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Greg_Hutcheon
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
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In today’s experience economy, a marketplace of countless options fuels higher customer expectations. Each interaction with a brand shapes a customer’s impression and delivering an excellent customer experience (CX) is essential for companies to compete. Even in the B2B context, customers are increasingly attuned to their experience when making purchase decisions. More than ever, making a sale depends on an in-depth understanding of what customers want.

Marketers are under new pressure to convert brand into business and generate income. Research shows that a gap exists between the experience companies think they deliver to customers, and what the customers feel they experience. Marketing is the catalyst to close this gap. As customer experts, marketers are perfectly placed to orchestrate great customer experience and take the reins on revenue by growing sales.

                                                       

Commerce Marketing – crafting CX throughout all stages of the sales funnel.


 












Traditionally, marketing focuses on the top of the sales funnel – supporting sales by creating interest and driving traffic – whereas Sales priorities are bottom of the funnel, focused on conversion.

This siloed approach to customer management risks creating negative sentiment with customers, and notably, missing out on valuable opportunities make more sales.

Synergy between marketing and commerce ensures everyone is on the same page and aligned on customer experience. Commerce marketing strategies create this synergy, delivering the customer experience foundation upon which increased sales are realized.

When we talk about commerce marketing, we refer to the marketing tactics used to boost commerce success. With commerce marketing, marketers are engaged throughout the entire sales funnel with responsibility for maximizing sales volume at each stage. This involves practices that guide prospects to a commerce website, convert them to customers, and, ideally, outspoken fans of your brand.
Crafting this journey takes a blend of marketing expertise, great content, and rich data combined to deliver a truly compelling customer experience. Underpinning all of this, a digital solution which enables the seamless merging of experiential X-Data and Operational O-data to understand and engage the customer effectively.




Commerce Marketing is the key to driving webshop sales.


 

The standard integration of SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP Commerce Cloud unleashes the full power of commerce marketing. SAP Marketing Cloud pulls the transaction data from Commerce to enrich X & O customer data obtained through integrations with 3rd parties, giving a 360-degree view of customers. These detailed customer profiles are the basis for crafting customer experience and the stimulus for marketers to drive more sales.

But how does this look in practice? Let’s look at 5 ways marketers use SAP Marketing Cloud to deliver on CX and boost sales.

SAP Marketing Cloud increases store visitor numbers.


Marketers use data-driven creativity to bring visitors to the webshop, and more visits means more sales. With detailed customer profiles created in SAP Marketing Cloud, marketers can create refined audiences for targeting with more relevant campaigns. With integrations to third party campaign tools, SAP Marketing Cloud covers all channels to trigger visits. Furthermore, the detailed profiles created in SAP Marketing Cloud can be combined with campaign tools such as AdForm Advertiser Edge to create look-alike audiences based on existing high yield target groups, driving sales through more effective targeting.

SAP Marketing Cloud converts visitors to buyers.


With customers in the Webshop, the marketers’ next task is to convert browsing to buying. Data captured from Webshop behavior gives marketers Realtime insights into visitors' interests, sentiments, and motivations, enabling more tailored recommendations and offers to be generated in SAP Marketing Cloud. Similarly, by logging clickstream and search data, SAP Marketing Cloud enhances the customer profile, making future targeting more effective and enabling more relevant recommendations and offers.

SAP Marketing Cloud brings back drop-outs.


SAP Marketing Cloud acts as a safety net for missed sales. Customers often leave online shops before making a purchase, but using the customer data captured during the shop visit, SAP Marketing Cloud facilitates intelligent re-targeting to bring back the customer and encourage them to close the purchase. SAP Marketing Cloud uses abandoned shopping carts as a trigger for campaign targeting, meaning re-targeting is automated and executed seamlessly so no sales opportunities are wasted and maximum potential revenues are collected.

SAP Marketing Cloud triggers cross-selling & up-selling.


Sales made are nice indications that CX efforts are paying off, but the work doesn’t stop there. Customer acquisition is costly, and maximizing sales from marketing spend depends on customers buying more and returning more often to the webshop. SAP Marketing Drives incremental sales through using captured data to generate more relevant recommendations,  using detailed customer profiles for personalized targeting. Furthermore, Offers and Coupons functionality in SAP Marketing Cloud enables marketers to engage customers in Realtime with incentives to add items to their shopping carts and increase the value of their purchases.

SAP Marketing Cloud converts buyers into raving fans.


Customers remember good experience and reward it with repeat purchases. SAP Marketing Cloud helps marketers foster a relationship with their customers as part of a loyalty program. Making customers feel valued and continually engaging them with relevant, personalized content and recommendations leads to future sales being made. On top of this, the holy grail of marketing is customer advocacy - crafting a customer base that drives further sales by encouraging other customers to buy a particular brand. With the proliferation of social media and digital channels, the experiences of other customers have become a bigger factor than ever before when making purchase decisions. CX driven by SAP Marketing Cloud is crucial to turn buyers into fans, through rewarding repeat purchasing, targeting with effective content and offers, and even fostering advocacy by reminding buyers to leave reviews. Using SAP Marketing Cloud, marketers can create custom audiences of particularly high-value or influential customers to be targeted with particular incentives for advocacy, triggering more visits, and more sales from new customers.

 

Conclusion


Closing the CX gap is essential in such a competitive environment. The era of Commerce Marketing opens up a huge opportunity for marketers to take the lead on revenue and deliver the expertise to give sales a boost. In this blog, we've set out 5 effective ways Marketers use SAP Marketing Cloud to do just that.

For more information about integrating SAP Marketing Cloud with SAP Commerce Cloud, just click here.