Your customers expect a personalized experience when they shop. Whether its product recommendations, targeted content, or even search results, this has become the norm for online shopping. According to an Adobe Commerce survey, 77% of consumers say they want personalized offers based on their individual spending habits, whether they’re shopping online or in store. 

Merkle’s Merkury Identity Resolution Tool

Personalized commerce now extends beyond your logged-in users. With identity resolution of anonymous users, you can achieve a personalized experience for customers who have not logged in.

You may be wondering, “how can I personalize an experience in Adobe Commerce without knowing my users?” This has been solved using Merkle’s Merkury identity resolution tool. With Merkury, your traffic will be tagged with a Merkury ID that allows you to identify anonymous data on your site. This means you can not only target those known logged-in users, but Merkury can identify and enrich data for your unknown users. Merkury identifies users based on a variety of different factors like device ID or user agent string. And with over 25 years of history, nearly 270 million households, and 700 million email addresses, we can turn your unknown consumers into known users at a personal level, allowing you to both segment and email those users.

Merkury seamlessly integrates with both Adobe Commerce and the Adobe Experience Platform. It can identify and enrich your previously unknown customer profiles in Adobe Real-Time CDP and, through the Adobe Data Connection Tool, send that data back to Adobe Commerce to deliver a personalized experience for users who have logged in and who have yet to log in.

Together, Adobe Commerce, Adobe Experience Platform, and Merkury can be very powerful. Adobe Experience Platform handles data collection and creates a unified customer profile, along with solving for data privacy and governance. Merkury provides identity resolution for anonymous users across multiple touchpoints. And finally, Adobe Commerce serves as a provider of critical ecommerce data and creates experiences using the data and audiences coming from Adobe Experience Platform to craft powerful one-to-one personalization moments to activate on that data.

Anonymous Abandoned Cart Emails

Let's dig into an actual scenario where Merkury was used alongside Adobe Commerce to identify and monetize anonymous users. One of our clients, a luxury goods retailer, tagged their site with Merkury, used Adobe Experience Platform to identify and segment audiences, and then used Adobe Journey Optimizer to deploy personalized abandoned cart emails to known and unknown users.

First, they broke down their users for this journey into three audiences: known users with a low lifetime value (LTV), known users with a high LTV, and unknown customers identified using Merkury.

In that first group of known users with low LTV, we identified abandoned carts with event data sent from Adobe Commerce to the Adobe Experience platform and deployed the abandoned cart emails through AJO (Adobe Journey Optimizer) with targeted language encouraging these users to become part of our loyalty program.

In our second audience of known users with high LTV, we again identified abandoned carts with data from Adobe Commerce, but instead deploy the abandoned cart emails through AJO with tailored offer decisioning to give an extra incentive to our highest-value clients.

Finally, we used Merkury to identify an additional 107,000 unknown users on top of the 120,000 known users in the other two scenarios. These additional 107,000 abandoned cart emails targeted to unknown users resulted in millions of dollars incremental revenue.

Anonymous Website Personalization with Dynamic Blocks

Using Data Connection, those three real-time audiences created in our previous example from Adobe Experience Platform could be shared back to Adobe Commerce to activate on. This enables customized experiences for each audience. For example, we could change our homepage to welcome our known loyalty users with different dynamic blocks targeting the specific Real-Time CDP audience shared back to Adobe Commerce. Or we could offer a limited-time discount to only our high lifetime value users via a cart price rule targeted to that audience as a thank you.

And with our unknown customers we could drill down that audience into more granular detail using Merkury data enrichment. We could segment by geographic region, gender, age, or a variety of other data points from Merkury to activate different site content or messaging via dynamic blocks for unknown users that have yet to log in.

Conclusion

Knowing one-to-one personalization can potentially lead to a 13% increase in average order value (per Adobe Target case studies) and double the improvement in customer engagement, it is imperative brands are doing everything they can to identify and understand their users. When Merkle thinks about personalized customer experiences for our clients, we want to think about understanding the underlying data first - from identifying your users, to storing that data, and understanding your analytics. Once you have collected, analyzed, and understood your data, you are finally ready to create your marketing campaigns and site experience to focus on those personalized customer experiences in the moment. Utilizing Merkury along with Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Real-Time CDP, and Adobe Commerce can help you bridge the gap between your anonymous users and personalized experiences.