3 E-Commerce Strategies Grocers Can‘t Live Without
If the past few years has taught the grocery industry anything, it's that e-commerce is no longer the way of the future. An online shopping experience is the best tool that grocery retailers have to survive and thrive in the here and now.
In short, there’s no going back to simply brick and mortar for online grocery shoppers. Grocery e-commerce is now a $32.7 billion industry, and online traffic and average order values (AOV) are rising year over year.
All the evidence tells the same story: Grocery businesses no longer have the luxury of viewing e-commerce as an added feature. They need to truly invest in an online shopping journey to provide personalized experiences.
Here are three of the most important strategies that online grocers can use to offer the above-and-beyond customer journeys that shoppers crave.
Improve Basket Size and Speed With Semantic Search
While in-store grocery shopping often starts with preparing a list and combing the aisles for products, the online shopping experience starts with search. In fact, many online shoppers begin their shopping journey at the search bar because of how convenient it is to find the items they are looking for right away.
That’s why it’s vital to tailor every customer’s search results to make sure you’re serving them the right products at the right time — which is exactly what Bloomreach Discovery delivers.
When Albertsons realized that half of its e-commerce revenue stemmed from search, the company decided to leverage Semantic Search to deliver more accurate and optimized results for customers. Our powerful product search incorporates natural language processing, advanced attribute extraction, and past visitor behavior to surface the most relevant products.
By implementing Bloomreach Discovery, Albertsons saw an increase in basket-building speeds by more than 25%. With our algorithms powering product search and recommendations, Albertsons can serve better results to customers at a faster pace.
Enrich Product Discovery With Store-Specific Ranking
One of the biggest challenges for modern grocery businesses is finding a way to balance the universal experience of visiting a website with the localized experience of shopping at a store.
With products, categories and even customer preferences that vary by store, state and region, how can grocery businesses offer a familiar brand experience while keeping the customer journey as local as it needs to be?
That’s where Bloomreach Discovery’s store-specific ranking plays a pivotal role. With merchandising capabilities that allow you to cater to shoppers on a local and hyper-personalized level, you can make sure your customers don’t fall through the cracks of your customer journey.
Bloomreach Discovery allows Total Wine & More’s merchandisers to carry out different search strategies based on regional markets, including store-specific ranking. The alcohol retailer’s merchandising team can deploy specific strategies based on product, and market those products to different regions of the country.
With our AI-powered Discovery engine, Total Wine & More can serve results that are automatically personalized and re-ranked based on the most important factors — the state you live in, the neighborhood you shop in, your income, your specific tastes, and more.
Personalize Email Campaigns to Power Experiences That Convert
In an unsteady economic climate like the one we currently find ourselves in, crafting the best email campaigns is a good recession-proof strategy to double down on.
For the grocery industry, this is especially important in the e-commerce market, where customer loyalty and retention is up for grabs. But getting more clicks, conversions and revenue isn’t as easy as it sounds.
With Bloomreach Engagement, our real-time customer data platform (CDP) combined with intelligent marketing automation, you can easily build an email marketing program with advanced targeting and AI-powered personalization without sacrificing deliverability and ease of use.
It’s the perfect tool to organize your data under one roof and put it to work with actionable, automated campaigns. That’s why BrewDog chose Bloomreach Engagement to reach more inboxes, get more clicks and convert more customers.
BrewDog generated 13.8% more revenue from its personalized email campaigns from Bloomreach Engagement compared to non-personalized emails in an A/B test. Personalized data made all the difference.
Power Your Online Grocery Experience With Bloomreach
For grocery businesses to succeed in today’s online market, personalization needs to be at the heart of your business strategy.
Streamlining repeat purchases, targeting localized search queries and optimizing email campaigns are all parts of the same puzzle: a personalized customer experience. To craft a strategy that revolves around your shopper, you need the right tools to power every touchpoint of their unique journey.
Bloomreach’s technology empowers brands to deliver personalized experiences across all of their digital channels. By combining the power of unified customer and product data with the speed and scale of AI optimization, Bloomreach ensures that the right product is put in front of the right customer — every time.