Abandoned carts are the bane of retailers’ existence. Part of the problem is that once a shopper abandons the cart, and your site, they’re unlikely to return. What if you could lure them back with targeted promotions that are tailored to exactly what they’re interested in?

While up to 77% of shopping carts are abandoned, more than half of those customers who abandoned their cart can be re-won if they receive a targeted email with a promotion or discount.

This underscores the importance of a connected strategy across marketing and commerce. It’s not enough to provide a smooth shopping experience – though that’s important too – retailers must know their customers and meet them where they are with the appropriate message. The bar for digital commerce is continually moving higher by consumers who demand a better experience; and in fact, brands who put the customer at the center of what they do are winning and keeping customers, according to recent research from Salesforce and Deloitte.

For commerce and marketing teams, aligning technology and consolidating customer data makes this possible and brings many benefits:

You get to actually know your customers

The first part of any great shopping experience, whether in-store or online, is having a personalized experience. In-store, we see this through recommendations from a store associate, to find exactly what you need. From a digital perspective, Salesforce uses artificial intelligence to make sense of all of the clicks and provide recommendations on site and in email for the products or categories shoppers are interested in, on the channels they prefer.

You can deliver targeted customer journeys

Customer journeys, which take a more holistic view of the customer from marketing to commerce and even to service, allow marketers to effectively deliver on one of the key digital marketing mantras: to deliver the right message, to the right audience, at the right time. While this can sound overwhelming, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to boil the ocean. Start by defining a few key moments of truth that define the customer experience, and use them to power 1-to-1 relationships, whether that’s on-boarding new customers, re-engaging with dormant ones, or communicating with your most loyal customers.

You create consistency across communications

For commerce marketers, providing unified experiences for customers is easier when systems are unified on the back end. Imagine having consistent, branded templates across your marketing and commerce programs, so that every email shoppers see, whether promotional or transactional, have the same look and feel.

Unify campaign tracking

Understanding the impact of campaigns on site traffic is critical for marketers, but siloed technology and systems make it difficult to attribute the actual traffic driven by marketing campaigns. Unified campaign tracking brings together marketing reporting into one dashboard, tracking all marketing touches, open rates, clicks and purchases, so that teams are aligned and focused not only on the success of the business, but on delivering the most relevant, satisfying experience to their customers.

But putting theory into practice isn’t without its challenges. Integrating multiple systems is difficult, and failing to meet customers’ needs across them can create negative experiences and turn consumers away from a brand. Problems with batch data transfer, identifying duplicates, and heavily coded integrations create complicated and fragile systems, which often results in pitching customers products they already own, or sending them messages when they asked not to receive such communication.

Salesforce streamlines that process today, with the Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud Connector. It syncs data between systems, so different teams can create more personalized, intelligence shopper journeys. The Connector sends Commerce Cloud data, such as key customer profile information, product, and order data, to Marketing Cloud, building out the customer profile with relevant data for deeper personalization. This is especially useful for sending emails triggered by on-site behavior, such as abandoned cart or abandoned browsing sessions, to ensure that every communication is populated with precisely the information the shopper is interested in. It also lets marketers automate transactional emails, such as order confirmations, password resets and more.

Our next wave of innovation for connected Commerce and Marketing is to simply and natively integrate both clouds to give commerce marketers a 360-degree view of shoppers, and enable more relevant personalized journeys, which we call Commerce Journeys. We want to give marketers the ability to seamlessly build engagement journeys based on real-time customer interaction, to drive revenue, and streamline reporting and processes for their internal teams. The technology is available. Our goal is to make this easier than ever before.

Bringing together commerce and marketing allows brands to create unified experiences for customers, demonstrating that the brand truly knows who they are. And when they do that, they can move past a single transaction to ongoing, personalized engagement that drives revenue, through repeat purchases and brand loyalty. The age of the customer is here, and it’s powered by Salesforce.

That’s partially why we were named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. Check out the full report.