- RETAIL SEGMENT: Fashion
- PRODUCT: Personalized Recommendations
- CHALLENGE: Manual, non-personalized product recommendations. Confusing navigation. Invisible long tail products
- RESULTS:15% Growth of Online Sales. Improved navigation and discreet recommendations resulted in an enhanced customer experience. Long tail articles remain visible and don’t turn into shelf ware
Discreet Personalization for Improved Navigation
The fashion brand GANT was founded in 1949 on the American East Coast by the Ukrainian emigrant Bernard Gantmacher. Originally specializing in shirts, the company was particularly popular with students at Ivy League universities and laid the foundation for American sportswear with its casualness and sportiness. After the takeover by Swedish companies in the 1960s, GANT expanded globally. In Germany, the company now employs more than 450 people, operates over 30 of its own stores, 6 outlets, and supplies exclusive wholesale customers at over 700 points of sale.
In 2013, GANT launched its German eCommerce site, which was very well received by customers and exceeded all expectations with high double-digit growth rates. Despite this success, GANT continuously analyzed the shop and identified potential for improvement.
Product Detail Pages Were a Dead End
GANT discovered a couple of key issues. Product detail pages were only accessible via the main menu navigation, impacting a customer’s ability to locate products, often leading to bouncing and unsuccessful shopping sessions. In addition, manual product recommendations only offered seasonal looks and did not take a customers’ preferences or behaviors into account.
“With the old system, maintaining the recommendations was very time-consuming,” said Werner Hammer, Head of eCommerce at GANT. “In addition, we saw a significant advantage in providing customers with recommendations that were of interest to them. With a recommendation engine we would be able to easily show what our customers really want.”
“Invisible products“
GANT listed each of their products in every color variant, impacting the amount of different products that could be shown on the main product category page. This meant customers could miss products they may be interested in as they were pushed deeper into sub-listing pages.
“In order to improve the navigation on our website and prevent articles from getting lost in the flood of offers, we looked around for a recommendation engine,” says Werner Hammer. “We wanted the solution to be discreet and unobtrusive in showing customers recommendations that really interest them, and in no way give them the feeling of being overwhelmed”.
Performance and Integration Capabilities for Step-by-Step Optimization
Overall, the solution had to fit the company’s conservative eCommerce approach, requiring the software to gradually incorporate and optimize personalization allowing the brand to maintain some level of control and override, allowing for a unique “man + machine” capability. After an exploratory phase in which various solutions were evaluated, the German GANT team chose RichRelevance Recommend as their personalization solution for its high performance and comprehensive integration capabilities.
RichRelevance Recommend™ uses powerful machine learning and a comprehensive set of algorithms to show customers product recommendations tailored to their individual needs. Mirroring an experienced salesperson in a retail store, a “super-algorithm” evaluates the anonymous navigation data to select which of the more than 150 pre-developed recommendation algorithms is able to show customers exactly those recommendations that best matches their needs.
After a short implementation phase, during which GANT was supported by experienced RichRelevance consultants, the German eCommerce site launched in 2016 with Recommend.
Significant Sales Growth and Improved Navigation
Since the go-live of Recommend in 2016, GANT has seen a lot of improvement in the web shop and an additional growth in online sales of 15% for purchases attributed to the RichRelevance product recommendations.
“We have put our trust in the RichRelevance personalization platform from the outset and have seen a clear improvement in online sales. Customers are guided discreetly – depending on their preferences – to the products they are actually interested in – all automatically and without time-consuming manual maintenance”.
RichRelevance’s product recommendations have significantly improved navigation and thus the customer experience. By using the personalized product recommendations, GANT was also able to solve the problem of long tail items getting buried amongst other more well known, trending products.
To further enhance the customer experience, the company plans to deploy RichRelevance personalization within its email newsletter and for merchandising in the future.
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- RETAIL SEGMENT:Food and Beverages
- PRODUCT: Personalized Recommendations
- CHALLENGE: Wine.com.br was looking for a way to engage and re-engage their audience, to encourage conversion and repurchases. To do this, Wine.com.br developed a custom email marketing campaign, containing personalized recommendations that enhance the customer experience and content relevancy.
- RESULTS:Using the Relevance Cloud™, to offer highly personalized recommendations the email campaign generated more than 30% of the day’s revenue and achieved a 16.38% conversion rate. An A/B test demonstrated that the personalization platform from RichRelevance had the capacity to convert 246% more than the tool which was previously used.
Wine.com.br is the largest wine e-commerce in Latin America and the third largest in the world. Today, it offers over 1,500 fine wine labels, as well as accessories for wine tasting and gourmet products. The company owns the Wine Club, with over 140 thousand associated. In 2015, Wine expanded its presence to the beer market, through WBeer.com.br, now www.beer.com.br.
Wine.com.br was elected the sixth most innovative company in Brazil by DOM Strategy Partners, and got the first place in the online retail category. It has also earned the title of second best e-commerce in Brazil in usability and communication with the client, in the study Best in Self-Service, conducted by E-Consulting.
Challenge
Wine.com.br wanted to create completely personal communications to engage their customers within email to drive clicks, promotional engagement and increase conversion.
Solution
Recommend is part of the RichRelevance Experience Suite that enables rapid implementation and delivers on true 1-1 personalized experiences throughout the entire customer journey. With personalization deployed, customers engagement and loyalty increases, ultimately driving sales and conversion.
How it Happened
Wine.com.br analyzed their email promotional campaigns and sought to increase conversion from email. To determine the best provider for personalized emails Wine.com.br conducted a comparative test between RichRelevance and the in-house Sommelier’s Recommendations. RichRelevance powered 50% of the email personalization within the test and the in-house Sommelier’s Recommendations the other 50%.
The campaign was focused in the Saudade Day (January 30th), a day to remember good times once had, feelings of nostalgia. The focus of the campaign was to deliver personalized recommendations that feel more human, creating a deeper connection with the brand, simulating a friend’s recommendation, who would be familiar with your taste.
By monitoring the engagement and clicks derived from the email campaign and the website visits, Wine.com.br was able to measure the performance of RichRelevance’s campaign’s vs the in-house Sommelier’s Recommendation.
Results
Leveraging RichRelevance’s XenAI platform combined with Wine.com.br’s email marketing tool, Wine.com.br was able to set themselves apart from competitors, offering highly personalized and relevant email communications.
As a result, the campaign achieved outstanding results, delivering increases of more than 77.6% in the conversion rate and 8x higher average revenue per email in some segments. The Personalization Cloud™ drove 30.79% of the day’s revenue, representing 34.71% of generated purchases (in a day), resulting in a conversion rate of 10.94%, 26% higher than the brand’s average.
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- RETAIL SEGMENT: Fashion & Apparel
- PRODUCT: Experience Personalization Suite
- CHALLENGE: For the launch of its first-ever eCommerce offering, the largest Brazilian fast-fashion retailer, Riachuelo, wanted to deliver a cutting-edge personalized search experience that would dynamically prioritize shoppers’ individual preferences, at scale.
- RESULTS:15% the total visitors use On-site search and it drives conversion at a 3x higher rate than the site overall
Riachuelo is the largest fashion company in Brazil, with more than 300 stores and 40.000 employees, a sophisticated supply chain that supports manufacturing 90% of the apparel it sells. In the past decade, the 70-year-old company has remade itself in the image of Zara and H&M, bringing “fast fashion” to Brazil’s growing upwardly-mobile population. The company prides itself on delivering 200 new styles daily to even its most far-fung locations.
In addition to a line of everyday basics and fast-fashion pieces that anticipate momentary trends, Riachuelo also ofers higher-end collections that periodically feature collaborations with top-name designers such as Donatella Versace. The model has been so successful that Riachuelo sustained solid year-over-year sales growth even through the country’s recent economic turbulence.
Challenge
Riachuelo has long offered rich web content and active social media communities, and decided to add an eCommerce presence in 2016. Riachuelo’s stores are tailored to local markets, with different footprints and assortments as well as personalized services for in-store shoppers. As the company ramped up to support online selling, it needed to replicate that one-to-one experience in tandem with its up-to-the-minute style.
Riachuelo’s fast-changing product lineup presented a further challenge. With 48,000 items produced, distributed and sold annually, the company needed to find tools to connect shoppers efficiently with the latest products matching their needs in the moment.
Solution
With personalization as a top priority, Riachuelo opted to integrate the entire suite of RichRelevance products into its first eCommerce offering. The implementation included Riachuelo pioneering the latest RichRelevance solution, Find, which optimizes the on-site search experience to present individualized results sets.
How it Works
When designing its on-site eCommerce search experience, Riachuelo wanted a flexible solution that would dynamically combine internal logic, shoppers’ input, and implicit context signals to return the most relevant set of results possible for each individual shopper.
Find’s three-tier personalization stack enables Riachuelo to set multiple search parameters and combine those criteria with input from shoppers to create highly personalized product assortments. First, The Riachuelo team can incorporate segments from its their CRM system for association with products and categories. Dynamic segmentation within the Find tool also allows for enables creation of further business rules on the fly based on such criteria like as inventory availability, geographic location, referrer, and product category
Furthermore, Find gives Riachuelo’s team full control over the set of searchable attributes associated with each product. Riachuelo can define and weight the attributes so that each is accorded the right importance and the algorithm applies the right degree of personalization. This fine-tuning capability essentially controls when and where personalization occurs within searches, focusing the power of the Find engine on the attributes most important to shoppers.
Find also provides Riachuelo with the control to combine key business parameters (such as inventory levels) with shoppers’ keyword search term, as well as any previously-supplied profile data, such as size and color preferences. The search tool accounts for misspellings, plurals, synonyms, and the like, not only for the results set, but for type-ahead search box suggestions that guide shoppers to relevant categories, individual products, and value-added content. The product images that accompany the search results are tailored on the fly to match desired colors; for example, a search for “pink shirts” returns product images displaying pink color options.
Shoppers’ on-site behavior is also factored into Find, with viewed products and categories influencing the search results in real time. Find also draws on the “wisdom of crowds,” analyzing what the community of site shoppers typically does after searching for certain words and using this data to prioritize results.
Finally, Find factors in individual context cues to help Riachuelo deliver optimal results. Location, seasonality, time of day, and proximity to local outlets can all influence the results set to deliver a truly individualized search experience (including both which products are surfaced and the order they’re displayed) for every shopper.
Results
Since launching the eCommerce site in 2017 with full-featured personalization, Riachuelo has earned high engagement and established a solid track record of online sales.
Find has proved an efective engine for sales. The 15% of site shoppers using the on-site search tool are 3 times more likely to convert than the overall average. Furthermore, zero-results searches represent just 0.16% of all queries, reducing the bounce rate following search — suggesting that shoppers are connecting with relevant products and content worthy of further engagement. Riachuelo’s overall fndability score – a calculation that captures whether sites deliver the right results eficiently, with a minimum of manual sort-and-flter steps – is 7.3%.
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- RETAIL SEGMENT: DIY and Home Improvement
- PRODUCT: Personalized Recommendations and Advanced Merchandising
- CHALLENGE: To showcase the full range of products and sell more complete solutions
- RESULTS: 65% increase in items per order and 28% increase in spend from those interacting with recommendations
Leroy Merlin is a home improvement and gardening retailer with 400 retail stores across the world. A major player in the global DIY market, Leroy Merlin offers products and solutions for DIY, decoration, construction and gardening. Each country operates as independent business units.
In 2017, Leroy Merlin Italy wanted to create a more personalized experience for customers on their website www.leroymerlin.it by incorporating personalization and machine learning to accelerate product discovery and ensure it was easy for their customers to locate all the items needed for a project. Leroy Merlin Italy aimed to increase items per order and customer satisfaction by helping guide their customers with intelligent and comprehensive project- based recommendations.
With so many product SKUs across a wide range of categories, Leroy Merlin Italy sought a solution that would enable them to easily optimize and reduce manual merchandising, while also allowing them to maintain control of their brand when appropriate. After analysing and testing several solutions and tools, Leroy Merlin Italy selected the best performing provider, RichRelevance, to be their strategic personalization partner based on their sophisticated AI that offers the right mix of automation and control.
Lionel Devidal, Digital and Ecommerce Director at Leroy Merlin Italy, explained “Through the RichRelevance solutions we were able to automate the recommendations based on two desired outcomes; showcasing compatible items based on what the shopper was purchasing as well as surfacing similar products the shopper may not find otherwise.”
Leroy Merlin Italy displays 2 placements on the product page; one designed to cross sell related products and the other displays similar products the customer might also like. To ensure customers receive guidance across their entire shopping journey, Leroy Merlin Italy has instrumented recommendations at every interaction point, on the add to cart and wishlist pages as well as within remarketing and abandoned cart emails to shoppers.
“We are very happy with the RichRelevance solution, it’s been very easy to set up strategies and customize rules, which is good seeing as we have a lot of advanced merchandising rules to ensure the compatibility of all our products! We also have the flexibility to strategically boost specific products when we want to.” Commented Lionel.
Leroy Merlin Italy has utilized RichRelevance’s best in class Personalization Services to garner best practices, guidance and insights in addition to leveraging tests to optimize the placements and strategies on the website. They have been delighted with the results as Lionel explained:
“There is no doubt in my mind that the RichRelevance personalization consultant has had a very positive impact on the success of our personalization efforts. Their ability to fine tune the engine and continually optimize means our results continue to improve.”
After just 6 months of going live with RichRelevance solutions in December 2017, Leroy Merlin Italy can attribute 9.5% of revenue to personalization. Leroy Merlin customers who interact with recommendations spend 28% more with 65% more items per order. Furthermore, the cross sell placement on the add to cart page, which recommends items related to those in the cart has a staggering 8% click through rate. Out of those items viewed over 20% go on to be purchased.
“RichRelevance personalization has allowed us to propose more complete solutions to our customers based on their specific needs and interests. We have a high engagement with recommendations on the site, and it is clear from the results that customers are valuing the recommendations being made. We are excited by the prospect of adding more placements to other pages on our website as well as the homepage, and the results this will bring for Leroy Merlin Italy.” Concluded Lionel.
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- RETAIL SEGMENT: Wellness and Beauty
- PRODUCT: Personalized Recommendations
- CHALLENGE: A Brazilian perfume and cosmetics manufacturer wanted its new eCommerce site to maximize engagement and sales with an optimized experience tailored to shoppers’ geographic location and past brand interactions.
- RESULTS: 40% MoM increase for online sales
A leading Brazilian brand of perfume and cosmetics with products backed by Brazilian and international celebrities. The combination of star power and value pricing translates into high quality products to a new customer segment – their hallmark. In 2017, their sales topped R$415 million and the company set out to double that figure by 2020 through a revitalized sales strategy and the launch of its first eCommerce site.
Celebrity endorsement in every category, such as fragrances, makeup , hair, body, bath, man and kids, goes farther than simply connecting names with products. Stars appear in print, television and billboard advertising and make appearances at promotional events, including meetings with the brand’s more than 250,000 direct sales representatives.
Challenge
As they prepared to launch their first eCommerce initiative in 2017, it sought to approach its customers to the entertainment universe backed-up Silvio Santos Group business, translating the glamour of celebrity backing into a rich online experience tailored to shoppers’ individual beauty needs. Complicating this effort was the need to adapt the new website to reflect and match different regional campaigns that runs at the same time, in different cycles, depending on the region, because it should follow the same Direct Sales door-to-door campaigns and catalog according to a site visitor’s location.
In addition to this geographic segmentation, they sought to enrich the online experience by tailoring product assortments and content according to individual preferences and past purchasing history. By maximizing relevance with dynamically personalized content, they sought to win customers and earn loyalty in Brazil’s crowded beauty and fragrance marketplace.
Solution Overview
This perfume and cosmetics manufacturer built its eCommerce business around RichRelevance’s AI-based personalization platform. The brand turned to RichRelevance Engage to dynamically detect and serve location-dependent content, products, and offers. RichRelevance Recommend then applied dynamic intelligence to present the most relevant items for each individual from within the region’s assigned catalog.
How it Works
Prior to implementing RichRelevance, they embarked on an extensive search for the right technology to launch its eCommerce presence. All-in-one solutions that promised personalization alongside an eCommerce platform didn’t offer the breadth and depth of functionality to meet their requirements.
Instead, they opted to select and integrate two best-of-breed solutions – RichRelevance and VTex, the largest eCommerce provider in South America. VTex offered the simplicity of a cloud eCommerce implementation along with the extensive commerce functionality they sought. RichRelevance’s industry-leading dynamic personalization provided the flexibility and interaction-specific machine learning to deliver the layers of contextual relevance they required. Thanks to RichRelevance’s open and flexible architecture, integration was swift and straightforward, with a four-month timeline from selection to launch.
When a shopper first visits the their site, RichRelevance’s Engage, Recommend and Personalization AI dynamically personalizes the site experience inn real time. Content from the home page hero banner onwards (from celebrity content to product assortments and site navigation) is tailored to the shopper’s geographic location, as well as individual history, context and behavior. A shopper in Bahia might be served content and products connected with one star, while Rio de Janeiro consumers might view content showcasing a new product launch for an entirely different line headed by another spokesperson.
With each site interaction, RichRelevance’s AI dynamically applies the most relevant decisioning algorithm to deliver the products best suited for the individual shopper’s beauty needs, continually learning and optimizing the experience in real time. Replenishment recommendations, complementary items, and new product launches are presented according to the shopper’s context within the customer lifecycle, while at the same time adhering to the business rules established for the regional product catalog.
Since launching in late 2017, they have worked hand in hand with RichRelevance to build a strong startup presence.Thanks to the content-rich, individualized shopping experience this perfume and cosmetics manufacturer offers, engagement is consistently high across geographic regions
Online sales have soared, with month-over-month growth since December average order sizes is increasing. The new eCommerce channel now accounts for a good portion of overall sales. And despite the short time frame since launch, their site is attracting return traffic and sales, thanks to personalized recommendations for replenishment items and complementary products.
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- RETAIL SEGMENT: Apparel
- PRODUCT: Personalized Recommendations and Personalized Browse and Nav
- CHALLENGE: Improve mobile conversion rate
- RESULTS: 53% increase in mobile conversion rate. 16.8% higher average order value from those interacting with recommendations.
- RETAIL SEGMENT: Arts and Crafts Discount Retailer
- PRODUCT: Personalized Search
- CHALLENGE: To improve the functionality and performance of the on-site search function
- RESULTS: 36% attribution for online sales
The Works is a retailer that serves over 22.5 million customers each year – stocking 40,000 different products including books, toys, gifts, stationery and arts & crafts at discount prices. Selling over 1 million products each week, The Works appeals to anyone looking for a wide variety of products at great value prices.
Lack of Functionality and Performance Data with Current Solution
The Works has been working with RichRelevance since 2013, employing product recommendations and content personalisation solutions across its website www.theworks.co.uk. As ecommerce sales have grown as a percentage of overall sales, The Works were looking to improve other areas of their website. In 2017 they started to look for a new onsite search solution, as their current solution lacked functionality as well as performance data on how it was working.
Alex Beard, Online Trading Manager at The Works takes up the story. “Previously, we’d employed an out of the box solution. It was restrictive in its functionality and performed very poorly at a subjective level. I say subjective, as we had no data to help us understand how it was performing at an objective level.”
Focus on Connecting Shoppers with Exactly what they Search for
The Works reviewed several onsite search solutions, including a thorough benchmarking analysis. In the end the decision was easy, and The Works chose the RichRelevance personalised on-site search solution, Find™, due to its ability to connect shoppers with exactly what they were looking for, as Alex explains:
“After meeting with RichRelevance, it was apparent that they’d created a solution that really focused on providing the most relevant results for the customer. We felt that RichRelevance had a better understanding of what we required from our site-search. We had no interest in all of the “fluffy” parts of search that others were pitching us (like SEO benefits) and only had an absolute interest in making sure customers found exactly what they were looking for when they came to our site. After a thorough competitor benchmarking project, we found that Find was the best solution to do this for The Works.”
Find performance is extremely positive
RichRelevance implemented Find™ on theworks.co.uk in just 12 weeks to ensure they were up and running in time for the 2017 Peak Trading Season. During the peak season, 36% of The Works online sales can be directly attributed to the implementation of Find™. Since peak trading, Find™ has continued to help The Works optimise searches for key terms over Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Easter. Their Findability score has remained strong, as has their conversion rates.
“We are delighted with the performance of Find. After a strong start over peak trading, it has helped us achieve great like for likes in January and February of this year, of 20% and 45% respectively.”
“We can see customers have been finding what they want, and quickly. The results being returned are more akin to customer expectations.”
The Works are continuing to optimise their implementation of Find™ and are also now looking at personalising their listing pages with the RichRelevance Discover™ solution.
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Case Study: CDW
B2B ONLINE
- SEGMENT: B2B IT Products and Solutions
- PRODUCT: Personalized Recommendations, Personalized Browse and Navigation
- CHALLENGE: With 100,000+ products, 1,000+ partners and 5,000+customer-facing trusted advisors, CDW needed to effectively connect a diverse set of customers with the right items, ancillaries and services to meet their unique business goals.
- RESULTS: RichRelevance’s personalization solution allows CDW to deliver an engaging, immersive and relevant customer experience tailored for industry, company and individual role, as well as unique goals and preferences
Founded in 1984, CDW is a leading multi-brand technology solutions provider to business, government, education and healthcare organizations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The company is ranked #199 on the Fortune 500 with nearly $15 billion in annual sales. Challenge CDW has a strong reputation for bringing together both technology and unrivaled expertise to solve organizational challenges and build IT solutions that companies need to succeed. With more than 100,000 products (from over 1,000 leading and emerging technology partners) ranging from discrete hardware and software to integrated IT solutions, CDW’s customers rely on the brand for ongoing strategic advice and proactive problem solving.