As the global leader in omnichannel personalization, we at RichRelevance take pride in providing the most relevant and innovative customer experience to end users. Every day we deliver over half a billion placement views to more than 50 million unique online shoppers worldwide. A shopper journey in our customers site is recorded as a sequence of Views, Clicks and Purchases which we call a Visit. All this user generated data is recorded in our front-end data centers and saved as Avro logs in HDFS on our backend Hadoop cluster. This valuable user data is used across teams to power our products and services.
In this “Age of the Customer”, as Forrester has labeled it – buyers are more empowered than ever before. B2B companies have the biggest challenge in adapting as transparent pricing and omni-channel has quickly become the norm, and the B2B buyer expectations are being set not just by the status quo but by direct competitors as well as best of breed companies raising the bar on customer interactions and experiences.
In the last 15 years, 52% of the Fortune 500 have disappeared. Amazon continues to rapidly disrupt retail, and one-third of the Retail 100 have churned out in the last decade.
Digital is without a doubt the growth driver in the retail industry as a whole. Merchants seeking validation for investments in online and mobile offerings need look no further than the recent holiday season: Cyber Monday alone generated more than $6.5 billion in sales, more than $2 billion of which were transacted via mobile devices.
Delivering Personalized Emails embedded with 1-1 Recommendations and Content is more important than ever in today’s market. Shoppers are inundated with an overwhelming amount of communication from brands, retailers and service providers and are challenged to sort through the masses of emails to click and open the communications and promotions they care about. Which is exactly why, sending basic “Let us know how you liked XYZ” and “Because you bought X, you might like Y” emails don’t cut through the clutter anymore. This type of standard email marketing loses the stickiness and CTR that encourages the shopper to return to the site. Retailers must approach emails with a true 1-1 personalization approach and deliver email content, subject lines, and imagery that is tailored to each individual shopper.
Over the last decade, search technology in ecommerce has barely evolved. Compare your search experience on Google with the results you get from your favourite retailers, and you’ll know what I mean.
The tail end of the Millennial generation (born in 1995) is now entering the workplace and with that comes an associated disposable income. Given our understanding of how many younger people are prioritising experiences over ‘stuff’ – what are the implications on the way retailers invest in technology as they clamour for a portion of pay packets and brand loyalty in a retail environment characterised by choice?
Is new tech creepy or cool? Marketing Week cover the story in their stats of the week.