Featuring Gartner and L’Oreal Paris
Luxury leader uses RichRelevance’s Relevance Cloud™ platform to provide premium experience and personalized service at every touchpoint – driving a 40% revenue boost from personalization
San Francisco, CA – January 13, 2015 – RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, today announced that RichRelevance client Barneys New York has received a 2015 Customer Engagement Award from Retail TouchPoints. Barneys New York was honored as a Gold winner in the Cross-Channel Optimization category based on its innovative omnichannel strategies that have delivered a 60% increase in mobile revenue and a 40% revenue boost from personalization.
Barneys New York: Relevance Cloud Powers Cross-Channel Optimization Success
Barneys is using the Relevance Cloud platform and product suite to create and sustain a personal connection with customers regardless of where they shop — on web, mobile, tablet or in the store. The foundation is the ability to collect, analyze and connect in-store data with online purchase and behavioral data, as well as product catalogs and inventory systems. This data then fuels a Barneys New York experience that includes online and offline components. For example, a shopper can check out content on jewelry; return to her mobile device; head to the store to complete her purchase with the help of a sales associate who is armed with details on recent arrivals, and product recommendations based on past purchases and behavior. Representative innovations include:
Digital personalization: Earlier this year, Barneys New York debuted a fully responsive site to optimize the digital experience across all devices. The new experience enhances product presentation and allows for better personalization of editorial content and product recommendations to a unique shopper’s tastes (again, taking into account online and offline activities).
Data-driven clienteling: Barneys New York also debuted a new clienteling app for sales associates. Available on smartphone and tablet, the new app arms sales associates with personalized recommendations based on a complete view of each customer’s past purchases and browsing behavior, as well as endless aisle capabilities.
About the Retail TouchPoints 2015 Customer Engagement Awards
The Retail TouchPoints 2015 Customer Engagement Awards recognize 18 retail companies that are reaching lofty goals with a variety of technologies and campaigns. Across the organization — from the supply chain to the mobile screen — each of this year’s winners has gone the extra mile to delight, surprise and satisfy shoppers. The award winners are ahead of the curve and are achieving business success in this increasingly competitive and challenging marketplace.
Through a nomination process, the winners were selected based on, but not limited to, four specific criteria: unique shopping/promotional offerings; customer engagement strategies; customer analysis; and technology innovation. Winners include large, national retailers and smaller, regional companies, as well as international selections. Award recipients also vary in their products and services offerings, from specialty apparel and department stores to automotive and gourmet consumables.
Like it. Love it. Prefer it: The Customer Preference Center Makes Shopping Personal
Speak the Language
Deemed by Forbes as ‘‘The Year of the Millennial Customer,’ 2015 continues to see upward trends in social interaction and mobile engagement. In fact, millennial customers are expected to spend $200 billion by 2017, making them the largest global customer segment, with the largest share of wallet. Fortunately, millennials speak a fairly straightforward social language made up largely of likes and dislikes to indicate their interests and preferences. Providing this information across social networks with the click of a button has become second nature, yet the vast majority of this rich data goes unused. Today, there remains a very obvious gap between when a user provides these explicit social signals (consider how many likes you’ve gotten on a recent Instagram post) and how this data is leveraged to improve the customer experience.
But what if it was possible to create a shopping experience that not only mimicked the social experience, but also enabled you to enhance the individual customer’s experience with data collected from their own preferences?
Now you can. With the integration of the Customer Preference Center, available through the RichRelevance Recommend™ solution, you can easily capture individual tastes and preferences and put them to use by intelligently curating shoppers’ experiences on your site, mobile, email, in-store or contact centers in real time. Empowering shoppers to affect the products, brands and categories they see as they’re shopping brings a sense of 1:1 customer service not often found in the digital shopping experience.
Making it Personal is Simple
The Customer Preference Center offers benefits to shoppers and retailers across all channels. Using a flexible API, customer preferences are directly embedded as like/dislike/favorite buttons on any page, or as a survey that collects preferences on categories, brands and products. As shoppers engage and input preferences, their product assortments automatically update as they shop. Behind the scenes, the personalization system collects this invaluable data to deliver more relevant recommendations across all channels. The Customer Preference Center retains customer profile information in the Relevance Cloud’s User Profile Service so that no matter which channel a customer shops, collected data can be utilized to make the experience more personal, ultimately creating a happier and more loyal customer.
A leading apparel e-commerce company in Europe that generates over $155 million in annual revenue integrated Customer Preference Center technology across product pages and has seen 50% of users provided preferences in one month’s time. Those users interacting with preferences are significantly more engaged and spend 3.5x more than the ones that did not interact.
As a shopper, I can’t imagine anything more thrilling (or more dangerous for my wallet) than always being able to easily find things I liked from my preferred retailer.
Preferences Your Way
What does it look like? The possibilities with Customer Preference Center are endless, and customizable based on where and when the retailer chooses to engage customers. Preference can reside within existing recommendations or be as cutting edge as an integrated swipeable shopping experience (think Tinder).
Here’s are some ideas of how Customer Preference Center can work:
Mobile-Friendly Survey on Sign-up
My Preferences Page
In-the-moment Preference Collection
Preferences Embedded in Emails
The Customer Preference Center enables retailers to avoid and/or supplement complicated social integrations by offering familiar social features across retail sites and mobile experiences. With flexible tools at your fingertips, customizing every shopper interaction has never been easier.
Forty-five years ago, Burger King introduced the concept of personalization with “Have It Your Way” and consumers have never looked back from the expectation of a personalized, relevant experience with key brands. Think of the Customer Preference Center as a digital innovation on “Have it Your Way,” taking its cue from the popularity of social media to share likes and preferences.
Contact us today to get started!
Today, we are thrilled to announce that RichRelevance Engage, the dynamic content personalization solution, is now out of beta and available to all our customers. Engage enables the delivery of content and campaigns in real time based on individual shopper behavior and shopping history across online, mobile and email channels. 
Traditionally ecommerce and marketing teams have competing objectives regarding conversion rate versus brand; creating disconnects in the customer experience. For example, a simple question such as, “Which four creatives should we
showcase in the home page carousel?” can lead to significant conflict within the organization.
In an effort to make informed decisions, the emergence of testing and optimization tools has caused an explosion in test schedules and reports creating a huge amount of data to manage and analyze manually, as tests are run for each placement. This is multiplied by the frequency of the campaign refresh, demanding a significant amount of resources.
Ultimately, retailers find it difficult to know what content to publish, where to publish, and how to improve the customer experience; meaning content is often difficult to find and/or irrelevant—curtailing the ability to impact the bottom line.
Engage addresses all of these pain-points. It auto-optimizes all your content, making data-driven decisions on which content to show to whom, where and when, saving time by eliminating the need to run hundreds of manual A/B tests – thus leading to increased productivity and improved conversion.
The Marriage of Content and Commerce
The ability to weave together content and commerce is what separates retail winners from also-rans. Matthew Woolsey, EVP of Digital at Barney’s New York, recently said, “Customers who engage with editorial content—whether that’s a Window story,
a designer interview, a video, a lookbook or a personalized editorial recommendation—spend 40% more than our average customer.”*
Engage allows retailers to marry content and commerce by measuring and optimizing campaigns based on commerce KPIs—cart adds, conversions and revenue—not just clicks. It also makes it easy to embed personalized content across the broader e-commerce site, including transactional pages, mobile apps or even email in order to maximize reach.
One customer participating in an early trial of Engage is HD Supply. This home and industrial supplies retailer in the US is using Engage to expose relevant products through promotional banners on their web and mobile sites. Nicole Norris, Digital Marketing Manager at HD Supply, commented, “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.” The results
for HD Supply show 116% increase in conversion and 13% increase in AOV from personalized promotional banners.
Getting Engaged
You can start using Engage right away, in just three simple steps:
- Mass upload your content from your CMS quickly via plug-in or feed
- Apply tags to content from similar cohorts to build campaigns more efficiently – Engage will automatically swap contents in-and-out from that cohort based on the KPIs defined by you
- Define segments and/or contexts to further zero in on to whom, where, and when should the message be delivered
All this may be managed from the RichRelevance Dashboard.
Engage will provide a much stronger toolkit for building richer content experiences, leading to higher levels of conversion and consumer loyalty.
Learn more about Engage here. (French, German, Portuguese)
*Source: The Zoe Report, May 28, 2015 – http://thezoereport.com/habits-of-mobile-shoppers/?mode=view-all
Digital technologies are not only redefining the way customers shop; they are redefining retail business models. More and more retailers have started to leverage cloud APIs to innovate and build exceptional customer experiences through personalization. No longer a buzzword, rapid innovation has become a competitive advantage for many companies.
This webinar will explore how the recently introduced Build™ platform is helping retailers accelerate innovation using API-based services as building locks to personalize every customer interaction.
Today, I’m super excited to announce the launch of the Relevance Cloud™– what we at RichRelevance believe to be the most comprehensive personalization solution for retail today. The Relevance Cloud is a re-imagining of all RichRelevance products with new features and more simple ways to access, use and implement each of RichRelevance’s products.
Our Discover, Engage, Recommend and Build products empower retailers to deliver and innovate brand-centric customer experiences that span the customer lifecycle across all channels. Each of these products is powered by the Personalization Graph—a unified customer view which aggregates key data on customer behavior, content, context and products. The Personalization Graph is the next generation customer view. Powered by Big Data technologies, it’s flexible, streaming and scalable. Unlike the rigid CRM-centric view of the customer, the Personalization Graph sees each consumer as a fluid, ever-changing and increasingly complex stream of events and touchpoints, reflecting the reality of today’s consumers.
Here are the parts of the Relevance Cloud:
Especially exciting to me is the debut of our Build API-based services (I am an engineer after all! ☺). The opening up of our SOA and platform are key to unlocking the next revolution in personalization. Personalization is not simply an application (e.g., the market-leading Recommend product recommendations) but a capability which must be deeply integrated into the fabric of every customer-facing moment, incorporating the essence of each retailer’s unique customer strategy. Data science as a skill set continues to mature within retailers, and with Build, we provide an open, flexible architecture for our retailers’ data science teams to create entirely new customer experiences.
Case in point: one of our long-time customers, Wine.com employed a “bring your own algorithm” approach to test and deploy a “similar products” recommendation strategy, incorporating their unique knowledge of their specific assortment. It ended up driving $5 per click—becoming one of their best strategies in terms of revenue per click and increasing overall orders and revenue, not to mention dazzling their customers by putting forward their industry specific expertise.
RichRelevance’s Relevance Cloud manages all the heavy lifting (fault-tolerant infrastructure, the operationalization of data, etc.) so that our customers can focus on what they do best: designing differentiated experiences that speak to shoppers 1:1, ensuring that personalization delivers a significant market advantage. I hope you are excited as I am about this next generation of personalization!