True commerce personalization goes a lot beyond customer segmentation, product recommendations, marketing automation or manual rules. There is a lot more to personalization than meets the eye. Most personalization providers don’t even scrape the surface of personalization. Customers should ideally enjoy the benefits of a personalized search experience all through their journey.

The trick to getting this unique search experience lies in identifying the right personalization provider. It’s a choice that needs a lot of careful consideration.

Search providers have to check if content and offers can be personalized based on individual affinities, customer profile and behavior. For instance, let’s say a customer searches for organic food and dairy products. A smart, predictive search engine will show results based on organic fruit, even without the customer specifying it in the search. A smart personalization platform can understand the customer’s granular preferences and connect the experience through the buying journey.

It can personalize for the individual, in such a way that two shoppers adding the same products to the cart get different cross-sell recommendations. The engine’s decisioning is dynamic enough to pick a contextual, real-time search strategy for each customer. A dynamic, personalized search engine can use deep learning based Visual AI to surface visually similar products. A smart personalization search provider can show live demand or inventory status for a product, to create an urgency among shoppers. It can use AI to automatically detect and assign relevant segments to customers for segment based content and experiences.

True personalization can dynamically trigger pop-up banners based on real-time signals, such as exit intent, time spent on page or segment affinity. Use this commerce checklist to evaluate if your personalization provider has these features.