QR Codes: The Time is Now for Quick Response

In the late 90’s, a feisty startup called Digital Convergence Corporation rolled into market, delivering free barcode scanners to subscribers of ForbesWired and Parade. These scanners, called CueCats, were kitty-shaped (no, really – shaped like a cat – so, CueCat – get it?) devices that plugged into a computer. With a simple swipe, magazine readers had the “luxury” of accessing more advertising or editorial content … online. Each swipe was tracked, relaying gender, email address and ZIP code to advertisers without permission. And swipers couldn’t opt-out.

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Ensemble Learning: Live on TV's Jeopardy and Behind the Scenes on Leading Retail Websites

Starting today, IBM’s Watson supercomputer will go up against a pair of human Jeopardy champions. Regardless of whether man or machine comes out on top, it will be a banner day for a machine learning technique called ensemble learning. Ensemble learning is based on the notion that tens or hundreds of independent algorithms, each aimed and working in a particular kind of context are better than one bigger, more complex algorithm. This idea lies at the heart of both Watson’s approach to generating Jeopardy questions and RichRelevance’s approach to generating relevant product recommendations and advertising.

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Tracking the Online Customer’s Path to Purchase: Key Findings and Takeaways

The RichRelevance Analytics group recently conducted a series of studies for several of our larger, premium retail clients to explore customer behaviors and identify the greatest opportunities for optimization. The results of one such study*—which I am sharing here today, revealed some pretty astounding insights for this particular customer’s online shoppers.

Home page “schmome page.”
The home page is for all intents and purposes the premier online brand presence for a merchant. It gets rendered more than any other distinct URL within the merchant domain and is often the gateway for the most loyal customers. Yet with only 4% of inbound sessions and 1% of total page views, you now know why that home page promotion didn’t do so well. These numbers paled in comparison to the search page, which was the landing page for almost 40% of all sessions followed by the category page at 26%, which narrowly edged out the item page at 25%. The lesson here? A simple UI or merchandising enhancement of virtually any dynamic page template will always be a more efficient allocation of resources than investment in the home page.

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The Inspiration Behind RecLab: Don't Bring the Data to the Code, Bring the Code to the Data

Last fall I had the pleasure of visiting Barcelona, one of my favorite cities on earth. It normally wouldn’t take much beyond the great Catalan food and wine to entice me to visit, but in this case there was an even more compelling reason to visit—to participate in the ACM Recommender Systems conference and spend time digging into deep technical conversations with some of the leading scientists and engineers in the field. I also had a chance to demonstrate Instant Shopper, a neat little demo we put together to illustrate the speed and effectiveness of RichRelevance algorithms that combine search and behavioral data on some of our merchant partners’ sites.

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Searching for High Fidelity in the Digital World

High Fidelity [hi-fi] typically relates to amplifiers and their capacity in managing the sound output to accurately reproduce the characteristics of the input; but fidelity also equates to loyalty, and prompts the question of how a retailer or brand motivates the customer “inputs” that breed the retention, satisfaction and trust that are the desired “outputs.” How effective is “fidelity” in the digital world today?  Online retailers discuss loyalty, attend conferences and spend thousands on communications in search of this holy grail, but does “high fidelity” exist in its raw form today?

Loyalty programmes have long had a significant foothold in the UK, with several retailers leading the way when it comes to making strides into true ‘customer loyalty.’ Tesco has been collecting online and offline data on their customers for some time and regularly sends me vouchers and other very relevant offers via ‘snail mail,’ actively inducing me to reduce total order values or gain more of the same thing [bogofs, etc]. But when I venture online, why is this clear understanding of my habits and tastes so far removed? Going back to high fidelity, perhaps the offline inputs are not being transitioned to my online buying persona, which may depend on my browsing habits, and brands, products and category preferences in order to nurture significant output.

Another major retailer in the UK is Boots plc. As one of very few brands entirely focused on Health & Beauty, their loyalty program is possibly the most advanced with over 16million cardholders (including me), who constantly replenish commodities each month. A YouGov marketing report found that an estimated 70% of Boots’ sales revenue is linked to their loyalty card, indicating that Boots has a very clear understanding of—and investment in—who spends what in its stores.  Whilst Tesco will send you vouchers and offers to increase the worth of ‘Clubcard’ points so you can take the family to theme parks or escape to luxurious spa weekends, Boots offers the chance to increase ‘Advantage Card’ points by purchasing at an increasing number of affiliated retailers via Treat Street, a recent expansion to Advantage Cardholders.

While impressive in breadth, both programmes essentially drive you back into their stores to increase their loyalty program opportunity, a clever innovation on trust and satisfaction. These are two examples that I personally invest in heavily; Nectar is another huge loyalty scheme (across several retailers) and there are many others beginning to surface. I will for example find a Starbucks now to utilise yet another loyalty card as opposed to walk into any other coffee brand’s store.

Every retailer possesses endless variety in the product mix, demographic customers (and the buying behaviours they inhabit) and business objectives that govern their viability, so ideas and innovations must be considered to ‘personalise’ each retailer’s ‘personalisation strategy’ and therefore create customer loyalty. Having an agile approach to customisation, and never accepting that one algorithm is right for a single shopper on any given site at any time will be critical as retailers bridge their loyalty programmes from the offline world to the online.

For the time being, in the on-line world especially, the meaning of High Fidelity remains as a song I remember back in the 80’s from the film Fame.  Hopefully soon, online retailers will transition the analog value of hi-fi to their customers’ web-based retailing experiences—thereby respecting the shopper.

Everyone Owns The Audience…Just Not In The Right Place

With the proliferation of data and access to consumer information, marketers have gained increased insight into their core customers. The Social Analytics industry has grown by over a dozen companies in the last 12-18 months and we’re already seeing how access to richer data is empowering advertisers to do things they’ve never done before. For example, the ability to target a certain group of consumers with distinct travel intent did not exist until recently.

Most media buying outlets no longer buy specific publishing properties (TV being the exception). The advent of data-driven targeting combined with powerful ad exchanges has made “audience targeting” the new norm. It’s a much better way to get a return on your ad spend, because it gives you the opportunity to speak to the people that matter most to your brand. However, this great new data-driven capability comes with some “not-so-great” consequences. As data has become increasingly commoditized, one of the main complaints is that “everyone owns the audience, but not always in the right place.”

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