Salesforce Commerce Cloud At Its Best: Campaigns For Different User Experiences

October 25, 2019

Every individual is unique, as is every snowflake.

But ecommerce websites have traditionally been “one size fits all”. There’s a logo, and everyone sees the logo. There’s a checkout page, and everyone who checks out, uses the checkout page.

About a decade ago, A/B testing became the modern online marketing standard, with Amazon blazing the way with their massive testing of every tiny little thing. Small subsets of visitors would see different versions, so you could learn what works best and what doesn’t. (If you want to know more about SFCC & A/B testing, we recently wrote an article on that!)

But you know what’s much more powerful than making changes only for testing purposes? Changing the website based on who the person visiting is. If he’s visited the site before, if he is from this country, if he is especially interested in this or that, if he has higher or lower buying power — to create a very different experience.

Traditionally, this wasn’t done much — with the exception of country/language/currency selection, which has also been standard for ecommerce for a long time — because it was very complex to implement, and few platforms could do this well, in a comprehensive way.

And guess what? We’re almost in 2020, or whatever year you may be reading this in which will be after 2020 (I’m assuming that time-travel technology has either not been invented or revealed quite yet) and in 2020, there are a few great ways to achieve this. And our recommended — strongly recommended — way to achieve this is… Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Specifically, one of the powers of Salesforce Commerce Cloud is that it lets you create profoundly different user experiences, for different users, based on a wide variety of criteria that you can use. Just imagine the following:

Previous clients who have tended to purchase more expensive items can see product lists that emphasize the more expensive products.
Previous clients, who have bought lots of red products from you, see featured products that are all red.
People who have visited your one particular product page on your site many times but has not bought it yet, can see different versions of that page, the front page, and other parts of the site, with additional context and reasons to purchase that product.
Clients of your store who have not purchased a product in 6 months can see not only discounts, but featured new products.
Clients who have purchased something that expires and needs to be renewed (supplements or medicine, for example) could see reminders close to the time their supply is going to run out.
The employees of your company see a different version of your ecommerce site — so they can get discounts.
Users from a country in which they have idiosyncratic ecommerce flows that include in-person payment components (like online systems to pay in cash that are common in South America) can purchase an item using other methods, like where they need to make a cash deposit, and then continue the purchase flow online.
Users can see featured or suggested products based on the weather and time of year. If you’re in New York in December, we can show you jackets and scarves; if you’re in LA, any time of year, we can show you flip-flops.

There are endless variations on what you can do to create very different user experiences based on the users, to ultimately create better experiences for your users and more sales for your company.

But the limiting factor here isn’t the technology — since Salesforce Commerce Cloud can comfortably handle most creative user experiences we can imagine using a modern tech stack — but your own creativity. What is the best user experience you want to create for this or that subset of users? This is one of the ways United Virtualities can help out — our tech team isn’t only awesome, our strategy and user experience teams are as well.