How IBM Commerce Solutions Drive Customer Engagement

by Darryl K. Taft

In April, IBM announced that it is collaborating with Care.com, which focuses on finding and managing family care. Care.com’s goal: to reach the 47 percent of consumers that fall within the Sandwich Generation (which simultaneously cares for aging parents and small children) searching.

To better individualize email communications on relevant care services and simultaneously increase brand loyalty with an engaging experience, Care.com used IBM Marketing Cloud. Care.com deployed new personalization strategies, including a welcome program with more than 20 targeted welcome emails that populate content tied to a new user’s specific needs, as well as a reactivation stream to re-engage dormant users with “We Miss You” emails. Since implementing this email marketing program over a year ago, Care.com has seen a substantial increase in email and Website engagement and conversions across their 20-plus target audiences.

The commerce market in India is expected to grow 37 percent to reach $20 billion this year, according to market estimates. Online retailers in India are under constant pressure from consumers who demand both enhanced buying experiences online and across mobile devices as well as faster delivery times. This growing e-commerce market poses a challenge to logistics companies, which must keep pace with the consumer demand for instantly available products at a competitive price.

With IBM Commerce, Gati KWE, a pioneer of express distribution and supply chain management in India, is able to integrate and coordinate the complex flow of products from warehouse to store to home. This is especially helpful during India’s festival season, when retailers have to handle a spike in online sales and promotions, which dramatically affects inventory planning. Gati KWE can anticipate the high demand for the most popular gift items based on analytic insights that examine past buying behavior.

Financial institutions are beginning to fully grasp the banking habits of today’s connected consumer and are reshaping their experiences to better engage with individuals who have high expectations for service and speed. Marketing financial services today demands the highest level of personalization, which means giving each individual customer marketing messages at precisely the right time and on their preferred channel of choice.

In collaboration with IBM Business Partner GlowByte Consulting, Russian investment bank BCS Financial Group chose IBM Commerce to help with highly targeted marketing campaigns that use analytics to pinpoint customer insights, such as whether a customer banks online or with a mobile device, or whether a company is looking to make an investment to grow its business. Since working with IBM Commerce and GlowByte Consulting, BCS Financial Group’s sales of its online trading, brokerage and investment strategy consulting services have increased by 20 percent in cross-sales, while customer attrition has decreased by 0.5 percent in just six months—with higher customer response rates to marketing campaigns and more products purchased per customer.

Venues such as zoos and aquariums attract more than 180 million annual visitors—more than the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB’s annual attendance, combined. Although approximately 3.6 million households make repeat visits, there exists a huge market opportunity for these venues to continue capturing revenue by connecting with visitors in a meaningful way.

To capitalize on this marketing opportunity and achieve increased customer acquisition, loyalty, renewals and reactivation, Georgia Aquarium turned to IBM’s Marketing Cloud to reinvent the way it delivers visitor experiences across all touch points—namely, email. With new initiatives, such as establishing buyer personas through market research and creating customer journey maps to document the entire customer experience, Georgia Aquarium is able to more effectively turn online customer feedback into actionable insights to implement change. Taking these insights from IBM’s Marketing Cloud, Georgia Aquarium has increased its revenue from email campaigns by 32 percent.

As online and mobile commerce continues to rise, retailers are working double-time to deliver a differentiated omni-channel experience that can engage the increasingly connected customer. To be successful in this buyer-driven world, Homebase, a home and gardening retailer in the United Kingdom, must learn to transform its digital presence to deliver a holistic and highly customized shopping experience that engages with today’s digital consumer.

With 40 percent of its customer base shopping online rather than in physical stores, Homebase needed a re-imagined way to reach its target audience and inspire a new generation of do-it-yourselfers. Using analytics to understand and anticipate customer needs, Homebase tapped the expertise of IBM Commerce, IBM Interactive Experience and several IBM partners, including CoreMedia and BloomReach, to tailor their customers’ experiences across more than 160 different kinds of home improvement projects. By offering relevant DIY tips and interactive product information, Homebase has seen double-digit sales growth in all digital sales channels and a 30 percent increase in online visitors.

Traditional florists, facing increasing competition from big-box retailers, grocery chains and new e-commerce players, saw sales slide nearly 40 percent in the past few years to $5.9 billion in 2014 from $9.4 billion in 2006, according to research firm IBISWorld. It is crucial to provide a differentiated experience, timely service, communication on the right channel at the most convenient time for each individual, and the most useful information at a personal level.

For Teleflora, which works 100 percent with locally owned mom-and-pop florists, driving business for local florists while providing exceptional customer service is paramount. To meet these customer and market needs, Teleflora is working with IBM Marketing Cloud to create digital marketing campaigns that include personalized reminder emails, browser abandonment emails and subscription reminder emails that use regular transactional messages. The Teleflora marketing team is working to create a single identity for each customer.