Ann Summers says it will use data gathered from its ecommerce shop to create more cross-category promotions in its stores, similar to Marks & Spencer’s Marketing Week Engage Award-winning Dine In For £10 offer.
Personalised Product Recommendations Provide a More Pleasurable Online Shopping Experience for Ann Summers Customers
Reading, UK — 15 June 2011 — RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalisation for the world’s largest retailers, today announced it has partnered with leading high street brand Ann Summers to personalise the online shopping experience. When they shop online, Ann Summers customers will now receive personalised product recommendations to help each shopper discover products that are uniquely relevant to them. As a result, customers have a more engaging and pleasurable shopping experience while Ann Summers is able to create new sales opportunities.
RichRelevance’s enRICH Personalisation Engine facilitates competition among 60 independent recommendation strategies to deliver the most relevant experience. Using RichRelevance’s technology, Ann Summers will be able to take the wealth of information known about each customer, including preferences and shopping history, demographic details and referral sites, and marry it to the data the merchant holds on relationships between products or product categories and the behavioural patterns of similar shoppers.
Led by prominent CEO Jacqueline Gold, Ann Summers reports an annual turnover of more than £117.3 million. AnnSummers.com, launched in 1995, is the company’s third largest channel behind its 150 high street shops and Ann Summers Party, which produces more than 4000 women-only events per week in the UK. By establishing a personalisation initiative, Ann Summers hopes not only to create a deeper connection with its largely female online customer-base, but to gather information about shopping behaviour and product associations that will increase sales across all channels.
“Through our personalisation initiative, we are gaining valuable insight into our customers and the way they shop for and discover our products. For example, we can access vastly more kinds of associated data about what people viewed after viewing a certain item,” said Andrew Harber, eCommerce Director at Ann Summers. “By partnering with RichRelevance to manage and analyse our customer data, we are more in-tune with our customers’ behaviour and can take a more holistic approach to merchandising and promotions.”
“Many multi-channel retailers struggle to extract actionable information from all of the data they have on their customers. It is not uncommon for data from the various channels to be siloed and for the customer experience to be fragmented as a result,” said David Selinger, CEO and founder, RichRelevance. “It is exciting to see Ann Summers take a customer-centric approach. By looking at all of their customer touch points as a whole and considering how data can be used to improve the customer experience across channels, Ann Summers will be able to offer a better and more consistent shopping experience.”
In selecting RichRelevance, Ann Summers cited the company’s Amazon.com heritage as a key factor in the decision, alongside ease of implementation and technical knowledge. “Everyone is familiar with Amazon’s recommendations and to be able to tap into the intellect behind the algorithms was very appealing,” said Harber.
About Ann Summers
Ann Summers is one of the UK’s leading lingerie and seductive lifestyle brands for women. Ann Summers offers fun, sexy ranges with luxurious design, injecting ‘everyday glamour’ into the high street. Ann Summers is passionate about offering something for every shape and size, as we believe that every woman can feel sexy. Ann Summers operates three successful sales channels; Party Plan, Retail and Ecommerce.
From its acquisition by David and Ralph Gold in 1972, Ann Summers has built an innovative brand empire that now holds presence in 150 primary high street locations in the UK and Ireland and their first international store in Valencia, Spain. In 1981, David Gold’s daughter Jacqueline Gold introduced the Party Plan concept, allowing women the unique opportunity to get together with friends, have a fun girly night in and buy Ann Summers products in their homes. Party Plan today boasts over 7000 Party Organisers throughout the UK who hold on average 4000 parties per week. Ann Summers’ Ecommerce site, www.annsummers.com, boasts over 1.5 million individual visits per month.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalised shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Wal-Mart, Sears, Overstock.com and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalisation at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and effectively monetise site traffic by providing the most relevant products, content and offers to shoppers as they switch between web, store and mobile. RichRelevance has delivered more than £1 billion in attributable sales for its clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of personalised advertising called shopping media which allows brands to engage shoppers where it matters most – at the point of purchase on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is located in San Francisco, with offices in Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.co.uk.
Technology researchers are being offered a $1m prize to solve a complex condundrum faced by retailers – how to choose the best online product recommendations to show shoppers.
By Darren Vengroff, Chief Scientist, RichRelevance
When done right, relevant product recommendations can deliver a 5 – 30 percent lift in conversion and sustain or even increase these levels over the long term. Darren Vengroff offers three best practices that can help retailers deliver on the promise of personalised product recommendations.
Two big new prize contests just getting under way take a page from the innovative, exciting competition run by Netflix. In a nail-biting finish in the fall of 2009, the movie rental service paid $1 million to a global team of data mavens, who just edged out another group, in most improving its online film recommendations.
The Netflix contest was celebrated as a triumph for the company and as a catalyst for bringing new techniques to data analysis. But in 2010, Netflix was forced to cancel a planned second prize because of privacy concerns. Two researchers showed that the supposedly anonymous data from the first contest could be used to identify customers. That eventually brought an inquiry from the Federal Trade Commission and a lawsuit. So Netflix shelved its plans for a second contest.
The online retailer is pulling a Netflix, dangling the promise of a rich reward–not to mention some serious bragging rights–to the team that increases customer purchases.