Magnolia + Attraqt = empowering customer journeys through dynamic content

There is a significant change underway for both Marketers and Heads of ecommerce, with a realisation that effective customer journeys can only be delivered when there is a clear content strategy in place. A content strategy that aligns and surfaces the right content every time a consumer engages with a brand along the complete customer journey, from acquisition through conversion to service and support.

Today, customer journeys involve multiple engagements across many different devices, and that is before they even enter an ecommerce site. When they do, on average, a customer will still make three visits to a site before making a purchase, with each visit involving the consideration of a significant range of content to satisfy their different information needs.

These customer journeys are longer, more complex and must be both connected and inline with customer intent. It is just too easy for a shopper to bail, so how these journeys are supported and orchestrated will determine whether as an online retailer you can successfully grow customer satisfaction and conversion.

Historically, marketers and digital commerce heads have relied on demographics and identity as the means to segment customers, and to provide a more personalised experience (ecommerce personalization). However, by segmenting in this way, we miss the intent of the customer in the exact moment of interaction. It is important to think 'consumer goals' first and foremost. We must ask ourselves:

Consumers are motivated by achieving specific goals, rather than looking to buy a specific product.

When you take an identity-based approach, the focus is on identifying the products that are most likely to be of interest to the shopper, based on what other similar shoppers like. Everyone in a specific segment is treated the same. However, everyone is individual and their intent is likely to be very different, resulting in different content and information needs. Then if you overlay that individuals may be at different stages of the buying journey, you can see that applying a segmentation approach is going to be way off the mark and unlikely to resonate in the way that you hope, resulting in abandonment.

Understanding your shopper's intent creates an opportunity to deliver specific content and information that meets their needs in the moment. This includes:

It is not only descriptions or text but also images, videos, user guides etc. For example, when Amazon has 10 different images, each one answering a different question, and invariably meeting a different need along the buying journey.

The result is that you require a lot more content which needs to be created quickly and efficiently.

Mapping content to the individual intent of a shopper along their customer journey is essential and the only way that brands and retailers can optimise conversion and build long-term brand affinity/satisfaction.

Clearly this content needs to be consistent across all touch points but more importantly it must help guide the consumer by providing information and content that helps them narrow the choices down to the exact product or service that meets their needs, thereby enabling and motivating conversion.

Magnolia is a leading-edge content management system (CMS) provider. They recognised early on that to support shoppers along the buying journey, you need to have three things in place:

Attraqt on the other hand provides a set of leading capabilities in search, merchandising and personalisation. These solutions provide customers with the ability to deliver digital experiences that meet the demands of every shopper audience while still meeting commercial goals. Underpinning these best-in-class product discovery solutions is a modern, cloud-native, highly scalable technology that is powered by the latest innovations in AI.

When you bring Attraqt and Magnolia together you create a very powerful collaboration that ensures both technical agility, but more importantly the ability for brands and retailers to fully align content to the precise intent of the shopper at every stage of the buyer's journey.

With Magnolia, you have one platform that enables you to manage and deliver content to any screen or device, with speed and agility. With Attraqt, you have the power of AI and shopper insights to understand and respond to the specific intent of the customer by delivering a highly personalised and compelling shopping experience from initial search all the way through to purchase and beyond.

This is just not possible with a single suite solution or a combination of multiple pure-play solutions. Both companies use open and scalable technology to ensure practitioners fully benefit from the perfect blend of human-guided decision-making and machine-led science to achieve optimisation, speed and efficiency in equal measure.

We are both very much looking forward to working together and bringing unparalleled success to our joint customers.