Driving Customer Loyalty With Sitecore Experience Commerce

While it may be a new topic for me to write about, commerce is not something brand new to Sitecore. In fact, it’s been around in different iterations dating as far back as August 2014 with the release of Commerce Server 7.2 Initial Release.

Now with Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.0 Update 3, the commerce engine is more powerful than ever. Sitecore Experience Commerce is a natively integrated, cloud-enabled software platform that helps brands personalize the entire shopping experience—before, during, and after the transaction. And with Commerce fully integrated into the Experience Platform, digital teams have a lot of power at their fingertips – to not just drive business through purchases, but to support long-term growth by using combined functionality to build customer loyalty.

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So let’s take a look at some strategies you can use when you combine the Sitecore Commerce functionality with the already powerful optimization functionality in the Experience Platform.

• Understanding Intent to Buy: Using Sitecore goals and engagement value scores, you can score site visitors on their likelihood to purchase by tracking whether they are viewing high category pages or diving into product detail pages, reviews, etc. Even with unknown visitors, tracking the propensity to buy allows you to promote content to drive purchases for those who are committed, and nurture those who are still at the beginning of their path to purchase.

• Personalization on Past Purchases: Businesses big and small all want the same thing … “to deliver the Amazon experience.” Well good news for those of you reading this; with Sitecore Commerce, you can configure promotions based on a customer’s past purchases. Rules-based personalizations that you can implement with Sitecore commerce include:
  • Current Customer Has Purchased [specific] Item
  • Current Customer Has Purchased Item with [specific] Tag
  • Current Customer Orders Count [compares] to [specific value]
  • Current Customer Orders Total [compares] to [specific value]

• Building Customer Loyalty: With loyalty program members spending between 12-18% more per year than non-loyalty program members, using Sitecore Commerce and personalization to build customer loyalty cannot be overlooked. Through the extension of certain Commerce plugins (i.e. Customer Specific Discount) available on GitHub, you can extend a customer’s xFile to include a desired loyalty attribute such as loyalty status, score or tier. Using business rules you can associate dollars spent to ‘loyalty points’ which would be stored in the xFile where specific discounts can be presented based on a customer’s status, and content/products can be personalized through simple rules-based personalization.

Obviously, the above are just a few ideas to get the thought gears turning when it comes to building customer engagement and loyalty in commerce experiences. The key to executing the right tactics begins with strategy and developing hypotheses about what will have a positive impact on the customer experience. If you want to chat about getting started with Sitecore Experience Commerce or have questions about developing your strategy, fill out the contact form or HMU on twitter @jgrozalsky.

Stay thirsty, friends!