- RETAIL SEGMENT: Apparel
- PRODUCT: Find™
- CHALLENGE: With more than 2 million unique SKUs, Swap.com needed to move beyond basic site search to provide ‘true personalization’ that is instant, individualized, accurate and exceeds shopper expectations.
- RESULTS:
- Delivered initial ‘out of the box’ conversion increase of 7.3% – the biggest conversion increase Swap.com has ever seen as the result of introducing a new tech capability.
- Immediately enhanced brand perception & engagement by returning relevant results for queries averaging 2.2 words or less. Provide a better experience to high-value customers (40% of revenue comes from session with search).
- The search experience at scale to help Swap.com understand if shoppers are locating the items they wish to buy.
- 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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- RETAIL SEGMENT: Sporting Goods
- PRODUCT: Personalized Recommendations
- CHALLENGE: Wide range of products. 60% Webshop in 14
languages and nine currencies - RESULTS: 3x revenue from orders containing product recommendations. 20% increase in
average shopping basket. Average of one more product per purchase. Improved revenues on mobile devices
Blue Tomato was founded in 1988 as a snowboard school by the former European Snowboard Champion Gerfried Schuller. Since then it has transformed into a successful international boardsport and fashion shop. Blue Tomato now owns more than 30 shops in Austria, Germany and Switzerland and their webshop offers more than 450,000 products from more than 500 brands and delivers to more than 40 countries. Having launched its webshop in 1997, Blue Tomato was an eCommerce pioneer. It now aims to become the leading omnichannel retailer for boardsports and freeski in Europe.
- RETAIL SEGMENT: Wellness & Beauty
- PRODUCT: Engage™
- CHALLENGE: Clarisonic wanted to maximize revenue per session by optimizing home page content tiles for different customer segments.
- RESULTS: Using RichRelevance Engage, Clarisonic achieved the following performance on its home page content tiles:*
- 20% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR)
- 24% increase in revenue per session
- 35% increase in overall clicks
* YoY performance improvement.
“The fact that I can keep testing content and justify why I’m showing it is amazing! I’m confident that these data-driven decisions are helping to move visitors efficiently through the purchase funnel.” Casey Davidson Director of Ecommerce and Digital Marketing , Clarisonic.
DOWNLOAD FULL CASE STUDY BELOW
- SECTOR: Pureplay department store
- SOLUTION: Recommend™ & Consultancy Services across web, mobile and contact center
- CHALLENGE: N Brown Group was looking to free up time and resources from manual recommendations and implement a more dynamic and scientific solution that would enable quicker reactions to customer behavior. As the business underwent a transformational programme from traditional catalog retailer to digital first, online retailer, N Brown Group needed more insight into its customer base to deliver a more personalized experience.
- RESULTS: 30% increase in sales
N Brown Group is one of the UK’s leading online retailers with a specialism in fashion that fits and flatters, offering customers an extensive range of products in clothing, footwear and homewares. The Group’s three power brands include JD Williams, Simply Be and Jacamo.
Back in 2013, N Brown Group was struggling with manual product recommendations on its ecommerce sites, which was proving both time-consuming and costly. Frustrated by their inability to react quickly to customer behavior and transactions, the business decided it needed a more dynamic and scientific solution, which was based on customer insight rather than someone’s personal opinion.
N Brown Group turned to the RichRelevance personalization platform as a data driven engine that made decisions quickly and dynamically with the ability to react to a mix of transactional and browsing data when making recommendations for individual customers. The fact it was mobile friendly was an additional advantage.
“The ease of integration with our existing systems and an attractive commercial model, made the decision to move to RichRelevance easy.” Explained David Jennings, Head of Development and Customer Experience for N Brown Group.
Since these early days back in 2013, N Brown Group has undertaken a number of projects to improve its understanding of the ever-changing customer and increase the sophistication of personalization initiatives across all sales channels.
Ann Steer, Chief Customer Officer at N. Brown Group, commented, “Personalization and the ability to deliver, individual relevant experiences are the single most important thing that will help us deliver business success.”
To support more traditional product recommendation capabilities, N Brown Group introduced RichRelevance’s Advanced Merchandising solution in 2016. Advanced Merchandising has enabled N Brown Group to put more relevant products in front of online shoppers that appeal directly to individuals’ tastes and preferences. For example ’complete the look’ products or recommending products that take into account customers purchasing history or current basket items.
Data-driven Advanced Merchandising has freed up merchandisers’ time so rather than manually creating outfits for display on the sites, they can focus on building merchandising rules that support wider site trading objectives and the needs of their customers. These merchandising rules work in partnership with RichRelevance’s algorithms, combining the expertise of merchandisers with the power of machine learning. Reporting on the performance of Advanced Merchandising is provided by RichRelevance and allows merchandisers to see which rules are attracting the most customer engagement and driving the most attributable revenues.
Another personalization initiative has seen N Brown Group bring recommendations into the contact center, which is often overlooked as a retail sales channel especially when it comes to creating a personalized, relevant experience for customers. However, N Brown Group realised its potential and implemented RichRelevance recommendations in the contact center, training 950 UK-based contact center agents in the RichRelevance product recommendations engine and rolling out the personalization solution within the contact center system’s computers.
“Before we introduced data-driven recommendations into the contact center, staff would only offer the five products we had on sale, so it wasn’t personalized for the customer at all. Now, our customer service agents can advise customers on an increased product range using the power of the online recommendations engine. This real-time solution helps agents answer product queries, upsell and cross-sell products, or recommend alternative items that will resonate with the customer. We’ve effectively created another sales channel and improved the customer experience at the same time.” Said Jennings
Having Recommend™ live in the contact centers has had the added benefit of drastically reducing the time spent doing manual merchandising for the contact center.
By 2016, N Brown Group’s customer touch-points had diversified as it transformed itself from a catalog to online retailer. As a result N Brown Group sought to better understand its new breed of customer and maximize the opportunity online shopping presents to deliver a more personalized customer experience.
To gain this customer insight, N Brown Group commissioned RichRelevance to undertake an insights campaign to map the online shopping experience and explore what levels of personalization were right for N Brown Group’s customers to create a superior customer experience.
The project involved extensive user experience and personalization tests which the N Brown Group will use over the next year to guide the personalization implementation across all channels to enhance the customer experience.
“We see investment into understanding the customer as the most valuable data in terms of driving business and personalization forward in next few years.” concluded David Jennings.
Measures of success
As a result of their work together, the RichRelevance personalization engine has grown sales by 30% in 2016. This means recommendation-driven sales now account for 7% of all N Brown Group sales.
Furthermore, the result of the extraordinarily dedicated customer analysis is that N Brown Group is poised to exceed the £5m+ sales lift that its personalization initiatives already delivered in 2016.
Overall the data-driven product recommendations are now supporting the ecommerce site and, unusually, contact center staff, benefitting customer service and supporting an overall 12% year on year increase in sales for the group.
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- RETAIL SEGMENT: Pureplay Department Store
- PRODUCT: Personalization Consultancy
- CHALLENGE: Not satisfied with the out of the box improvements, Shop Direct sought the help of the RichRelevance personalization consultants to optimize implementation and maximize results from their personalization initiative.
- RESULTS: 2.5% lift in revenue per visit (Electrical Category)
Shop Direct is the second largest pureplay retailer in the UK with brands including Very.co.uk and Littlewoods.
Shop Direct has been working with RichRelevance since 2014. They selected RichRelevance as a forward thinking technology partner who understood the needs of the customer and was able to provide personalization at all parts of the customer journey.
Over the past two and a half years, RichRelevance has grown to account for just over 6% of Shop Direct’s increasing sales, which are now almost £1.9 billion.
With an experimental test and learn culture, Shop Direct wanted to get more than the out of the box improvements they were seeing from the RichRelevance personalization platform. In August 2016 they commissioned a consulting engagement with the objective to optimize placements and maximize the results from their personalization initiative. In addition they sought technical assistance on implementation methods across the Shop Direct sites Very.co.uk and Littlewoods.com.
Measures of success
RichRelevance first undertook an assessment of the site, which included an implementation health check and a review of manually created rules. As a result, enhancement opportunities were identified and outdated rules were cleaned up. Improvements were made to enable Shop Direct to update additional placements more quickly as well as adding more parameters as a default.
Another element to the project was supporting the implementation of advanced merchandising. RichRelevance data analysts built specific reports to show the value of the advanced merchandising rules. Additionally, the personalization consultant provided advice on best practice implementation.
Having an implementation free from technical issues as well as using RichRelevance best practice was the optimal foundation for moving to the next step: the optimization.
Optimization Work
The first step in the optimization plan was to test the RichRelevance best practice strategies verses the current Shop Direct strategies. Four tests were carried out on the cart and item pages. The results indicated comparable or small lifts for the best practice strategies. While it showed that the current strategies were working well, it offered alternative strategies for Shop Direct to utilize if they wanted to.
After completing the site-wide strategy tests, the next step was to narrow the scope to category level. The first test ran on the Electrical category. When certain strategies were preferred, Shop Direct saw a 2.5% lift in revenue per visit. Other category tests are still ongoing.
“We very much see the consulting engagement as a long term optimization partnership for continual improvements across the Shop Direct ecommerce sites”, commented Kathryn Jones, Findability Manager at Shop Direct. “It’s as important to Shop Direct to find out what doesn’t work as well as what does, but to do so quickly and efficiently. By utilizing the skills of the RichRelevance personalization team we were able to tap into their expertise of both personalization and the RichRelevance platform which meant we progressed quicker.”
“We work with our RichRelevance consultant on a weekly basis as a sounding board for both ideas and advice on how to best set up rules and strategies to support our business objectives. This has been very helpful and worked really well for us”, added Isobel Gerrard, Product Recommendations Analyst, Shop Direct.
The optimization efforts continue and Shop Direct is now looking at new on site placements, email implementation and ‘build your own’ strategies.
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- RETAIL SEGMENT: Pureplay department store
- PRODUCT: RichRelevance Engage™
- CHALLENGE: HP wanted to create a direct, personalized relationship with each customer from the moment they first use their new HP device.
- RESULTS: HP used RichRelevance Engage to create HP Jumpstart, a personalized companion app that encourages and inspires every customer with a highly relevant content experience.
- HP Jumpstart will be HP’s largest direct customer channel by the end of the year.
- The new companion app has yielded a greater than 30% increase in engagement as compared to the generic template HP used in the past.
- Quality of engagement has improved as more than onethird of customers engagement in welcome content and minutes of use has doubled since our pilot began.
- SECTOR: Marketplace
- SOLUTION: Personalized Product Recommendations
- CHALLENGE: With a wide array of partners and product offerings notonthehighstreet.com needed a personalization tool to help improve the customer experience by connecting shoppers with the most relevant products.
- RESULTS: 25% order value (from those interacting with Recommend™)
Notonthehighstreet.com is an online marketplace with 5,000 partners and a wide array of product offerings. Since they were founded over 10 years ago, demand for their unique, personalized products has continued to rise, with their customer base seeking bespoke and unique products compared to the mass produced offerings on the high street.
For notonthehighstreet.com personalization is a particularly important part of improving the customer experience. As a marketplace with such a broad product range and partner base, notonthehighstreet. com customers have very different shopping missions that range from top ticket items like large furniture pieces to Alpaca walking experiences in Derbyshire. With a mission to make every customer interaction as unique and enjoyable as possible, notonthehighstreet. com was looking for a personalization tool to help them connect the most relevant and appropriate product to each shopper.
After looking at whether they could develop a tool internally, notonthehighstreet.com turned to RichRelevance’s personalization platform to automate connecting customers with the right products.
“We chose the RichRelevance solution due to the flexibility and depth of personalization it gave us, dovetailing into our own product curation needs. We also liked the unobtrusive nature of the RichRelevance offering and the way it integrated seamlessly, complimenting the customer journey”, explained Michael Roberts, Senior Merchandiser at notonthehighstreet.com.
“The RichRelevance system is an AI based self learning tool, so the personalization takes care of itself automatically. A dashboard is provided which is easy to use and has powerful reporting and merchandising features built in. This means I can set high level guidelines to refine the recommendations when I need to – for instance when I want special promotions for Mother’s Day or Valentines Day.”
Since implementing Recommend™, notonthehighstreet.com found the personalization tool has provided them with insight into their customers’ behavior leading to the ability to highlight interesting new products within their offerings that the shopper might not have found otherwise. This capability is particularly important on mobile.
“With the advance of mobile shoppers whose browse times are much shorter on notonthehighstreet.com, the value of tools such as RichRelevance has increased dramatically, as they allow us to promote relevant product visuals to customers quickly and easily”, said Michael Roberts.
RichRelevance personalized product recommendations have high exposure across the notonthehighstreet.com website, with placements on the homepage, department pages, the bottom of listing pages and across checkout and add to basket pages. They help the shopper at every stage of their shopping journey.
Since notonthehighstreet.com deployed RichRelevance Recommend in 2015 they have seen steady improvements and many benefits both on conversion rates and incremental gain in sales. The AOV of orders interacting with personalized recommendations are 25% higher than those who don’t, showing the value and relevance of the suggestions being made. A total of 11% of orders on notonthehighstreet. com now interact with RichRelevance recommendations.
Notonthehighstreet.com has also been able to utilize RichRelevance personalization software to overcome specific challenges, for example a high bounce rate from search engine traffic, as Michael explained:
“We were struggling to immediately engage with traffic arriving from search engines, where we had a high bounce rate compared to the overall site. We utilized the RichRelevance technology to show very relevant product alternatives at the right time specifically for this source of traffic and as a result reduced our bounce rate by an impressive 13%.”
In terms of the future, notonthehighstreet.com sees personalization of the shopping journey as continuing to play an integral role in the way they deliver the right products to the right customers, alongside promoting new products and supporting their valued partners.
“RichRelevance has the features right now that we need to deliver our vision to focus on the needs of our individual customers and deliver them a great shopping experience.” Michael concluded.
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