Adobe Commerce Personalization
If you gain enough value from the features that Adobe Commerce offers, then the sticker shock will be overcome. You (and your development team) must analyze these features and make an internal commitment that you will use them. If you don’t... you’ll end up with a significant, yearly donation to Adobe—and you have better things to do with your money.
We know Adobe Commerce inside and out, so it’s critical to call out these features.
Customer segmentation
Every customer is assigned to a customer group. Each group has many customers, but each customer is only in one group. I bring this up because many people confuse a customer group and a customer segment.
Customer segments are calculated. A customer can be in multiple segments.
Segments are powerful. They allow you to identify customers that match conditions:
- Customer address
- Customer attributes (name, customer group, newsletter subscription which ties into Mailchimp)
- Totals of cart items
- Product purchase history
- Totals of orders
With this, you can target dynamic blocks (along with cart / catalog price rules) at those who match the customer segment’s conditions.
You can also export the list of customers so you can use it for targeting in third-party applications. Be careful of applicable laws.
If you don’t have Adobe Commerce, you can get much of the same functionality by using Mirasvit’s “Customer Segmentation Suite for Magento 2.”
Product recommendations
Recommendations are the first of Adobe’s move toward “microservices” for the Adobe Commerce platform. This feeds activity-based data to Adobe Sensei and the recommendations are returned.
There is no full equivalent of this for Magento Open Source... except for some third-party offerings which we will discuss below.
To be honest, I can’t say whether third-party offerings are better or worse than Adobe’s as I haven’t been able to do a head-to-head shootout yet. I will say that while most of the third-party systems will accept additional data inputs, Adobe Product Recommendations won’t.
Adobe Live Search
This is a brand-new feature that was just released. This seems to be a competitor with Algolia. At this point, I’d recommend Algolia. This will likely change over time, but Live Search is too new to say exactly what to think.
Algolia (Search / Category Display / Product Recommendations)
I have yet to find a better search tool than Algolia. It’s incredibly powerful but also reasonably priced. Its feature set is rich, and the results are quite customizable. The Magento integration just works “out of the box.”
We were working with a merchant who was using a different “bees knees” search provider. A funny side note: this search provider had six case studies on their website. Four of the featured websites had switched to Algolia. We also made the recommendation: installation was fast, and they were impressed with the results right out of the box.
Algolia can also take over displaying products on category pages. The benefit is you can use their merchandising and personalization tools to adjust the order of the displayed products.
Note: neither Algolia’s Magento module nor Shopify app supports product recommendations yet. This is likely 2022 or beyond.
Nosto / Vue.ai
These two solutions are pretty similar in their offerings (on the surface). They both offer product recommendations. Pricing is not available.
MailChimp / Klaviyo
We use Mailchimp for our email marketing. It does everything we need it to do and way more. Frankly, we don’t use automations like we can. If you don’t use your email marketing platform to the fullest, that’s ok. It should be on your to do list, even if you can’t get to it until next year.
Klaviyo is on our watch list. We are considering switching to it. Klaviyo is slightly more expensive.
For Magento, the Mailchimp integration works, but it can be hard on CPU resources.
Typeform
We talked about collecting data from your customers in our last edition of Empowering Merchants. TypeForm was my recommendation. The forms are beautiful and are easy to build with logic. You can point someone in the right direction and then collect which direction they were pointed to.
Depending on your GDPR restrictions, your developer can customize the form to add anonymized details which can then be passed back to your customer data through a callback.