Introducing Commerce Marketing in SAP C/4HANA

SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Marketing Cloud are both part of the SAP C/4HANA suite, also known as the SAP Customer Experience suite. Combined these solutions provide a rich set of Commerce Marketing capabilities. Commerce Marketing will deliver a personalized shopping experience for your online customers. This blog introduces these Commerce Marketing capabilities in more detail.

The main benefits of Commerce Marketing are:

• Enrich and better understand your customers by capturing their online behavior in a way that it can be used to improve the marketing segmentation and execution activities
• Personalize the ecommerce experience by providing differentiation in presented online content, product recommendations and -offers.
• Increase follow-up and conversion through event-based marketing on selected online events (like an abandoned shopping cart).

These benefits and their corresponding key features are listed and described in the following paragraphs.

Enrich customer data

Along with the standard integration scenarios to replicate customers and their consent from SAP Commerce Cloud to SAP Marketing Cloud, a selected set of online transactional data is sent to SAP Marketing Cloud to capture the online shopping and buying behavior of your customers. These online interactions are related to the relevant products and product categories and can be used as input for your marketing activities (e.g. segmentation). Also, they can be a trigger for your event-based marketing. The abandoned shopping cart follow-up is the obvious example of such a scenario and comes as part of the standard integration scenarios between SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Marketing Cloud.

Personalized ecommerce storefront

Campaigns and target group data are sent from SAP Marketing Cloud to SAP Commerce Cloud. There they can be used to define restrictions on the display of the individual page components or full pages. By doing so, the presented shop front-end can dynamically differentiate between online customers based on the target group that they are assigned to. When opening a SAP Commerce page (or page component), a real-time lookup is done in SAP Marketing Cloud to check if the current customer is part of the relevant target group.

Product recommendations

Personalized product recommendations are provided from SAP Marketing Cloud based on the buying history and shopping behavior of a customer. A few types of product recommendations are delivered out of the box, like the top n product recommendations (e.g. products most viewed, most bought or recently viewed products), associated product recommendations (e.g. products often viewed or bought together) and collaborative product recommendations (e.g. user who bought this item also bought).

All these product recommendations are dynamically determined in SAP Marketing Cloud using a configurable model that defines the recommendation type and its corresponding algorithm, a filter to remove unwanted products from the recommendation list (e.g. items that are already in the shopping cart) and a ranking to sort the final product listing in the preferred way.

SAP Commerce Cloud provides a standard page component that will consume the defined recommendation model and present the product recommendations to the online customers. This page component can be configured using Smart Edit in SAP Commerce Cloud. Also, these recommendation models are available for selection in the content studio in SAP Marketing Cloud itself to be included in a marketing mail template.

Product offers

Personalizing the promotional product offers is another scenario in the Commerce Marketing feature set. It provides functionality to dynamically determine the relevant offer for a selected customer, channel (e.g. ecommerce) and time frame. An offer is configured in SAP Marketing Cloud by defining the content (the promotional banner), the target group (which could also be all customers), the ecommerce or physical shop(s), the product or product category and the validity.

As with the product recommendations, SAP Commerce Cloud offers a standard page component for offers and again, this component is fully configurable using Smart Edit. Also the content studio of SAP Marketing Cloud provides the option to include these offers in your marketing mails.

Coupons

Coupons come as an additional option to the offer functionality described in the previous paragraph. As an incentive, an offer can be related to coupons. From SAP Marketing Cloud version 2002 this coupon option is strongly enhanced with a new integration scenario. This scenario enables the replication of a promotion and its coupons generated in SAP Commerce Cloud to SAP Marketing Cloud. From there, they become part of the offer functionality and can be used as part of a marketing campaign including a coupon code. Customers can use this coupon code in their online purchases to collect on the offer discount. SAP Commerce Cloud will send the redemption of these coupons to SAP Marketing Cloud to add to the marketing campaign performance measurements.

Data exchange

It is important to notice that the Commerce Marketing capabilities in the SAP C/4HANA suite are still growing. Recent releases are showing new and/or improved integration scenarios based on SAP CPI (Cloud Platform Integration) like the integrated coupon scenario described in the previous paragraph. A full overview of the available standard integration scenarios between SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Marketing Cloud can be found on the online SAP API business hub.