerce began. He was a part of the team that launched eddiebauer.com many years ago and has been in many different roles across the industry. Today, Brian leads the go-to-market strategy at Bloomreach. 

Image for Heather Garand, Sales Director E&M | Sinch

Host

Heather Garand, Sales Director E&M | Sinch

Heather Garand, is a marketing storyteller with over 15 years’ experience helping lead omni-channel growth for a number of Canada’s largest brands today. Currently Heather is the Sales Director Canada for Sinch. Sinch is a leading player in the Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) space and one of the fastest growing cloud players. Heather helps companies understand and integrate the power of CPaaS solutions for companies to have the best-in-class Customer Experience.

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Key insights

According to Brian, Bloomreach provides different standards for customers to use diverse combinations of their solutions and the solutions in the market. “The first pillar is discovery, which is where we power search merchandising, product recommendations, and personalization on sites. It’s an AI-driven solution. […] The second pillar is content, and it speaks for itself. It’s the experiences that we, as consumers or B2B buyers, are interacting with. We power the sites and applications of customers with content solutions, and, again, we are doing targeting and personalization through that product as well. And then, the last is engagement, which is, of course, where we also partner with Sinch. And engagement is an AI-driven engagement solution focused on marketing automation, channel optimization, and marketing optimization. Again, focused on personalizing the channels, the content, and the marketing that a customer receives through email, text, in-app notifications, social, and advertising.”

With COVID, everything changed, and digital became more present. Brian notes that digital grew as an important piece but not necessarily the prime driver. “The trends that we now see really playing out in a more important way were already happening pre-pandemic. The pandemic dramatically accelerated the importance of digital as a way to engage with, inspire, and convert customers. And obviously, there was a point during the pandemic when it was essentially the only channel, and businesses that really hadn’t focused on digital, of course, had to accelerate the way they were leveraging those channels dramatically and then, also link together their channels more effectively.”

The pandemic and changes in data privacy protection led to massive changes in marketing strategies. Brian explains how these changes impact acquiring new customers and building relationships, and he notes that bringing in new customers today is more expensive and less effective. “There’s been a pretty profound shift over the last few years. The combination of those factors is propelling a shift toward a more sustainable marketing model, which is focused on the customer relationship — and some would call that retention marketing, or customer relationship marketing — which is really about personalization and using the right channel, the right offer, and engaging with the customer in order to, from a marketing perspective, keep your file healthy and reactivate those customers. If you’re able to do that effectively, your marketing costs, your customer lifetime value, and the costs associated with marketing to your customers will be a lot healthier as well. And it’s a lot more sustainable.” 

Episode highlights

Curbside pickup service

“Curbside pickup had a pretty dramatic impact during the pandemic, not just on both consumers and consumer behavior but also how businesses thought about how their channels needed to interact. And, of course, we saw the dramatic growth in home improvement, home furnishings, and grocery — categories that were lagging in terms of e-commerce penetration actually doing very well through the pandemic with dramatic growth in those market segments.”

Zero-party data is a vital part of personalization

“It’s not just always inferring the customers’ interests. You can also ask them. But obviously, there’s a huge amount of data to be gained through all those implicit signals and the ways customers are interacting, time of day, channel, and offer. And then, how they’re navigating, browsing, and shopping on your sites and apps also comes into play. So we bring all that data together to create that single view of the customer.”

Separate the signal from the noise

“Lots of data, major investments in data lakes and so forth, over the last number of years were, in some cases, really important steps for businesses to take. We actually integrate to those big data lakes and so forth, but what we’re really focused on is the data that’s actually important for you to serve and market to your customer more effectively. And we do a lot of processing on that data in order to do that.”
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