Hyper personalization for wholesale e-commerce businesses is essential for delivering a B2B customer experience that stands out. B2B customers are particular. They want nothing but the best in customer experiences when sourcing goods and services from vendors, wholesalers, and service providers for their business.
How can wholesalers create a hyper personalized CX to meet these high expectations? This is where SAP CDC (Customer Data Cloud) and SAP CDP (Customer Data Platform) come in.
What is Hyper Personalization?
Hyper personalization is the process of using customer data to deliver highly personalized customer experiences. Examples of hyper-personalized customer experiences can include:
- Customizable homepage experiences
- Product recommendation quizzes
- Personalized recommendations based on browsing history
- Targeted emails
- customer segmentation
When creating a hyper personalized experience for customers, companies need to dig deep into customer data analytics. They need to collect and sift through multiple sources of data and get to know their customers closely. Examples of data used for hyper personalization strategies include: social media, purchase history, browsing behaviors and more.
The collected real time data is combined and analyzed using AI or machine learning technology to create individualized customer profiles. These profiles are used to deliver personalized content, recommendations, and offers to their customers.
The Importance of Hyper Personalization for Wholesale Ecommerce Vendors
While hyper personalization is more commonly utilized within the B2C industry, it should not be dismissed by B2B companies. To better understand why personalized digital experiences are essential to any B2B vendor or wholesale ecommerce business, let’s take a look at some recent data points from Gartner on B2B customer behaviors:
- B2B buyers spend most of their purchasing journey unassisted. Just 17% of that time is with a sales representative.
- 44% of millennials prefer a purchasing experience without a sales representative.
- B2B sales channels need to match B2C shopping experiences better.
As we can see, B2B customer behaviors have changed quite a bit since the start of the digital age. They’re spending less time dealing with sales representatives and far more time researching independently online. They crave accurate information, but also want minimal interaction with a salesperson.
Additionally, according to this study, when companies tailor customer conversations, keep up with buyer needs, it allows them to enjoy 48% greater YoY growth in annual revenue.
Experiences B2B Customers Demand
In order for a B2B ecommerce wholesale business to remain competitive, it should deliver online customer based experiences that can:
- Help the customer understand their needs.
- Educate the client on products and solutions that can meet those needs.
- Predict customer needs.
- Offer self-serving online purchasing options with minimal steps to complete the transaction.
Ready to Deliver the Hyper Personalized Goods? Let’s Go!
Ok, so now we know the What and the Why when it comes to hyper personalization experiences for B2B customers. Now, it’s time to look at the HOW.
Step One: Collect Data
Data is the foundation of every personalized customer experience. Before you can create customer profiles, data must be collected. The data collected should inform you about who your customers are and how you can best meet their needs.
How to Collect Customer Data?
There are multiple ways an organization can collect data about their current and potential customers. Any digital touchpoint where people are interacting with your company and brand is a potential source of meaningful customer data.
Examples of these include: social media insights, email marketing platforms, ecommerce sales, website traffic, paid ads metrics, chatbots interactions, and more.
However, combining the vast amount of data from every touchpoint can be time consuming and laborious. That is unless you have a way to aggregate all of data in one place.
Step Two: Aggregate Data with a Customer Data Platform (CDP)
With a Customer Data Platform (CDP), businesses can achieve a connected view of customer insights from all points of contact.
For instance, with the SAP® Customer Data Platform, siloed data from the front-office and the back-office can be easily unified. The management team can use the aggregated data to create holistic customer profiles. This will allow the company to anticipate customer needs better, deliver personalized content and strengthen customer relationships.
Purchasing Power, an employee purchasing program provider serving employers and employees, uses the SAP CDP to create hyper personalized customer experiences.
They use the platform to collect customer data across all channels/touchpoints and aggregate all of this customer data in one place.
Step Three: Deliver Personalized Experiences
Once a method for unifying, accurate data collection is implemented, hyper personalized experiences can start to be developed and deployed. This is best done with an identity management platform, such as the SAP® Customer Data Cloud.
An identity management platform is where users and businesses can have meaningful interactions. It is a front-facing platform and is where customers can choose their preferred level of interaction with a vendor. It’s also where they can enter and manage their profile and personal information.
With SAP CDC, identity and consent management is handled to meet privacy laws and customer comfort preferences. This, in turn, enhances trust between a customer and vendor, which is essential for any online store. Features that can be ultilized for hyper personalization development in the CDC include:
- User account creation
- User login
- User profile management
- User verification
- User preference selections
- user payment methods
SAP CDC/CDP: The Ultimate Duo for Personalized B2B CX
The SAP Customer Data Platform and the SAP Customer Data Cloud work together to create amazing, connected, B2B customer experiences. Both platforms are essential for businesses that want to deliver hyper personalized experiences to their B2B customers. As the CDP collects and aggregates data from all touchpoints in a unified location, the CDC is used to transform that data into personalized customer experiences.
Ready to Explore a Hyper Personalized Customer Journey? Contact ASAR Digital
ASAR Digital is a leader in CX experience development and a certified SAP Gold Partner. We’ve helped B2B businesses improve profit margins and accelerate growth by working with them to create customer journeys that are personalized and agile.
For more information on how your wholesale ecommerce platform can develop an agile business model with hyper personalized customer experiences, contact our team today.