This is the second part of our series about B2B Commerce trends in 2025. See part 1: Artificial Intelligence.
A new Emporix report conducted by Worldwide Business Research reveals the state of personalization in B2B: objectives, expectations and concerns - find out more in this article.
TL;DR
- B2B buyers expect personalized buying experiences - both digital and in-person.
- B2B leaders consider personalization in sales outreach, website and product recommendations as key loyalty drivers.
- Implementation of effective personalization comes with a number of challenges.
- Using Emporix, B2B leaders lay the technical foundation for an agile personalization.
In increasingly competitive markets, the personalization of buying experiences has proven to be an important strategy for fostering customer loyalty in B2B commerce. Hybrid selling, fully aligning digital and in-person sales, is considered crucial to success by B2B executives.
On behalf of Emporix, Worldwide Business Research surveyed 100 European B2B leaders in Q3 of 2024 on the current state of personalization in their commerce, their business objectives, expectations and challenges. The key findings are outlined below.
The State of Personalized Customer Experience in B2B
Personalization has long been a B2C domain, but B2B customers want it too.
The majority of B2B leaders consider personalized sales outreach as what customers expect the most, reflecting that relationship building is key to success even in digital B2B sales.
Key findings in detail:
- Personalized sales approach (51%), custom website (43%) and product recommendations (42%) are considered top customer loyalty drivers.
- Implementing effective personalization is associated with various challenges.
- Key challenges include balancing automation and “human touch”, complex customer journeys and measuring and demonstrating ROI.
How personalization can drive customer loyalty in B2B
Personalization includes many commerce use cases that are designed to create tailored B2B buying experiences and thus increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Used properly, personalization can therefore be a key competitive advantage in fast-paced markets.
Top 5 loyalty drivers to include in a personalization strategy
- Personalized sales outreach uses customer and behavioral data to orchestrate targeted messaging and offers across all sales channels (hybrid selling) that resonate with individual customers, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
- Website customization tailors B2B shop or customer portal content, layout and processes in real time based on visitor behavior, preferences and previous interactions to improve the buying experience and customer loyalty.
- Product recommendations use AI-powered data analytics to suggest relevant products based on individual purchase history, behavior and preferences, accelerating purchase workflows and leveraging upsell/cross-sell potential.
- Seamless omnichannel experiences ensure consistent, personalized interactions across multiple hybrid selling touchpoints - e.g. websites, mobile apps, email and in-person sales - providing a cohesive and tailored customer journey.
- Tailored content includes customized marketing messages, blog articles, emails, ads and other assets that are tailored to the interests, demographics and behaviors of B2B buyers to ensure maximum relevance and engagement.
Key Challenges When Personalizing Hybrid Selling
Despite its benefits, the implementation of effective personalization is associated with a number of challenges that must be overcome with the right personalization strategy:
- Balancing automation and “human touch” requires full integration and alignment of digital touchpoint personalization with in-person interactions (that are both siloed in many organizations) to deliver seamless B2B buying experiences.
- Complex customer journeys involve longer, branched sales cycles, multiple decision makers and various touchpoints, making it challenging to deliver consistent and personalized experiences throughout the buying process.
- Measuring and demonstrating ROI means linking personalization efforts to tangible business outcomes and demonstrating their impact on customer acquisition, retention and revenue growth. This can be challenging in B2B hybrid selling environments.
Other challenges that B2B leaders face related to personalization include poor data quality to derive actionable insights, insufficient technology stack, keeping up with evolving customer preferences, lack of skilled personnel, resistance to change internally, lack of resources to scale, privacy concerns, budget constraints and lack of first-party data.
Conclusion and Recommendations
B2B companies across Europe are stepping up their personalization efforts.
AI plays a major role in achieving a state-of-the-art level of “PersonalAIzation”. Chatbots are becoming more and more human-like, content can be customized by AI algorithms, and predictive AI can analyze customer behavior to provide tailored buying experiences.
B2B companies are well-advised to focus on personalization initiatives that are easy and efficient to implement and promise to add maximum business value (low-hanging fruits).
How Emporix Helps Launch or Evolve Personalization
Using Emporix, B2B leaders lay the technical foundation for an agile personalization.
Emporix is a groundbreaking commerce platform, designed according to the MACH principles for composable software architectures: microservices-based, API-first, cloud-ready and headless based. This is how Emporix enables the agile migration of personalization.
Best of breed services and tools required to efficiently manage seamless hybrid selling across digital and in-person sales channels can be orchestrated flexibly and tailored to their needs using the Emporix Commerce Orchestration Platform.
Selection of Emporix built-in features to enable personalization
- Price personalization allows prizes to be tailored to individual customers and proposals to be optimized for strategic decision-making, driving customer loyalty and profitability.
- Customer segmentation to offer personalized buying experiences by using customer-specific categories and/or products tailored to individual preferences, boosting satisfaction, engagement and loyalty.
- Coupons help drive customer loyalty by linking benefits to all or individual customers, specific customer segments or categories, providing tailored offers based on their preferences and behavior.
- Multiple Sites allow managing a variety of outlets and delivery areas, where each site can have its own tax rates and delivery options.
Emporix exceeds other composable commerce platforms by offering a unique Process Orchestration Engine (OE) enabling B2B businesses not only to orchestrate capabilities, but also to efficiently streamline business processes - a use case that 35% of the B2B leaders interviewed consider a major gain.