Personalization and product recommendation technology vendor RichRelevance has appointed industry veteran Diane Kegley vice president of marketing.
With 20 years of experience in multichannel marketing, media and branding experience, Kegley was most recently president of SMA Global, a marketing strategy and production company. Prior to that, she was vice president and chief marketing officer for Stanford Research Institute’s AtomicTangerine, leading global branding, marketing, communications and partner relations.
By Darren Vengroff
Industry watchers predict that overall holiday sales this year will be down, but that a larger percentage of those sales will take place online. According to a recent survey by Burst Media, some 85 percent of consumers will shop online this holiday season. That means if you’re not doing everything you can to boost sales in the online channel, you’re leaving revenue on the table.
Did Wine.com have a recommendation function before RichRelevance?
We had a homegrown tool built by our IT team. It was better than no tool at all but it was limited in what it could do. It made recommendations based on a limited set of information and was not dynamically following the customer’s browse path or purchase history. It wasn’t a strong performer. We contracted RichRelevance, a personalization and recommendations provider company, to manage our recommendation engine.
Exhibitors, attendees, and speakers at last week’s Shop.org Annual Summit were encouraged and excited about the future of ecommerce, both in terms of growth and technology.
In fact, walking around the convention center at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas seemed to make everyone feel like the industry was on the cusp of rapid change, revenue growth, and even greater consumer acceptance.
by Darren Vengroff
Netflix
created the $1 million Netflix Prize
The idea sounded seductively simple: If developers could predict how users would rate a film, they could use that prediction to decide whether it makes sense to recommend the film to them or not.
Search for red Bordeaux wines on Wine.com, for example, and columns on the left and right sides of the landing page will recommend lists of related wines-but no two shoppers will see the same lists, Bergsund says. The underlying recommendation engine is from richrelevance Inc.
Online product recommendations have been around for almost as long as e-commerce itself. Most online retailers today offer some type of product recommendations on their sites, with research proving that presenting shoppers with items that fit their interests boosts sales and increases customer satisfaction. But the truth is, many retailers are not doing all they can with recommendations; they plunk them down on product pages, do little to monitor performance, cross their fingers and just hope the recommendations work to boost sales a bit. Often, there is an initial spike in conversion, but performance tends to fizzle out after a few months.
However, there are simple ways to make recommendations work better–proven tactics that not only drive a greater initial lift than standard recommendations, but also create a lasting and sustainable lift over time.
Every once in a while in most Web surfers’ lives, a suggestion pops up on the screen that leads them to wonder: How did they know that about me? The moment can seem magical, and a bit creepy.