CMSWire TV
The Gist
- Composable foundation. The Vitamin Shoppe adopted a phased composable strategy to reduce risk, modernize its tech stack and enable faster iteration.
- Omnichannel in action. Digital and physical experiences are converging—from in-store POS revamps to future goals like endless aisle and cross-channel cart visibility.
- Real personalization goals. Uman Chan outlines what one-to-one personalization really looks like beyond name-based greetings—focusing on timing, intent and customer context.
In this episode of CMSWire TV: The Digital Experience Show, CMSWire Editor-in-Chief Dom Nicastro sits down with Uman Chan, director of digital technology at The Vitamin Shoppe, for a wide-ranging conversation on composable architecture, omnichannel execution and modern personalization.
Chan shares practical lessons from The Vitamin Shoppe’s multi-year journey into composable digital commerce, including how a phased migration enabled rapid wins and long-term agility. He also unpacks how the brand is connecting in-store and online experiences—and why true personalization must go beyond greetings and product recs to support context-aware customer journeys.
Editor's note: This transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.
Table of Contents
- How the Vitamin Shoppe Is Building a Composable Digital Experience
- Why Composable Architecture Makes Vendor Flexibility Possible
- How to Vet Vendors and Choose the Right Tools in a Composable Stack
- How The Vitamin Shoppe Executed a Seamless Composable Migration
- From Unified Commerce to One-to-One Personalization
How the Vitamin Shoppe Is Building a Composable Digital Experience
Setting the Stage With a Tech Leader
Dom Nicastro: Hey everybody, Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief of CMSWire.com here for another edition of CMSWire TV’s The Digital Experience. We're here with Uman Chan. He is the Senior Director of Digital Technology at The Vitamin Shoppe.
We’re going to get into all about building your composable digital experience stack — and how that's such an easy journey. And he's going to tell us how to do it in, like, a minute. We’re going to get him off the air, right, Uman?
Uman Chan: Exactly.
Dom Nicastro: No, this is a long story, and we'll get in as much as we can with the practical tips.
Uman, I just wanted to give you the floor real quick to talk about your background and how you arrived in this role. What’s your day-to-day output like in this role with The Vitamin Shoppe?
Driving Digital Transformation From the Ground Up
Uman Chan: Yeah, so I’m Uman Chan. Hi everybody. I'm the Senior Director of Digital Technology at The Vitamin Shoppe. I've always been a technologist at heart. I started as a software engineer and gradually worked my way up into a leadership role. I’ve worked in retail for the last — I think — about 10 or 15 years now, and I ended up at The Vitamin Shoppe.
When I came in, it was very much your typical monolith e-commerce platform sort of environment. So that’s why we saw a lot of opportunities to modernize things.
My day-to-day involves maintaining and enabling the business to deliver a very seamless experience across our digital channels. My team is responsible for all the technology that powers the digital experience — the maintenance of it, the modernization of it, and also the enhancements that are associated with it.
Balancing Innovation With Business Needs
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, so you're the team that's working with all these crazy, unending requests from the business side of things — marketing and those folks.
Uman Chan: It’s marketing, the whole nine yards. Correct.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, we're getting more and more of a sense here at CMSWire — with the types of people we interview for this show and our marketing stories — that it's leaning toward the tech folks, because you guys have such an important role in that. So would you describe yourself as coming from a tech background?
Uman Chan: Correct. Yeah. I think traditionally, technology has been seen as sort of a cost center. But more and more businesses are recognizing it as an enabler — because it enables the business to move fast and keep up with the customer’s demands.
From Legacy Systems to Composable Commerce
Dom Nicastro: Yeah. And one of the things that's never-ending with your teams — and many teams we talk to — is just constantly trying to build these modern digital experience tech stacks that the average person like me can just use easily. You’ve got all these systems from different vendors that have to talk to each other.
This journey for The Vitamin Shoppe in particular goes back almost a decade, right? In terms of modernizing legacy technology — if you could take me back a little bit, what was the genesis of saying, “All right, we need to improve here, we need to become more flexible and composable,” versus staying in a legacy environment?
Breaking the Monolith, One Piece at a Time
Uman Chan: Yeah, of course. So I joined The Vitamin Shoppe in 2017. Just to paint the picture of what it looked like at the time: it was a small team, a team of core Java developers. We had a monolith e-comm application — your traditional go-to that kind of does everything. It’s a black box. So when things break, we don’t really know what’s going on inside the black box.
Deployment cycles were long. Generally, we were an agile team, so we had two-week sprint cycles, and at the end of each sprint we had a deployment. But even if you changed one line of code, the whole application had to be redeployed and restarted. So that was the structure — and it was a slow process.
I still remember we used to have 2:00 a.m. calls where the whole team would get on the line and basically pray that everything went right. If something went wrong, everyone was on standby trying to fix the problem. Obviously, we’ve moved away from that — but we definitely saw a lot of opportunities there.
Embracing MACH Principles Without the Label
Uman Chan: So in terms of a composable commerce or MACH journey, we didn’t actually set out with that as the explicit goal. It was more like: what can we do to get to a better place?
The approach and principle we used was: whatever we touch — when we get business-approved projects — we modernize that part. We pull that piece out of the monolith and build services outside of it. So we started gradually doing that.
At first, we pulled out our front end so that it was headless. That way, if we made changes on the back end, we didn’t have to touch the front end. Then we continued doing that.
The first big project where we pulled a lot of services out of the e-comm platform was our search project. We modernized our search stack and our merchandising stack. That also gave us the opportunity to build out some cloud infrastructure so we could start layering things on top of it.
Over time, we actually built a lot of momentum. We started with what we call the “browse pages,” which are read-only, and then we eventually built up enough velocity that we said, “Hey, this actually resembles all the MACH principles. Composable commerce makes sense.” And we went from there.
Why Composable Architecture Makes Vendor Flexibility Possible
What MACH Really Means
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, and you mentioned the MACH acronym — microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless, right? Let's say someone’s coming into the show, and we do have a lot of people in your shoes that really get it, they understand what MACH is. But…
Uman Chan: Correct.
Dom Nicastro: Let’s account for some of those first-timers coming in. “Oh, MACH, what’s that? I kinda know… I kinda don’t.” Walk me through that MACH idea. And there’s an alliance that you’re a part of — you spoke at their symposium in Chicago. I was there. There was a lot of good conversation about that approach. So kind of give us the skinny. How do you see the MACH sort of approach?
Modularity Explained With LEGO Blocks
Uman Chan: Yeah, the way I think about it — even when I first sold the idea to our business, to the CFO and CEO at the time — the way I described it is basically: think about it as building with LEGO blocks. Traditionally, you mold this whole thing — your e-comm website — as one big piece. If something breaks, you either rely on the vendor to fix it or you have to replace the whole thing. You migrate, you upgrade… it’s a big lift.
In this case, it’s modular. You have these LEGO bricks and pieces you can build on top of. It allows you to have a strategy where you can pick best-of-breed solutions. If one piece doesn’t work for you, you can swap it out for another.
For example, the search engine I talked about — that was the first thing we put in, but also the first thing we had to replace. The initial vendor didn’t really work well for us after a few years. So we swapped out that piece for another search engine. And that became a lot easier because of the composable approach.
Why Swapping Vendors Becomes Simpler
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, when you said you swapped another vendor — that’s a big statement in this world, right? Some organizations are like, “We could never swap this vendor — the headache, the heartache, it’d be too much.”
But with your approach, why is it so much easier in that modular setting to just rip and replace? Why isn’t it overwhelming the systems? Why doesn’t it take a year to even get rolled out? How is that happening so quickly now?
Uman Chan: Yeah — we don’t believe in vendor lock-in. That’s one of the reasons we embrace this approach. When we integrate with a vendor, we isolate all the vendor-specific logic and interfaces so that it’s confined to certain services.
The rest of our system — the parts talking to the services we’ve built on top of it — are insulated. We don’t have to touch everything. Traditionally, you’d have had to change all the things that bleed into your system. In this case, we only need to change the specific services that talk to that vendor. That drastically reduces the effort when you need to swap out your tool or vendor.
The Tradeoffs of Best-of-Breed Approaches
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, and with that modular, composable, best-of-breed approach — what are some of the challenges? One that’s often talked about is that it brings in more vendors, right? Maybe more support teams to work with, more integration pieces to contend with.
Do you deal with those challenges day to day? And how do you manage integration or API challenges?
Uman Chan: Yes and no, I’d say. There are definitely pros and cons, like you’re alluding to. When I say best-of-breed, it’s not just vendors — you could also bring things in-house.
Our philosophy is: do what makes sense for the particular application. If something is more specific to your organization, it might make sense to build it internally. But if something is proven and out there, and you don’t want to reinvent the wheel, pick the best vendor.
And yes, there are cases where you end up with more vendors — and that’s okay. Sometimes, working with different vendors gives you the benefit of specialization. They’re solving the problem in a unique way. They often have roadmaps you can influence, because now you’re a very specific use case for them. It actually works both ways — you help shape the vendor’s product too.
Addressing Composable’s Biggest Criticisms
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, because this has been a great source of conversation and debate. Around the same time as that Chicago conference in April, there was a post from a former member of the MACH Alliance that stirred up a lot of healthy discussion on LinkedIn.
It got into both sides — the value of composable, but also some of the challenges. Some of the main ones: architecture complexity, skyrocketing expenses due to multiple vendors, burden on business users, increased security risks.
If you could address some of those big-picture challenges — is there initial upfront cost when moving to composable? And does it eventually even out? Do you realize ROI if you do it right?
Complexity Requires the Right Tools and Team
Uman Chan: Yeah, so I think with composable commerce, there’s definitely more complexity to manage. There’s no doubt about that.
The question is: what are you doing to manage that complexity? It is, at heart, a distributed system — and by nature, that means there’s more for your team to manage.
You can either scale up the team — which is generally not feasible, financially — or you can put in tools to help manage it. And to me, that’s really the key. It’s one of the most overlooked things for a lot of organizations.
Webinar
Sep
25
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Register
Webinar
Sep
25
Call Spoofing Trends Financial Institutions Can't Afford to Ignore
Don't let robocalls sabotage your customer relationships. Learn how to secure your voice channel.
Register
Webinar
Oct
15
Agentic AI Playbook Real-World Customer Service Use Cases You Can Deploy Now
Boost self-service by 30% and slash call volume by 63% with agentic AI.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
CX Reality Check: What Your Customers Are Really Thinking
Register now and get the insights you need to not just meet rising expectations, but exceed them.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Content Leaders Collective: What a Good CCMS Actually Looks Like
Discover how content leaders transform clunky systems into growth engines — and why your competitors are ahead.
Watch Now
You can build this really pretty stack — like an F1 car — but if you don’t have the team to manage it, it won’t work. So with tooling, you have to upskill your team to build and maintain it. But you also have to "up-tool" so that the team can support a more distributed system.
Related Article: Why Composability Is the Future of Digital Experience Platforms
How to Vet Vendors and Choose the Right Tools in a Composable Stack
Why Internal Alignment Matters in Vendor Selection
Dom Nicastro: Right, right. If you don't have the team in place — and Europe’s a great example. One of the folks I talked to in Chicago, a practitioner just like you at a sports brand, was in the same role — a digital technology leader.
He said when they put in the system, they learned their team wasn't Java trained — and that tool was Java-based. Little things like that come up. So I guess the question is: is upfront vetting of the vendor crucial in this situation? Should you know everything ahead of time, and who should be involved in that tool selection?
Uman Chan: Yeah, for sure. We ran into this a lot. In the past, there was a situation where we’d hear from marketing, “Hey, we signed up for this vendor,” and now we had to integrate with it. But once we dug in, we’d find it didn’t integrate well.
So we’ve actually developed a very sophisticated RFP process where we have all the right people involved. We send out all the questions upfront, and we vet the vendors. We do a lot of calls — a business functional deep dive, a technical deep dive — so we ask all those questions.
And that also speaks to your earlier point — that’s one of the good things about having multiple vendors. Now you can really pick one that suits your team from both the business side and technical implementation side.
Whereas in the past, if you had one vendor for multiple things, it usually wasn’t one-size-fits-all. Now you’re specialized. You can pick and choose a vendor that really fits your organization’s architecture, business needs — and even from a cost perspective, you’ve got more leverage.
Why Tool Evaluation Should Be a Team Effort
Dom Nicastro: All right, I’m getting my takeaways in my head, Uman — and one of them is: don’t let the marketers choose anything on their own. We’ve done a lot of content on who owns tech — is it IT, the CMO?
Uman Chan: I didn’t say that!
On a serious note, I think it’s really important to get input from all the different teams. That’s how you choose a tool that fits the entire organization. The truth is, in the sales process, a lot of things sound great — until you actually implement it and it’s in production. Then you start to see a lot of things you weren’t considering.
That’s why it’s important for the people who are implementing and using it to really vet it. One thing we do is actually request to do a demo — and I don’t mean a standard demo. I mean an actual POC where we integrate the tool in a staging environment. That way, we can try integrating with it and have the actual users run through a lot of scenarios.
It’s really about trying before you buy.
Vendor Vetting Checklist
Key criteria to assess before committing to a composable vendor.
| Criteria | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Proof of Concept Access | Allows teams to test real integrations in staging environments |
| Team Compatibility | Ensures tech stack and skills align (e.g., Java, microservices) |
| Support for Headless APIs | Improves composability and integration speed |
| Security & Compliance Transparency | Identifies potential red flags early in high-stakes environments |
Warning Signs From Vendors During Evaluation
Dom Nicastro:
Uman Chan: From my experience, the vendors we end up choosing had no problem with that — because they’re confident in their tools and feel comfortable doing it. On the other hand, if a vendor shies away from it, that’s usually a yellow flag. And we question why that’s the case.
Dom Nicastro: Okay. Yeah, well — we're not going to buy it if you don’t let us see how it integrates with our stack.
Uman Chan: Exactly. You wouldn’t buy a car without test-driving it, right? It’s the same thing.
Why Big Platforms Can’t Do It All
Dom Nicastro: Another question I have — and this is coming from a user, too. I use a CMS. I use a marketing automation platform. Why can’t these tools just be good on their own?
I’ve been trying for years to figure that out. I go to conferences, and I see all these third-party booths showcasing what you can do on top of the centralized martech platform. And I think: why the heck can’t the original tool do that? Is it just the reality that big platforms like CMS, marketing automation, CRM — are always going to need constant evolution and third-party add-ons?
Uman Chan: That’s part of it. I do think when something tries to do too many things, it’s not really specialized in anything.
You’re going to hear a lot of car analogies from me because I’m a really big car guy — but it’s like using all-season tires. It’s an all-season compromise. If you use summer tires in the summer and winter tires in the winter, you’re going to get better performance and specialty.
It’s the same here. One-size-fits-all is fine for the mass market. But when your organization or business needs something specialized, the all-in-one tool will miss something.
Specialized Tools Are Like Seasonal Tires
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, that’s a real thing, huh? I have to ask the car provider next time — when they try to upsell me on the winter tires — I’ll say, “Okay, that makes sense.” It makes sense to you as a car guy, right?
Uman Chan: It does make sense — depending on where you live. So it’s kind of like your organization and where you are. If you live in a place… okay, yeah, then you probably want snow tires.
Dom Nicastro: All right. Well, I’m in New England. I think it makes sense.
But for us, it’s like: “Does it have four-wheel drive, kid?” All right, you’re in. You're good. We don’t think much about tire types. Some people do. But I like that analogy — you’ve got different models for different times.
Your approach at The Vitamin Shoppe — you used a phased...
Uman Chan: [laughs]
How The Vitamin Shoppe Executed a Seamless Composable Migration
A Phased, Value-Driven Rollout Strategy
Dom Nicastro: A phased, value-driven migration path — and you executed a staged launch with zero downtime, even for checkout and profile. Walk me through those efforts. I mean, they sound so good, but it must have been a lot of work to get there.
Uman Chan: Yeah, for sure.
The approach was half by design, half by necessity. We don’t have a lot of budget. We don’t have the luxury of saying, “Let’s stop the world and do a big migration for a year and a half.” The reality is we had to build it into existing projects to make it work.
But that also de-risks us, right? There’s no big-bang migration where we shut down the old site, bring up the new one, migrate all the data, and push the button three hours later hoping it works. Instead, the phased approach allowed us to de-risk everything while delivering business ROI with every phase. That was a really good strategy — and one that made sense for our organization.
Obviously, it doesn’t apply to every organization, but in a lot of cases, it makes sense if you’re looking to deliver incremental value as you go. That’s a tremendous benefit of composable commerce.
Zero Downtime Launch Tactics
For our actual launch last September — where we rolled out checkout, profile, and cart — we implemented a very sophisticated launch strategy. We used feature dials, dark launches, internal launches, and even scaled by geolocation.
That meant running both stacks in parallel. The customer wouldn’t see any difference — but depending on your location, you could be on one stack or the other without knowing it. We had to invest time and dollars to build that out, but it was worthwhile.
To your point, we expected there to be issues. We launched 10% externally first and had a schedule to ramp up traffic to the new stack. But it performed so well we had to accelerate the schedule. What was supposed to be a week between phases turned into a day or two — and everything went off without a hitch.
My team and I were watching the stack thinking, “Okay, where’s the issue?” We expected a problem. But there wasn’t one. It just worked. The strategy was very, very robust.
Migration Strategy Options
How phased, value-driven migrations compare with traditional replatforming methods.
| Approach | Advantages | Risks/Challenges |
|---|---|---|
| Phased, Value-Driven Migration | Lower risk, incremental ROI, no downtime | Requires more orchestration and long-term planning |
| Big Bang Migration | Single deployment, clean cutover | High risk of failure, longer downtime, resource-intensive |
How Agile and Sprint Cadence Evolved
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, and those issues — the dev folks always want to get ahead of that. “We know you’re going to see this. We’re on top of it,” when the marketers come at you with support tickets.
You mentioned your sprint strategy earlier — two-week sprints. Has that evolved? Are you doing quicker sprints in some cases or has it pretty much stayed intact?
Uman Chan: Correct.
Dom Nicastro: So are you laser-focused on that two-week sprint cycle in your Agile?
Uman Chan: Yeah, so we’ve stuck with two-week sprints from a development standpoint. But releases can happen on demand. We actually do multiple releases throughout a sprint.
The idea is to break up changes into smaller chunks so that if you fail, you fail fast and recover fast. That gives you a much quicker feedback loop. In the old world, you’d wait and wait, bundle everything together, something breaks, and then you have to sift through everything to find what went wrong.
Now, if something breaks, we know exactly what caused it. Obviously, we don’t break a lot of things in production — don’t get me wrong — but when something does go wrong, it’s much easier to pinpoint and recover.
Where AI Is (and Isn’t) Making an Impact
Dom Nicastro: And in all this effort — in 22 minutes of conversation — we haven’t mentioned artificial intelligence. So we’re going to mention it now.
Since November 30, 2022 — ChatGPT’s birthday — has anything changed significantly for your dev or marketing teams in terms of how AI is literally, tangibly helping you build faster and better?
Uman Chan: So I’d say for us, AI is still in an experimental stage.
We do have features in production that are driven by AI, as part of our vendors’ software. For example, recommendations — that’s a very common use case. There are also algorithms helping with replenishment and similar logic.
Internally, we’re leveraging AI for a lot of mundane tasks. On the development side, we’ve been experimenting with AI for testing — that’s a big area where we see opportunity. More automated testing means we can speed up the development cycle.
The tricky part for us — being in the health and wellness space — is that we have to be really careful about what we claim and what we don’t. Even something as simple as using GenAI to write product descriptions — that’s not something we can just automate. It still requires human review to make sure we’re not claiming anything that could be harmful to a customer.
So we’re definitely exploring AI — and doing a lot behind the scenes to speed things up — but we’re not letting it take over 100% of any area of the business.
AI Hallucinations Are a Real Risk
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, you’ve got to watch out for those AI oopsies. Like, “That statistic wasn’t in the 85-page report I just had you digest for me.” You’ve got to verify. It makes stuff up. It’s like an intern — an intern that makes stuff up and doesn’t cooperate.
I always compare AI to an intern. You have to train it well and—
Uman Chan: Exactly. Right. AI hallucination is a real thing.
From Unified Commerce to One-to-One Personalization
AI’s Role in Enhancing Human Effectiveness
Dom Nicastro: Train it to be your brand voice — to know your brand, your people, your customers — and then it can be a big help.
Uman Chan: Yeah, that’s definitely a big opportunity. I believe AI will help everyone do their job more effectively. It’s not there to replace people — it’s there to help people be more effective, if you use it the right way.
Connecting Digital and Brick-and-Mortar Systems
Dom Nicastro: 100% agree. And actually, I didn’t ask — The Vitamin Shoppe has a pretty sizable brick-and-mortar presence, correct?
Uman Chan: Yeah, we have over — I think — 650 stores now.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, that’s a lot. So in your world as a digital technology director, is there any crossover with the brick-and-mortar world? Are you building systems to help those teams power better in-store experiences, even if they’re not always in the digital arena?
Uman Chan: For sure.
Last year — as if it wasn’t crazy enough to completely revamp our cart, checkout, and online experience — we also revamped our in-store systems and POS. That’s now microservices-based, too. Right now, the promo side is common across systems, but the idea is to eventually enable truly unified commerce. It’s kind of a fancy term, but really—
Dom Nicastro: Amen.
Uman Chan: —it just means doing omnichannel really well. It should be completely seamless across all the different touchpoints customers have with your brand.
Where we’re at now is that we have the right foundations in place. Next, we’re looking at tightening those experiences even more and creating synergy between the channels. One of our stretch goals for the near future is enabling endless aisle and cart continuity across touchpoints.
Endless Aisle and Cross-Channel Cart Continuity
So for example, if you’re on your way home from work, you pull out the app and see an energy drink you want to grab for your son. You can check inventory and do BOPUS. When you get to the store, an associate can pull up your cart from online and say, “You’ve got four items — we have three in stock, and we can ship the last one to your house.”
That becomes a seamless way to get the products you want, how you want, when you want.
Related Article: Phygital CX: Where Digital and Physical Meet in Retail
Bridging Customer Expectations Across Channels
Dom Nicastro: I need more of that in my life, Uman, I do. My wife sends me out to pick things up, and then I get to the store and — “Well, it’s not available.” But the app said it was. All those disconnects between digital and physical are frustrating for customers. When it happens, I sympathize with the brand, because I write about this stuff and understand how it works.
Uman Chan: [laughs] Absolutely.
Dom Nicastro: My wife doesn’t sympathize at all. She says, “It was available. It should be there when my husband gets there.” So I’m sure you’re watching the whole physical-digital fusion — what they call phygital, right?
Uman Chan: Yeah, absolutely. As retailers, we sometimes fall into the trap of thinking in terms of how systems work — and that creates a gap. But the customer doesn’t care about your internal structure.
To the customer, it’s simple: I’ll shop with you or I’ll shop with someone else. That’s the only difference that matters. If you don’t make it seamless, they’ll walk — and you might lose that customer for life.
Committing to Seamless Experiences and Speed
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, the brick-and-mortar Vitamin Shoppe associate can’t say, “It’s Uman’s fault, he’s on the digital team — they didn’t update the repository.” The customer just wants to know what happened.
This has been so much to munch on in this conversation. I want to close with one more question — what excites you most about the rest of this year and beyond in terms of building your composable digital experience stack?
Uman Chan: Yeah. We definitely have a lot of the right foundations in place now to truly deliver a seamless, homogenized experience. So the ability to move fast — to be agile — excites me. That’s key, especially in the past few years. The pace of change has accelerated, and that’s only going to continue.
If there’s one certainty, it’s that there will be change. And we’re more equipped for that now.
Redefining Personalization for Today’s Customer
The other big focus for us is personalization. I know it’s a term that’s been thrown around for the last 15 years, with different flavors of meaning. But to us, personalization really means next best action: What does the customer want? How do we make sure they have it, at the right time, at the right touchpoint?
Dom Nicastro: Yeah.
Uman Chan: And when I say “at the right time,” I don’t just mean product recommendations or greeting the customer by name. It’s also about understanding where they are in their journey.
Maybe they need education. Maybe it’s just content. Maybe it’s an offer to help them convert. That’s really where we want to go in terms of personalization.
Levels of Personalization Maturity
How brands evolve their personalization strategies over time.
| Level | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| One-to-Many | Same message for all users | Email blast promoting a sale |
| One-to-Segment | Messages tailored to groups | New customer vs. returning customer campaigns |
| One-to-One | Individualized content and offers | Next best action based on behavior and preferences |
From Segment-Based to One-to-One Personalization
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, that’s a big journey. Like you said — 15 years of conversation and a lot of struggles. In our digital customer experience survey, we asked whether personalization reality is one-to-many, one-to-some, or one-to-segment. There are a lot of ways to slice it.
But with a consumer brand like yours, I’m assuming your marketers want true one-to-one.
Uman Chan: Yeah, 100%.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah. Well, good luck with that. That’s not easy — but if you can pull it off consistently, that’s a huge brand win.
Uman Chan, I appreciate you coming on *The Digital Experience Show* here with CMSWire. It’s been a pleasure. Sorry we didn’t physically connect in Chicago at the conference, but we’ll see you at the next one.
Good luck on your digital experience tech stack journey, and thanks again for joining us.
Uman Chan: For sure. Likewise. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Dom. Thanks for having me.
Dom Nicastro: Bye now.
