Tomorrow's World. How to prepare your digital services today, for the future

Which key areas should online brands focus on today to best prepare their digital services and operations for the future?

Digital leaders are regularly asked to peer into their crystal balls to predict the trends and tools they believe will make the biggest impact over the coming year.

And the word that comes up time and time again? Personalisation.

Personalisation isn’t a new concept, of course, but it still remains a top priority for online businesses and one that offers huge scope for improvement and growth.

As part of Adobe’s 2024 Digital Trends report, a consumer survey found just 26 per cent of consumers described their digital experience with a brand they had an existing relationship with, as ‘excellent.’ Meanwhile, 60 per cent said they were frustrated that brands knew a lot about them, but didn’t take their preferences into account.

With many digital businesses looking to ‘sweat the asset’ – or get more value from their tech stack – spending time understanding the customer better is crucial.

SQLI talks to Shaun McCran, Head of Product Marketing – Adobe Commerce, EMEA, about personalisation and more.

Where does the e-Commerce industry stand today in terms of digital services?

With the challenging economy, brands are talking more about sweating the asset. What they really mean is getting more value from what they already have and driving value from their existing solutions to maximise their potential.

To futureproof a business in this context, they must learn to understand their business and customer, better.

The phrase ‘personalised experiences drive growth’ is commonly used in the industry. You drive experiences by showing the customer you know them and by providing them what they need in a quicker, more timely fashion. Understanding how customers engage with you and your experiences can help businesses anticipate future purchasing behaviours.

What are the key areas brands should be concentrating on getting right, now?

It comes down to three key factors. First, businesses must gain a deeper understanding of their customers and utilise solutions for effective segmentation and retargeting. Second, they should capitalise on cross-selling and upselling opportunities. And third, they should ensure optimal content velocity through targeted releases.

On the last point, I often give an example around product images. We create two or three product image variations and match them to segments to show businesses how much difference one can make over another. Someone is wearing a product, for example a jacket, and we can dynamically change the background to reflect the customer’s situation more closely. It might be an American landscape background, or a UK landscape.

The idea of connecting customers to products more efficiently is key. In the example above, for the UK customer showing the product against a UK-themed backdrop – a familiar setting – helps build a connection before purchase. With the solutions we have now and with new solutions like generative AI, generating and delivering product variations with different backgrounds is fast and simple.

Personalisation seems to have been around forever, how has it evolved?

Segmentation strategies allow businesses to understand their customers on a much more detailed level now. A basic example is separating your typical customers into 10 segments. One segment buys X, Y and Z and 50 per cent go on to buy other products. Now you can use predictive analysis to put the right products in front of your customers to encourage them to buy more. All of this can now be automated with AI Solutions so that the human element can make decisions, not spend all their time manipulating data, struggling to find patterns.

Most of our commerce customers upsell extremely well, but there's a surprisingly wide space where they can grow more. How good is your product recommendations ecosystem? How many times did you position accessories around a product to a customer you provided promotional materials to, based on a previous purchase? This area is underdeveloped for most businesses, making it a great opportunity to drive more value.

Why is upselling so important today?

The most impactful areas for improvement and growth often involve maximising existing resources. Upselling relies on deep product knowledge and identifying complementary offerings.

It's a great way of getting businesses to use their data to see what customers are looking at and predict what they're going to look at next. We've worked with customers in this space and tested and learnt things with them every two or three weeks and within the space of six months, 30 per cent of their revenue is coming from targeted cross selling for people that weren't even there to buy those products. It's a great way of future proofing and driving additional revenue from capabilities that you already own – back to ‘sweating the asset’.

It’s a really powerful story. Brands are often scared of using data in this way because it seems such a big area to get into. But you can set boundaries to make it easier to bundle items together, it just takes planning. I advocate strongly for testing and learning. Take a little step, move things forward and learn. You’ll make more progress than you think.

What should brands do to get some of these things moving?

Sit down with your product teams and look through your product sets and work out what complements what. Then match products with segments.

The technology is already in our Adobe products. It's about knowing your business and knowing what sells well, because you're measuring your customers and measuring engagement.

You've got to have a team that's flexible. Introducing any new digital service or approach requires people who are open-minded and willing to make organisational adjustments. Even with AI, there’s always a human element that adds value and that’s important to consider.

Where does collecting data and using AI fit in to the future of digital services?

One of the things Adobe has done quite a lot is to help customers collect data more quickly, and more seamlessly. Wherever you click or view a product or online experience, it can all be tracked more easily. There’s a massive volume of brands that don't have access to this data, at a speed that allows them to utilise it effectively.

If you email me a week after I have been looking at something to purchase, I probably have bought it from somewhere else or forgotten about it. The ‘non commit purchase’ activation window is quite slim. There’s a whole conversation to be had about tracking in real time or as near to real time as you can. Being able to track and modify an image on the fly to personalise content can make such a big difference to sales.

With the growth of AI solutions, many people worry that AI is going to come in and replace them, but people need to think about how it can take away the laborious tasks to give you more time to do the strategic side of things. Think of AI as a co-pilot. It performs the heavy lifting, leaving your people to make strategic decisions.

A brand I worked with recently had a large catalogue of products and we showed them how they could use generative AI to create new, seasonal event backgrounds on all of their product images. It took a couple of minutes with generative AI services. In comparison, doing this manually takes weeks of image manipulation. By leveraging the technology in this way, you can achieve substantial cost savings because you don’t have a team of people sitting there doing it by hand. The increased efficiency and speed also allow you to respond quickly to timely events and generate a larger volume of content where you previously may not have capacity to even attempt it.  

Any final points?

In my eyes, making the most of personalisation is key to today’s digital services. Adobe’s 2024 Digital Trends report summed it up best when it said: ‘In 2024, world-class digital experiences require a personalised end-to-end customer journey across all channels, delivered seamlessly and consistently. It is not a series of customised touchpoints.

Agencies like SQLI are in a perfect position to step in and show their customers how to use the solutions already at their disposal and to retarget their customers more effectively based on previous purchases, or the things they're looking at in their basket in real time.