How to Transform Your SAP Commerce Stack into a Retail Personalization Powerhouse

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Retail Marketing and IT leaders alike are under pressure to deliver seamless, personalized experiences at scale without compromising performance or security. And we all know that personalization goes far beyond using a customer’s name in an email. Leading retailers are driving revenue through these marketing tactics:

  • Triggering abandoned cart emails within minutes of a shopper leaving the site.
  • Recommending products based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and inventory availability.
  • Sending transactional messages like order confirmations and shipping updates that reinforce brand trust.
  • Delivering lifecycle campaigns that nurture customers from first purchase to loyalty.

The Pressure Is On: Retailers Must Personalize or Risk Losing Loyalty

Since 2020, SAP Emarsys has mapped consumers across different forms of customer loyalty. The 2025 Customer Loyalty Index reveals six ways customers demonstrate loyalty: True, Incentivized, Inherited, Silent, Ethical, and the new Trend Loyalty.

  • True Loyalty: The holy grail – deep, enduring, emotional bonds.
  • Incentivized Loyalty: Driven by discounts, perks, and rewards.
  • Inherited Loyalty: Based on heritage, legacy, or tradition.
  • Silent Loyalty: Ongoing loyalty without visible advocacy.
  • Ethical Loyalty: Alignment with values such as sustainability or fairness.
  • Trend Loyalty (NEW): Hype-driven, fast-moving loyalty fueled by social buzz.

The latest research reveals that brands are losing their grip on True Loyalty, down 5% from 2024, marking its first decline in five years. The latest research in our Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) report suggests that consumers are increasingly driven by fleeting emotional connections and viral trends, with 14% now classified as Trend Loyal.

These shifts signal a critical moment for businesses: loyalty is no longer a passive outcome of brand recognition. It must be actively earned through personalized, consistent, and emotionally resonant experiences.

With 84% of brands failing to differentiate through personalization, integrating SAP Emarsys with your SAP Commerce Cloud stack becomes a strategic imperative. In the Engagement Era, every interaction is a chance to rebuild trust, deepen relationships, and turn fleeting attention into lasting advocacy.

The loyalty landscape is changing

8 Tips to Turn SAP Commerce into a Personalization Powerhouse

When loyalty is fragile and fleeting, retailers must move beyond basic transactions and embrace intelligent personalization. These eight strategies will help you unlock the full potential of SAP Commerce and SAP Emarsys and turn your tech stack into a loyalty-building engine:

1) Integrate real-time data streams: Connect SAP Commerce with SAP Emarsys to enable real-time data flow across customer touchpoints. This allows for dynamic personalization based on live behavior, not just historical data.

2) Leverage AI-powered segmentation: Use SAP Emarsys AI capabilities to automatically segment customers based on behavior, preferences, and lifecycle stage. Then, you can tailor messaging and offers accordingly.

Ai Powered Segmentation

3)  Automate lifecycle campaigns: Set up automated campaigns that respond to customer actions (e.g. cart abandonment, repeat purchases, inactivity) to keep engagement high and relevant.

Engagement Tactics

4) Personalize across channels: Ensure consistent personalization across email, SMS, web, and mobile. SAP Emarsys enables omnichannel orchestration, so customers get a unified experience.

Personalize

5) Implement loyalty triggers: Reward repeat engagement with personalized incentives, exclusive offers, or early event access. SAP Emarsys helps marketers create and deliver meaningful customer experiences that build life-long loyalty.  

6) Use predictive analytics for product recommendations: Tap into predictive models to serve up personalized product recommendations based on browsing and purchase history.

Recommendations

7) Test and optimize continuously: Use A/B testing and performance analytics to refine personalization strategies and improve conversion rates over time.

8) Ensure scalable architecture: Work with your IT team to ensure the integration is scalable, secure, and optimized for performance—especially during peak traffic periods.

Why SAP Emarsys is the Smart Choice

Global retailers are turning to SAP Emarsys to simplify how they connect with customers. Instead of juggling multiple platforms or complex integrations, SAP Emarsys works seamlessly with SAP Commerce Cloud—bringing email, SMS, and push notifications into one unified system. With real-time orchestration and AI-powered personalization, teams can launch campaigns faster, reduce tech overhead, and drive deeper engagement across every touchpoint.

By deploying SAP Emarsys alongside SAP Commerce Cloud, you can:

  • Use historical and real-time Commerce Cloud data to deliver AI-powered personalization and engagements such as product recommendations, cart reminders, inventory alerts, and dynamic offers.
  • Launch revenue-driving use cases like abandoned cart and post-purchase cross-sell in minutes—no costly IT investment needed.
  • Accelerate time to value with SAP Emarsys using pre-built SAP Commerce Cloud tactics and trigger node.
  • Build rich customer profiles using behavioral and transactional data.
  • Use RFM modeling and revenue attribution to optimize campaigns.
  • Develop consistent omnichannel messaging for seamless transactional and promotional campaigns across web, email, SMS, and push.

What's Next?

If you’re already using SAP Commerce Cloud, you can get even more value by pairing it with SAP Emarsy to:

  • Deliver personalized experiences at scale
  • Streamline your tech stack
  • Drive measurable business outcomes

Start with quick-win campaigns, such as abandoned cart recovery and transactional messaging. From there, build fully personalized customer journeys just like PneuStore who has 31+ active journeys to boost customer engagement.

Ready to personalize like a pro?