As an e-commerce marketer, you’re likely juggling countless priorities, optimizing site traffic, managing campaigns, and enhancing conversions, all while delivering seamless, personalized customer experiences. Sounds daunting, right?
Today’s e-commerce leaders recognize that experience, not just product or price, is the real battleground for customer loyalty.
But great customer experiences don’t happen by chance. They require intentional planning, cohesive execution across channels, and integrated data management.
In this guide, we’ll explore proven strategies for crafting seamless, personalized e-commerce experiences that foster long-term loyalty in depth, highlighting real-world success stories and how SAP Emarsys gets you there.
E-commerce Experience by the Numbers: Why it Matters
According to SAP Emarsys’ 2025 Global Consumer Products Engagement Report, e-commerce is still the most critical channel for consumer products marketers. In fact, 50% rely on it as their primary growth driver. But here’s the shift: 42% of consumers now expect personalized deals and offers as standard, not special treatment.
The reality check gets tougher. Over 60% of consumers have already switched to cheaper alternatives, and 66% think products should cost less when they buy direct from your website. So competing on price alone isn’t going to cut it anymore.
But here’s where it gets interesting – and where your opportunity lives. Less than half (45%) of consumers actually advocate for their favorite brands. That’s a massive experience gap waiting to be filled.
So, what does this mean for you as a marketing leader?
Simple: the brands that win are building experience capabilities that make every customer touchpoint work harder. They’re doing three things really well: unifying their customer data, using AI to personalize at scale, and keeping all their teams aligned around the customer experience.
Four Strategies that Actually Move the Needle
Creating standout e-commerce experiences starts with getting the fundamentals right and executing them consistently. Here are the four approaches that separate customer experience leaders from everyone else, with practical frameworks you can implement regardless of your team size or tech stack.
1. Master your high-stakes moments
The reality: Peak periods like Black Friday, seasonal launches, and flash sales can make or break your year. Yet most brands treat these events as tactical campaigns rather than strategic experience opportunities.
The approach: Use historical data to architect experiences that actually hold up under pressure. This means coordinating your marketing, logistics, and support teams around customer behavior patterns, not just campaign schedules.
How to execute:
- Analyze last year’s hourly traffic and conversion patterns to predict exact demand spikes.
- Update your automation sequences, product recommendations, and messaging triggers to reflect current inventory and strategy.
- Create cross-team playbooks that align marketing sends with fulfillment capacity and support availability.
- Build in real-time adjustment protocols for when things don’t go according to plan.
Why it works: You maintain performance and customer trust during the moments that matter most to your bottom line.
2. Keep your digital assets relevant
The reality: Most brands set up their automated emails, product recommendations, and website personalization once and then forget about them. Meanwhile, customer behavior, inventory, and market conditions constantly shift.
The approach: Treat your digital assets like living systems that need regular optimization based on real customer data and business changes.
How to execute:
- Review your automation flows monthly. Do they reflect current inventory, seasonal trends, and customer feedback?
- Refresh your preference centers and data collection points to capture evolving customer needs.
- Personalize homepage experiences and email content based on individual customer lifecycle stages and recent behavior.
- Test different messaging approaches and double down on what’s actually driving engagement.
Why it works: Your customers get content that feels current and relevant instead of generic or outdated.
3. Use AI to personalize without the manual work
The reality: True personalization at scale is impossible to do manually, but most brands either don’t personalize at all or create overly complex systems that break down.
The approach: Centralize your customer data and let AI handle the heavy lifting of personalization while you focus on strategy and creative direction.
How to execute:
- Connect data from your e-commerce platform, email system, loyalty program, and customer service tools into one view.
- Use AI to optimize send times, product recommendations, and audience segmentation based on actual behavior patterns.
- Create dynamic customer journeys that automatically adjust based on lifecycle stage, purchase history, and engagement levels.
- Set up predictive models that identify high-value customers and at-risk segments before you see it in your regular reports.
Why it works: You deliver individually relevant experiences at scale without burning out your team or compromising on quality.
4. Align your teams around the customer, not just campaigns
The reality: Most customer experience problems happen at the handoffs between departments – marketing promises what fulfillment can’t deliver, customer service doesn’t know about ongoing promotions, and merchandising decisions don’t consider customer communication timing.
The approach: Create shared visibility and accountability across all customer-facing functions, with regular coordination that goes beyond just campaign planning.
How to execute:
- Implement shared dashboards that show real-time customer behavior, inventory levels, and service ticket trends
- Hold weekly alignment sessions between marketing, merchandising, fulfillment, and customer service
- Create communication protocols for inventory changes, shipping delays, and customer service escalations
- Plan your promotional calendar around fulfillment capacity and customer service availability, not just marketing goals
Why it works: You eliminate the friction points that erode customer trust and create seamless experiences that actually deliver on your brand promises.
Success in Action: How Brands Are Winning with SAP Emarsys
Leading brands are turning to SAP Emarsys to deliver outstanding e-commerce experiences. Here’s how they’re succeeding:
Ryderwear: Scaling personalization with AI and automation
Ryderwear, a fitness apparel brand, leveraged Emarsys to dramatically scale email personalization and improve e-commerce engagement using AI-powered automation.
Challenge: Ryderwear needed to elevate the e-commerce customer experience while operating with a small marketing team and limited capacity for manual execution. Without scalable personalization, their customer interactions lacked the relevance needed to build loyalty and drive conversions.
Solution: Ryderwear leveraged SAP Emarsys to automate customer journeys using AI-powered product recommendations and send-time optimization. With automation driving timely, contextual emails, they transformed manual efforts into a high-performing digital strategy.
Results:
- Email revenue contribution grew from 4–5% to nearly 20%
- Automation-driven revenue increased from 20% to 80%
- Improved efficiency despite a lean marketing team
Learn more: How Ryderwear Uses Predictive Analytics Marketing to Unlock Success.
“Campaign revenue was bringing in about 80%, automation was 20%. Now it’s flipped—automation revenue is 80%, and that’s really where you should be aiming for.”
Total Tools: Loyalty-first experience at scale
Total Tools used Emarsys to build a unified view of customers across 80+ locations. By integrating their loyalty program into their e-commerce site and automating personalized experiences, they doubled sign-up rates and increased online conversion.
Challenge: Total Tools struggled to unify online and in-store data, limiting customer behavior and loyalty status visibility. This fragmented experience made offering consistent, personalized interactions across channels complex.
Solution: Using SAP Emarsys, Total Tools integrated loyalty data with e-commerce behavior to deliver a cohesive customer journey. They personalized interactions through Web Channel overlays and updated dashboards, allowing real-time loyalty point visibility and seamless online redemption.
Results:
- 200% increase in loyalty sign-ups
- A 2x increase in click-through rates from adding AI product recommendations
- 30% increase in active customers in CRM based on the SAP Emarsys Smart insight definition of active
- 15x return on investment for CRM ads (Google and Facebook)
- Increased conversion through Web Channel overlays
Learn more: Total Tools Unifies Data To Drive Omnichannel Experiences That Boost Loyalty.
“SAP Emarsys has become the center of how we orchestrate the conversation with our customers. We’re using the customer’s interactions with our brand to drive a conversation with them. And with AI and machine learning doing the heavy lifting for us, driving personalization at scale, we can focus on delivering a more rewarding customer experience.”
Make Customer Experience Your E-commerce Differentiator
SAP Emarsys empowers your brand to create seamless, personalized, and highly engaging journeys at every customer lifecycle stage.
With SAP Emarsys, you can:
- Connect and unify customer data: Break down silos to build comprehensive customer profiles, enabling you to deliver personalized experiences based on real-time insights.
- Automate with AI-driven intelligence: Scale personalization effortlessly by leveraging AI to predict customer behaviors, optimize messaging, and ensure every interaction is timely and relevant.
- Enhance omnichannel consistency: Deliver cohesive experiences across email, web, mobile, and physical touchpoints, keeping your brand experience consistent wherever your customers engage.
- Measure and optimize performance: Gain deep insights into customer behavior, campaign effectiveness, and revenue attribution, empowering your team to refine strategies continuously.
Whether you’re gearing up for high-volume events, refining your personalization approach, or aligning cross-functional teams, SAP Emarsys helps you turn complexity into clarity and every interaction into an opportunity to build lasting customer relationships.
Ready to elevate your e-commerce customer experience?
Request a demo today and discover how SAP Emarsys helps e-commerce brands convert customer insights into sustainable growth.
About the author
Mikkel Tophoj has worked in digital marketing for 11 years with a focus on strategy. As a Services Consultant at SAP Emarsys and previous roles at agencies, he has helped Fortune 1000 brands across all industry verticals connect their data to create dream customer experiences and drive measurable results. Keeping up with innovation, he is focusing on how AI can amplify marketing efforts. He holds a BS in business administration with an emphasis in marketing and a minor in economics from CU Denver.
