For merchandisers, delivering a compelling digital shopping experience across the dizzying array of channels, touchpoints, and devices that customers use to shop requires a deliberate plan of action. Shoppers have high expectations as they move through a buying journey that often bounces from online to offline and back again.

Ensuring the experience is as consistent as it is relevant means rethinking how your organization adopts and leverages technology to create connected—and meaningful—digital merchandising experiences. 

A digital transformation strategy is what paves the way for success on all fronts. To this end, we’ve broken down the essential steps merchandisers need to connect the dots for customers while driving growth, sales, and exceeding customer expectations.

Digital Transformation Strategy Examples

Here’s how three Monetate clients—all leading brands—incorporate technology, data, and personalization into their digital merchandising approaches:

Product discovery transformation

• Nespresso enhanced product discovery for their different coffee flavors and types by implementing an interactive quiz that asked customers about their taste, preferences, desired brew strength, and coffee drinking habits. Using Monetate’s AI and machine learning features, the platform automatically analyzed these responses to match shoppers with coffees they were likely to enjoy, displaying recommendations as the shopper navigated to key pages of the website. 

Social Proof integration 

• Clarks automated their bestseller badging by implementing real-time social proof messaging across product detail and product listing pages. Previously, their team had to manually update badges for their top 100 products each week. The new system saves a tremendous amount of time by automatically displaying relevant social signals like badges which builds shopper confidence from the product category pages.

Dynamic personalization meets Social Proof

• Iberia Airlines transformed their flight booking experience by creating five different types of social proof messages that display how many times specific flights had been searched (showing 5, 10, 20 or 40 searches depending on the message type). The system adapts these urgency-building messages based on factors like trip length, time spent on site, and whether customers are logged in, ensuring each traveler sees the most relevant messaging for their situation.

Digital Transformation Strategy Steps for Merchandisers

Strategies are like maps that make it clear where you’re starting and where you need to be. In a digital transformation scenario, your strategy is focused on aligning technology investments with business goals, but from a customer-centric perspective. Here are some key steps a merchandiser-focused digital strategy should incorporate.

Step 1: Create your framework

Merchandisers need a clear plan for how digital technology will support key business goals while improving CX. In fact, these two areas are linked. The framework should clearly define how digital technology will support and enhance the online shopping experience for customers. It should map the buying journey (we’ll get to that soon), state business objectives, and state details like time frame and budget. This is the time to lay out clear goals and establish what metrics you’ll track (e.g., conversion rates, sales revenue, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and technology adoption rate, etc.)

Step 2: Map the journey

A journey map documents how customers move through the digital shopping experience from the first interaction with your brand to the last. The goal is to fully understand the journey from the customer’s perspective. Start with entry points—are customers landing on category pages from search engines, arriving via email links to PDPs, or coming through a social media ad to your homepage? 

As you chronicle the customer’s buying journey, you’ll be pinpointing important digital merchandising experiences—site search, category pages, product detail pages, (PDPs) and checkout. These components of ecommerce websites have an outsized impact on helping customers find the right products and motivating them to buy.

Step 3: Identify areas for automation

Automation saves a ton of time, but to implement it correctly you’ll need to take a step back and evaluate your current workflows and processes. Time consuming, repetitive, error prone (and mind numbing) tasks like updating product recommendations and adjusting offers based on inventory availability or trends can be automated with the right tech tool. Monetate’s AI-powered automation focuses on helping retailers scale these types of repetitive processes using real-time customer behavior and sales performance. 

Step 4: Figure out your tech

Digital transformation can’t begin until you’ve done a thorough tech audit. Evaluate every platform and system your merchandising team uses, then identify where data gets trapped between them. Look for integration gaps, like when your product recommendation engine can’t access inventory data or customer purchase history sits isolated in your ESP. Document outdated systems that may lack critical functionality and create a wish list of capabilities you’ll need in 6-12 months, whether that’s A/B testing category pages or personalizing navigation based on shopping behavior.

Step 5: Connect your data

Scattered customer data creates fragmented shopping experiences and missed sales opportunities. Unify data from all your sources—purchase history, loyalty programs, website behavior, support tickets, and offline channels—to build complete customer profiles. Eliminating data silos creates a strong foundation for personalization. Focus on connecting information that drives revenue, like linking inventory levels to product recommendations or using browsing behavior to customize home page layouts and products showcased.

Step 6: Get the humans involved

Digital transformation is defined by technology, but it will fail without people driving it forward. You need strong leadership support and engaged teams to drive and support your initiative. Secure executive champions who understand both the investment required and the long-term payoff. Then build cross-functional teams that blend technical expertise with merchandising knowledge. Importantly, invest in training programs that help everyone adapt to new tools while maintaining focus on customer needs.

Step 7: Measure and optimize

Once you’ve implemented the new tech, trained your employees and begun rolling out new experiences, the measurement and optimization begins. You’ll track progress against the metrics you established in your framework. Use AI-powered testing to experiment with different approaches, like dynamic product recommendations or personalized category pages. 

You can also effectively support optimization efforts with machine learning algorithms that analyze millions of data points to help reveal which experiences drive the most engagement. Use these insights to optimize your strategy, ensuring every change moves you closer to delivering the tailored shopping experiences your customers expect.