What is B2Me commerce?

B2Me commerce, short for "Business-to-Me," represents a modern evolution of personalized commerce where companies tailor products, services, and browsing experiences directly to the unique individual consumer. Unlike traditional B2C (Business-to-Consumer) business models that focus on broad audience segments, B2Me shifts the focus to the unique preferences, behaviors, and customer needs of each customer. It is driven by customer data, powered by AI, and built on the principle that each individual consumer today expects brands to understand and anticipate their desires with precision.

At its core, B2Me commerce is about personalization at scale. It leverages real-time analytics, customer journey mapping, and adaptive technology to deliver hyper-relevant, personalized content, offers, and interactions. Whether through personalized email campaigns, dynamically generated website experiences, or curated product recommendations, B2Me creates a one-to-one relationship between the brand and the individual — turning mass marketing into a personal dialogue.

The B2Me approach reflects a broader shift in consumer expectations in the digital age: people want to feel seen, understood, and valued by the brands they engage with. B2Me commerce answers that demand by making personalization not just a feature, but the foundation of how business is done.

The cornerstone of building authentic, meaningful, memorable, and lasting relationships with customers is personalization.

Clearly, the top priority for B2B(Business to business) brands should be to personalize the end-to-end customer journey and enable various customer segments — e.g. C-suite, IT, R&D, HR, Ops, and so on — to get the answers and advice they need, when they want it.

Yet, if customers clearly want a personalized customer experience, and brands want to use content to make this happen, why isn’t this always the case? That is, despite their significant investments and dedicated marketing efforts, why are some brands unable to personalize the customer journey and create the authentic, robust customer relationships that are so essential for success and growth? Surprisingly, it is because their existing tools and technologies will not let them.

Ideally, brands want to engage each customer on a 1:1 basis, and usher them along the customer journey. In other words, they want to deliver personalized digital marketing at scale. But practically, they struggle to do this because they don’t know who each customer is, or what they’re doing. So, brands are obliged to do the next best thing: create an inventory of (hopefully relevant) content such as articles, guides, whitepapers, webinars, datasheets, case studies, and so on, and deploy them across various touchpoints on their website.

The idea is that customers will self-select the content they want. The problem, however, is that many customers are not willing to do this — especially early in the customer journey, when the relationship is new and not “sticky.” As marketing executive and Forbes Council member Caroline Tien-Spalding points out:

Therefore, something else is needed that would enable brands to stop hoping and start knowing what content is going to resonate with different types of customers. This something else is AI and ML, and it unlocks the power of personalized marketing — which is the gateway to B2Me.

B2Me commerce is arguably not so much an evolution of B2B, as it is a recollection that behind every “B” are several “HBs”: human beings. The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves a number of decision-makers. And while each of these decision-makers share a common goal — getting the best solution for their organization — they have different perspectives and paradigms. For example, those in IT and InfoSec focus on data security and compliance.

Those in operations focus on logistics and implementation. Those in human resources focus on workforce management and culture. And those in the C-suite focus on cost, ROI, and strategy. And of course, there is often considerable overlap.

B2Me marketing embraces this complex reality and creates a landscape for customers that is hyper-personalized, convenient, seamless, and integrated across devices and platforms — similar to what B2C customers expect today.

As David Michela, VP Digital Solutions at Horizontal Digital, observes:

AI and ML (which technically is a type of AI where systems are designed to perform a singular objective) makes B2Me possible by automating personalized marketing at scale. It is driven by real-time business intelligence (gleaning data to know what a specific customer is actually interested in) vs. only predictive analytics (analyzing historical data to guess what groups of customers are hopefully interested in).

Here are some of the key ways AI and ML are enabling B2Me, while also helping brands get closer to their customers than ever before:

• Analyzing the behavior of customers on a website — what they do, when they do it, how long they do it for, whether they have done it before, and so on — and automatically placing them into pre-built audience segments.
• Identifying when the behavior of customers does not conform with pre-built audience segments, and automatically creating new ones.
• Automatically delivering specific content recommendations to customers in each segment, and at the optimal time in their respective customer journey. For example, customers who are fairly early in the journey can be prompted to watch a webinar or download an ebook that promises to clarify and inform their preliminary research process. Alternatively, customers much further along the journey who are ready to make a decision can be prompted with testimonials, case studies, and other kinds of social proof to help them confidently move forward into a transaction.
• Running automated split A/B tests to measure the performance of various pieces of content (e.g. ebooks, whitepapers, etc.), in order to accurately measure which are delivering the most value and ROI — and which need to be re-invented or retired.
• Automatically identifying what an image or video portrays, then tagging them accordingly. In addition to breaking down content silos, this frees up marketers to focus their time and effort on higher-value tasks and priorities.

Earlier, we noted that B2Me is about helping brands get closer to customers than ever before. However, this does not mean that brands must ask customers to reveal personally identifying information (PII) — which is not something many consumers will do; especially early in the relationship. Instead, brands can capture a range of rich, actionable intelligence through non-PII interaction data, such as:

• Visit details (e.g. time, day, location, traffic source).
• Campaign source (e.g. messaging or targeting used in an acquisition campaign that brought customers to a website).
• Onsite behavior (e.g. pages visited, clicks, content accessed, galleries viewed) clicked on, content consumed, galleries viewed, etc.

All of this data can be used to drive automated personalized marketing, but in a new way that is not perceived by customers as invasive or aggressive. Customers will feel that the relationship is collaborative — not creepy.

B2Me commerce is more than just a marketing trend — it's a strategic shift that acknowledges the individual behind every click, view, and decision. By leveraging the right tools and technologies, brands can deliver truly human-centered experiences at scale. Whether you're just beginning to explore personalization or looking to optimize your existing strategy, B2Me offers a roadmap for building stronger, more meaningful customer relationships in the digital age.

For additional insights, dive into additional content within the Sitecore Resources, featuring thought leadership content on personalized marketing (B2Me), marketing automation through AI and ML, and more.