Exploring SAP Hybris CEC Suite: SAP Hybris Marketing & SAP Hybris Commerce
The SAP Hybris Customer Engagement and Commerce (CEC) delivers a powerful set of commerce and marketing applications for enterprises that seek a single, integrated solution to support B2B and B2C scenarios.
The SAP Hybris CEC portfolio is built on four pillars: Commerce, Marketing, Cloud for Sales, and Cloud for Service. Enterprises can use CEC to easily develop a multiyear deployment strategy that starts with basic eCommerce and expands over time to include sophisticated marketing, customer service, configuration, and billing solutions.
In this article, we’ll provide an introduction to two of these pillars, Marketing and Commerce, and discuss how you can use them to drive revenue growth and increased conversion on websites running the SAP Hybris Commerce platform.
An Integrated Solution
When companies are asked why they want to implement a new eCommerce platform, most of the time this answer falls into the top three:
“To drive more revenue.”
When it comes down to it, the purpose of any eCommerce site is to drive revenue. But how do you do it?
eCommerce organizations constantly ask themselves this question. The short answer is that more shoppers need to visit your site, find products that interest them, add them to their carts, and then check out.
Sounds simple, right?
It would be, if not for the average conversion rate from cart to order hovering around three percent, remaining fairly steady for quite some time. So, if you can’t increase the cart to order rate then maybe the answer is to get shoppers to add more items to their carts.
With SAP Hybris Marketing and SAP Hybris Commerce you can do just that.
SAP Hybris Marketing combined with SAP Hybris Commerce is an integrated solution that enables you to market products to customers in a way never seen before. SAP Hybris Marketing gives you a holistic view of your customers by pulling data from multiple channels. Not only does it give you visibility into campaign responses and submitted orders, but also what pages customers viewed, what terms they searched, and their click streams, just to name a few.
What’s more, the data is displayed at the individual customer level, not simply lumped together in a few charts.
So, where does SAP Hybris Marketing source and load this customer data? It comes from a number of sources, including your ERP, CRM, Hybris Commerce, SAP Cloud for Customer, analytics, Tweets, and posts. Other SAP solutions, taking advantage of the SAP Hybris Commerce Data Hub, load the data via a background process. Data from social media channels, such as Twitter and Google Plus, can be loaded via the RDS Package for Rapid Data Load. If you need to configure data for automated loading, SAP Hybris Marketing accepts .csv files as input.
With all your data loaded into SAP Hybris Marketing, you now have insights into how individual customers interact with your site.
So, what can you do from here?
At a high level, you can tailor the shopping experience to each individual customer. Several tools can assist you with this, but two key players are Marketing Recommendations and Marketing Segmentations.
Marketing Recommendations
Marketing Recommendations use advanced algorithms to create models that determine the next best product to show a customer. Recommendations are based on historical patterns, customer preferences, and future propensities. As you load more data into SAP Hybris Marketing, the algorithms get smarter and the recommendations get better.
Recommendations can then be used in SAP Hybris Commerce through prebuilt CMS components generated by the SAP Hybris Marketing algorithms.
Marketing Segmentations
Marketing Segmentations provide high-performance customer segmentation in real time regardless of the data source. This allows you to identify the right target audience for your campaign and deliver a personalized marketing message across all channels.
An example of this is the ability to create customer segment rules in the SAP Hybris Commerce WCMS that verify a customer’s membership in a SAP Hybris Marketing campaign. You can then use this segment to target customers with campaign-specific content.
Individual, Personalized Solutions
Using SAP Hybris Marketing combined with SAP Hybris Commerce, you can target customers individually using data about how they interact with your website. You can also present products and content to them not just unique to each individual but also to each visit.
Showing individual shoppers product recommendations created solely for them is only a fraction of SAP Hybris Marketing and SAP Hybris Commerce’s combined capabilities. Stay tuned to the LYONSCG blog as we continue to discuss the SAP Hybris CEC suite.
Michael J. Hayes, Hybris technical architect, has specialized in eCommerce for the past 14 years and focused exclusively on Hybris for the past three. He’s developed eCommerce solutions for companies such as Grainger, Airgas, and Follett Higher Education Group.
