Large Industrial Distributor

• RETAIL SEGMENT: Large Industrial Distributor
• SOLUTION: Engage™
• CHALLENGE: This case study highlights how Engage™ was used to optimize customer engagement— without having to invest intensive manual resources.
• RESULTS: Using RichRelevance Engage™, this supplier achieved the following banner performance:
  • Increased AOV by 13%
  • Increased conversion by 116%
  • Increased revenue by 125%
  • Increased click-through rate by 34%

“What I love about Engage is that it takes us out of the equation in determining what customers would respond to best. Because Engage is based on algorithms, it helps us make that decision.” — Digital Marketing Manager

A large industrial distributor of maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) products and services to multifamily, hospitality, healthcare and government facilities across the United States and Canada. The industry leader carries more than 55,000 products on its website.

The digital marketing team overseeing promotions, email and display marketing and social media, had the daunting task of identifying and placing website banners to better expose a massive product selection and drive revenue from online visitors.

When it came to banners, they noted that “we were seeing poor results on home page banners. Nothing was working. Customers came and left and we simply weren’t getting a lot of traction.”

Moving personalization beyond product recommendations

The retailer tried different programs as an interim step to force banners based on what they thought would work, but then learned about the Engage™ product offered by their existing personalization provider, RichRelevance. Having used its Recommend™ product since 2010, they had already witnessed firsthand how personalized product recommendations help fuel the online path to purchase.

“As soon as we heard about Engage, we were super excited. Its features matched our goal of increasing banner engagement with our customers by leveraging segmentation and targeting, as well as self-optimizing capabilities,” said the digital marketing manager.

RichRelevance Engage maps individual shopper behavior against advanced targeting and audience segmentation tools so that marketers can deliver highly personalized campaigns with relevant content. Its ability to automatically optimize this matching saves valuable time and eliminates the need to run hundreds of manual A/B tests to get content personalization right.

The retailer implemented Engage in August 2013, and has seen significant success in its key metrics, including a 13% increase in AOV (compared to the website AOV of those who didn’t click on a banner), 116% increase in conversion and 125% increase in revenue (as compared to previous banner ad performance, for the latter two metrics).

“What I love about Engage is that it takes us out of the equation in determining what customers would respond to best,” says the team. “Because Engage is based on algorithms, it helps us make that decision.”

Seamless cloud implementation

Adding the Engage product to their site was seamless, and brought not only time savings, but additional benefits when it came to execution and learning. The Digital Marketing Specialist who manages online promotions and internal site display for the business, shares the details: “Before we implemented Engage, we only had one space to do any sort of marketing and banner messages. Other programs allowed us to display marketing banners on different pages, but were still very manual in terms of entering information for each individual target and segment. They involved a lot of people, and designers. With Engage, I’m saving at least several hours of time per campaign. Engage also now allows us to run 50 to 100 campaigns at a time, which we were never able to do before.”

Gleaning customer insights across the purchase journey

In addition, Engage is helping the team learn what customers respond to. “Customers weren’t responding to information or content like brand features and website resources, but were really engaging when it came to promotions.” They have also learned which verticals engage the most, and gleaned best practices to help optimize banner placement, based on their ability to monitor and measure campaign results through the Engage dashboard.

Previously, the digital marketing team only had the opportunity to deliver one banner per industry (out of five total served) per home page per month. Today, this retailer can serve banners not only on the home page, but also on key conversion pages like product, registration, and order confirmation pages—all while testing many different promotions. It is able to meet its goal of optimizing customer engagement via banners that expose the most relevant products to the most applicable shopper segments.

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