The path to purchase has been completely transformed over the last decade. Today, discovery and decision-making extend far beyond traditional ecommerce sites, spilling into video platforms, social media and even AI tools.
The New Path to Purchase
By the time a visitor lands on a branded ecommerce site – whether directed by these channels or through an omnichannel marketing campaign – brands have only one opportunity to convert curiosity into commitment. The key is delivering seamless and relevant experiences that drive conversion.
Personalization is the foundation of these customer experiences, which is why it’s no longer a differentiator: it’s a requirement.
But personalization encompasses many processes and functions.
Of all these, personalized offers have become increasingly critical tools, especially as customer acquisition costs soar and brand loyalty becomes increasingly elusive. Yet many retailers still rely on outdated offer strategies, such as traditional segmentation and broad, profit-eroding mass promotions that fail to address the dynamics of today’s shoppers.
Most online visitors – whether new or existing customers – arrive on the site anonymously, often remaining unknown until checkout. This makes it crucial for retailers to leverage real-time behaviors and signals during each session to detect a shopper’s purchase intent to influence outcomes effectively.
When retailers fail to respond to these in-the-moment opportunities, they not only lose the chance to maximize conversions and basket sizes but also sacrifice profitability. The solution? Moving beyond traditional promotions to fully automated, AI-driven offer capabilities that leverage intent.
Intent is the powerful missing link in modern offer strategy. By leveraging intent signals within AI-powered offer decisioning, retailers can:
Automate offer execution with machine learning that adapts to evolving purchase intent behavior, freeing retailers to focus on strategic priorities.
Personalized marketing touches, like emails featuring a customer’s name and past purchase details, are considered table stakes for re-engagement. Cart abandonment emails, remarketing ads and digital retargeting also serve as last-ditch efforts to drive conversions.
The Mass-Offer Model is Broken
As a result, retailers miss out on engaging (and converting) three critical cohorts:
Turning Curiosity into Commitment:
How Intent-Driven Personalization is Redefining Digital Marketing
of consumers use YouTube to search for information the same way they use Google.1
primarily use social media for searches.2
use ChatGPT as an alternative to Google when exploring new categories.3
Optimize promotional budgets by focusing incentives on driving incremental behavior, not rewarding purchases that would happen regardless.
Engage shoppers in real time with offers that are relevant and optimized to maximize conversion and basket size.
Track and understand the conversion and abandonment behavior of known and anonymous visitors.
Targeted Digital Advertising
Curated Merchandising
Tailored Content
Search Optimization
Product Recommendations
Personalized Offers
of consumers say they appreciate the convenience of personalization, but only as long as their data is secure.5
Data-cautious consumers unwilling to share personal information.
of consumers continue to use guest checkout even if they have the option to log in.6
Returning, even high-spending shoppers who skip logging into their accounts.
of consumers said they’ve given up on an online purchase because it would have required them to create an account.4
Anonymous visitors exploring your brand for the first time.
Brands and retailers try to close this gap and meet conversion goals by over-relying on mass promotions. While these methods appear to drive immediate positive outcomes in the form of conversions and topline sales, their long-tail effects can be grim:
Ecommerce and marketing teams need a better option – one that empowers them to truly understand every visitor and deliver the right offers and incentives that inspire action and maximize business results.
Squeezed margins
Small basket sizes
Low retention rates
Low Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Brand dilution and damage
When done well, personalized offers motivate up to 45% of consumers to make a purchase.7
Intent: The Missing Piece of the Offer Puzzle
This often leads to mass offers that lack nuance, hurt margins and hinder audience and revenue growth. Marketing teams are failing to capitalize on the invaluable data being generated on their ecommerce sites. As consumers venture across your ecommerce site, they leave little digital breadcrumbs that paint a detailed, invaluable picture of who they are and what they really want. These signals provide insight into their reasons for engaging with your brand, what they want to buy and in some cases, how much they plan to spend.
Yet only 13% of retailers are satisfied with their personalization strategies, largely because “most lack the capabilities for individualized personalization, and are limited to basic segmentation tactics.”8
This is intent.
This is intent.
Intent is a powerful lever for delivering more meaningful and personalized digital offers at scale. When you can monitor and analyze visitors’ in-session behaviors in real time, you can better understand their propensity to buy. With these insights, you can treat all visitors like the unique people they are, serving offers that turn their initial inspiration and curiosity into true buying intent.
With the right deals, offers and incentives, that intention can also be influenced, even accelerated. Brands just need to be able to use data intelligently, and in real time, to identify which levers to pull, and when.
noun – intention or purpose adjective – resolved or determined to do (something)
Why is intent important?
Why is intent important?
Up to 81% of consumers say irrelevant recommendations are worse than no recommendations at all.9 Intent data can add granularity and, perhaps most importantly, context to ecommerce offers.
By analyzing all visitors’ onsite behaviors – both known and anonymous – you can better understand their motivations and mindsets, and ultimately deliver deals, messages and financial incentives that drive action – without over-relying on mass offers that end up hurting margins and marketing ROI.
While most consumers today are more price-conscious, brands must carefully consider how promotional offers and price cuts impact their brand equity and reputation. Intent-based personalized offers provide a solution by privately messaging visitors in-session based on their detected purchase intent.
Not all visitors will receive an offer – those with higher purchase intent or those only interacting with low-margin products may not need additional incentives. This approach empowers brands to strike the perfect balance between appealing to customers’ desire for deals and protecting brand reputation and margin.
Intent in Action
Intent in Action
Adopting new personalization initiatives often requires major tech implementation periods that include data cleansing, integration and testing periods. But with a simple tag-based install, retailers can quickly begin to harness the power of intent as the system works with existing ecommerce coupon capabilities, adapts to brand standards and self-optimizes.
Let’s dig into how it all works...
Intent in Action
1. Real-Time Data Analysis
2. OFFER DECISIONING
3. OFFER PRESENTMENT
2. offer decisioning
Once a retailer has foundational context, AI and machine learning calculate a visitor’s propensity to buy and their predicted spend. It also takes into account margin allowance, or how steep a discount each visitor should receive based on the retailer’s strategic goals and desired outcomes.
1. Real-Time Data Analysis
Harnessing real-time clickstream data, key session attributes and signals – not cookies or PII – retailers can build a foundation that allows them to truly understand consumers. This includes the basics (device type, time of visit, log-in status), clickstream activities and browsed behavior, as well as more in-depth relationship-oriented information (new users/prior browser/prior buyer, loyalty member, referral source). In addition to shopper data, the system considers brand- and product-level data, such as eligible items, item pricing and available margin.
get a closer look
By optimizing offers based on real-time intent signals, retailers can level-up their ecommerce discounting strategies, improve customer experiences and meet their goals across five core areas:
Reaping the Rewards of Intent
1:1 intent-based offers convert traffic more effectively and improve both conversion rates and average order value (AOV).
Topline revenue
Not all shoppers are created equal, and not all customers require the same promotions. Intent-based offers identify and target shoppers who need the right incentive to convert, avoiding unnecessary discounts for those who already likely to purchase.
Incrementality
Steer price-sensitive or value-conscious customers toward higher-margin categories or stretch baskets to expand breadth of purchase cross-category.
Category Penetration
Intent-based offers use discount dollars more sparingly, and only when needed. They avoid low-margin categories and can be strategically deployed to boost higher-margin products and categories.
Margin
Influence intent and shape demand around aging inventory to drive sell-through at healthier margins, reducing the need for clearance discounts.
Inventory Management
Explore how retailers of all sizes and across categories can benefit from intent-based offers and promotions...
From Concept to Application
Category Penetration
Concept: An office supply retailer had a product selection that spanned from big-ticket office furniture to low-margin products like pens, printer paper and paper clips. As a result, the retailer was tasked with managing discount rates for those low-margin products, boosting category penetration and effectively engaging business customers.
Application: Using real-time intent signals, the retailer deployed add-to-cart offers optimized based on shopper type, from new visitors to past browsers and preferred members who hadn’t visited the site in an extended period.
Impact: 38% increase in AOV for treated customers
Impact: $13+ ROAS achieved, outperforming other ad spend initiatives
Concept: An ecommerce and TV shopping channel offers a diverse range of fashion and beauty items, as well as electronics and home goods. Despite successfully driving customers to the site using various marketing efforts, conversions remained low, especially for items that were not “on air.”
Application: By delivering real-time, personalized offers to high-propensity customers, the retailer was able to move non “on-air” categories and products at a higher velocity and achieve a higher ROAS.
Incrementality
Impact: Delivered a 77% increase in average order value (AOV), while protecting margins.
Concept: One department store retailer had a loyal customer base but sought to double its ecommerce business. Although customer acquisition was top-of-mind for the digital commerce team, they had to win over customers without relying on mass discounts that ate away at margin.
Application: Real-time, in-session personalized offers were deployed to convert cost conscious first-time visitors and encourage return customers to increase their basket size.
Margin
Impact: Delivered 11% growth in topline revenue, with a marked increase in digital profitability.
Concept: A home improvement retailer sought to grow ecommerce sales as a percentage of total revenue without undermining its profitable in-store flyer promotions.
Application: Real-time, in-session personalized conversion offers complemented existing online promotional strategies, improving conversion rates and increasing AOV.
Topline Revenue
We’re embarking on a new era of customer experience – and the personalization imperative is evolving rapidly.
ES Engage™ by Exchange Solutions empowers retailers to harness anonymized session data, not cookies, to deeply understand visitor behavior and optimize their shopping experiences.
Seize New Growth Opportunities
Are you ready to revolutionize your ecommerce strategy with personalized, intent-driven offers? Partner with Exchange Solutions to reduce cart abandonment, grow topline revenue and maintain profitability – all without sacrificing your brand identity to mass discounting.
Begin Your Journey
The Ultimate Ecommerce Win-Win
Real-Time Analytics That Drive Results
Quick Deployment, Immediate ROI
This innovative approach to digital offers creates the ultimate win/win for shoppers and retailers:
Shoppers: Whether they’re loyal customers or first-time visitors, shoppers receive high-impact, personalized offers tailored to their session behavior. These dynamic, real-time offers enhance the shopping experience by making customers feel recognized and valued without requiring a login or account creation.
Retailers & Brands: Align your offer strategy with business objectives by utilizing ES Engage’s intelligent decisioning engine to deliver margin-aware, personalized offers. Maximize revenue and profit potential while increasing sales and basket size. Leverage real-time data analytics to track clickstream behaviors, optimize offer performance, and stay agile in a fast-changing retail environment.
The Ultimate Ecommerce Win-Win
With a streamlined, tag-based implementation, ES Engage can be deployed and operational in as little as six weeks.
This allows retailers to quickly see measurable gains in conversion rates, revenue, and profit margins.
Quick Deployment, Immediate ROI
As new intent-driven offers are launched, ES Engage’s robust analytics provide actionable insights, allowing you to assess and improve performance across key metrics:
Quick Deployment, Immediate ROI
Real-Time Analytics That Drive Results
Engagement: Measure offer acceptance, completion rates, and average order value (AOV).
Financial Impact: Monitor revenue growth, margin preservation, and the cost-effectiveness of discounts.
Incrementality: Analyze uplift in sales, orders, and conversions through test-control comparisons.
Real-Time Analytics That Drive Results
VIEW SOURCES
Exchange Solutions is a cloud-based loyalty platform management company that delivers personalized loyalty solutions to B2C and B2B businesses, enabling them to build deeper and more profitable engagement with their customers. With more than 25 years of experience in the industry, Exchange Solutions transforms loyalty programs and promotions from being costly applications to productive and profitable capabilities for clients across various industries in the US and Canada. Current clients include retailers such as Esso™ and Mobil™, Sobeys Inc., McKesson, Indochino, Suncor, Foot Locker and Bealls Inc.
exchangesolutions.com
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1https://content-naf.emarketer.com/search-behavior-being-redefined-thanks-generational-shifts 2https://content-naf.emarketer.com/search-behavior-being-redefined-thanks-generational-shifts 3https://www.futurecommerce.com/posts/omnimodal-the-new-frontier-of-consumer-behavior 4https://www.investopedia.com/clunky-websites-are-costing-companies-money-scaring-away-shoppers-8722090 5https://gopages.segment.com/rs/667-MPQ-382/images/State-of-personalization-report_reduced.pdf
6https://www.forbes.com/sites/catherineerdly/2022/04/22/4-minutes-or-less--what-do-customers-expect-during-online-check-out/ 7https://www.bazaarvoice.com/resources/shopper-experience-index-volume-18/ 8https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/retailers-deploying-mobile-apps-will-double-by-2026-302343832.html 9https://www.futurecommerce.com/fc-insights/new-modes
HIDE SOURCES
3. offer presentment
1. Drive Add-to-Cart 2. Convert Cart 3. Stretch Basket / AOV 4. Shape Demand (e.g., Clear Inventory, Competitve Response) 5. Improve Fulfillment Profitability (e.g., Incent BOPIS) 6. Maximize Special Promotional Periods (e.g., Black Friday) 7. Create Awareness (e.g., Promote Free Returns, Email Sign-Up) 8. Generate Return Visits (e.g., Future Use Reward)
Deploy tailored campaigns, offers and messages designed to drive strategic business objectives
Achieve Strategic Business Objectives
All offer inputs and outputs are dynamic and can adapt to consumers’ behaviors and purchase patterns in real time, so retailers can ensure visitors have a seamless, relevant and on-brand experience. Retailers also can configure new offers as their needs and priorities change, whether they want to boost ecommerce conversions, maximize promotional periods or shape demand.
With every new offer, retailers can glean in-depth data and key performance indicators, such as total sales, orders, margins and average order value, so they can continue to adapt and evolve their strategies.
Monkey Business - stock.adobe.com
However, these tactics are typically powered by broad customer segments, cookies and known first-party data. As a result, retailers miss out on engaging (and converting) three critical cohorts:
Achieve Strategic Business Objectives
Achieve Strategic Business Objectives