Headless Personalization in Composable Commerce

As a next step to composable commerce, we often see customers looking at how to do personalization within headless ecosystems. In our approach, personalization generally falls into three main categories supported by one or more personalization platforms: customer grouping, product affinity, and targeting.

Customer Grouping organizes and sorts your customers into similar user groups or segments. This allows you to make decisions based on the groups. A customer can live in one or more groups, which can form from behavior or attributes (e.g., vegetarian, searches for running shoes, bought dog food, etc.).

The Customer Data Platform’s (CDP) job is to manage customer groups and segments. CDPs take customer data and create customer profiles, then segment and group customers based on your criteria. You use these groups and segments to create personalized experiences through targeted content and messaging.

Having the customer groups on their own isn’t always valuable. Ultimately, you want to create these groups to act on them—through target content, personalized experiences, tailored messages, etc. This is a foundational step towards providing better personalization across your different channels.

Product Affinity helps customers discover products based on items they viewed or have placed in their carts. This is similar to customer grouping, however, it is more product-focused than customer-focused (e.g., someone with hot dogs in their cart may want to buy mustard). Frequently, product affinity is involved with product search and browsing to provide dynamic results that boost desirable products and bury less desirable ones.

A key to maximizing the value of product affinity platforms is correctly setting up the eventing, either directly in the interface or through tag management. This gives the platform the data to make product recommendations or suggestions.

Targeted Content is creating tailored content – such as marketing, banners, messaging, imagery, etc. – and showing it to a specific customer audience. Sometimes, the audience is defined by an existing customer’s group or segment. Other times, the audience is dynamic based on the customer’s on-site behavior.

Often, targeting platforms are what organizations see as “personalization.” However, they must be part of a larger ecosystem like CDPs, content management systems (CMS) or experience platforms, product information managers (PIM), and interfaces. The targeting platform integration can create challenges, especially around caching or page shifts, which Google penalizes. Your targeting platform needs an interface or publishing capabilities that allow your business users to create targeted experiences without requiring development or engineers.

With the different approaches to personalizing user experiences and the challenges involved, Aries Solutions has helped organizations define and execute composable commerce personalization roadmaps. Our approach includes determining the business requirements, identifying vendors and solutions, and gaining incremental value through implementation.

Companies often take a “crawl, walk, run” approach toward personalization. We help companies identify the biggest value drivers and develop a plan to bring incremental value while managing their budgets and spending. You don’t have to do everything all at once.

Headless personalization can mean different capabilities for different organizations. Understanding your goals and working with an experienced partner like Aries will help you get the most value from your headless implementation.