How composable commerce powers personalization at scale

Personalization is key to boosting engagement and satisfaction, right across the customer lifecycle - from acquisition to reactivation. But building highly personalized customer experiences isn’t easy, especially if you’re working with legacy systems that are hard to customize and grow. Composable commerce is the opposite: a relatively new concept in ecommerce, it allows you to pick and integrate best-of-breed tools such as ecommerce stores, CDPs and payment gateways - and is key to running personalization at scale. 

In this blog post, we cover:

Sending an email with the customer’s first name and an offer based on their recent shopping history is a simple example of a personalized interaction. However, as most businesses have been doing it for many years now, such emails get lost quickly amongst tens or hundreds of messages a customer receives every day. 

Meaningful and impactful personalization requires going beyond basic customer data to build and deliver tailored messages to thousands of customers across multiple touchpoints. Technology has empowered this personalization at scale approach, enabling companies to interact with all their customers on a personal level. This ultimately provides a better shopping experience for users, meaning higher purchase rates and a boost to your bottom line. 

Data is the lifeblood of modern businesses, and while companies today are technically able to collect and store massive amounts of data, they often struggle merging them into meaningful and relevant subsets. In addition, tech teams are forced to go through several layers of spreadsheet drudgery to take the most basic actions on available data, and a huge part of ecommerce is still powered through confusing spreadsheets templates manually uploaded to SAP before changes go live directly on production. 

Data collection is the  first step towards delivering personalized messages at scale. However, it leads nowhere unless you’re able to connect different data sources to create a single source of truth for analytics. 

Data analytics is at the heart of any attempt to run personalization at scale. To be able to translate your existing data into personalized messages you need to:

Businesses have been using ETL (extract, transform, load) as an integration process that combines data from multiple sources into a single data store to inform BI decisions. ETL worked well when data sources were limited - in other words, when there was much less data out there. The need for more comprehensive and accurate operational analytics sparked the emergence of reverse ETL or rETL tools which extract data from the warehouse, transform it to make it sync with the target destination’s API and load it into the target app. 

The explosive growth of ecommerce platforms, coupled with the increasing demand for real-time, personalized interactions across multiple touchpoints, fueled digital transformation - a pivotal strategic shift where businesses still relying on legacy technology turned to digital to retain their competitive edge.  

The software component of digital transformation is fundamental to the tech roadmap of businesses that aim to move towards running personalization at scale.

The backbone of the software side of digital transformation is the composable software stack, an architecture that is composed of packaged business capabilities (PBCs) or microservices, all interacting with one another via API (Application Programming Interface).

The composable software model enables a company to build its tech stack around best-of-breed microservices, availing more flexibility, scalability and adaptability - all of which are essential factors for business success. That’s why businesses across the ecommerce industry are investing in decoupled, JavaScript-based storefronts that are quickly becoming best practice.

While legacy systems tend to be monolithic, hard to customize, and difficult and costly to scale up, composable commerce systems are the opposite. They provide all the flexibility needed to handle the demands of fast-evolving businesses, and the rapidly changing ecommerce landscape.

Personalization at scale requires connecting different data sources to your platform. Composale commerce enables you to select data pipelines that you need to tailor your messages to your specific segments. Treat it as if you were doing a puzzle: begin with your high-impact corner and edge pieces and then continue putting the rest of the pieces together until you achieve your desired design. 

Different businesses work with different data sources due to the extent of complexity in their tech stack. However, the following diagram shows the most common commerce data components that you need to enable personalization at scale. Note that it is an incomplete list of the different data sources used for personalization, and is based on what our clients often connect into Talon.One to build their loyalty & promotions features. 

Each of these components is responsible for an independent business or technical domain. They interact with each other through communication protocols like HTTP/TCP requests and Rest API. You can easily upgrade your backend without having to worry about any outages in the frontend. 

With MACH Alliance tech (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless), businesses are able to connect data from different sources and put it to work. A modern headless tech stack lets brands work with their data across their tools. That lets all teams iterate fast, adding new functionality without major replatforming. 

Talon.One’s loyalty and promotion software integrates seamlessly with CRMs and other third party APIs, allowing you to add a scalable and future-proof Promotion Engine to your composed ecosystem of microservices. You can benefit from in-depth product and developer docs that guide you in every step of the way.

Building or expanding in-house promotion solutions (including those built on top of limited commerce platform functionality) requires thousands of developer hours. When integrating Talon.One, you can build and run campaigns without involving IT resources - saving thousands of hours of dev time while increasing marketing ROI. 

Many promotion services are restrictive in their customizability and the number of integration options they offer. At Talon.One we understand how important these options are when it comes to delivering personalized promotions at scale. Our customers have reported over 2.5x additional personalization data available to target customer, item and inventory data. 

Talon.One’s personalized campaigns deliver tailored messaging to drive conversion. Our clients Eddie Bauer and Favo saw a 19% and 38% increase in campaign conversions and conversion rate respectively after integrating with Talon.One.

Keen to see the platform in action, and see how Talon.One can create value for your business? Book your free demo now to learn more.