Most content optimization solutions require you to constantly run manual A/B tests, making it hard to scale a personalized experience for every customer in real time.
Join Casey Davidson (Director of E-Commerce and Digital Marketing, Clarisonic) and Reid Narkunas (Director of Product Management, RichRelevance) to learn how Clarisonic, a skincare product company by L’Oreal, was able to increase its clickthrough rate (amongst other KPIs) by 20% in less than two months through deploying automated content personalization with Engage™.
Other key topics of this webinar include:
- Why you shouldn’t waste time with manual A/B testing
- Top 7 use cases of automated content personalization
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.
In a global B2B survey conducted by Avanade, 56% of purchasing decision-makers within companies report that they will (and do) pay more for products/services if the customer experience is better than with less expensive retailers. On average, they will pay 30% more for superior customer experience. As B2B companies transition from traditional channels to the fast-paced ecommerce environment, the principle remains: Ensure your customer is always at the center of everything you do and the rest will follow. While obvious and logical, for many, the challenge comes with where to start. These four simple steps will launch you on a personalization initiative that not only makes your customers happy, but keeps them happy, too.
#1 Re-think your customer persona
The line between B2B and B2C has blurred. B2B shoppers now consume in the same way they do outside of the work place, and are far from reliant on inside sales personnel. Today’s B2B shopper relies just as much on social, crowd-sourced and peer-reviewed resources to support and validate her work purchase decisions–as much as she does for personal shopping. Take guidance from market leaders like Office Depot and MonotaRO, who have integrated user-friendly features and functionality that enable shoppers to seamlessly navigate their site. A quick browse through their catalogs highlights features such as product reviews, inventory availability, and product recommendations which ensure that customers make educated buying decisions through a sophisticated personalized interface.
#2 Hone in on your customers’ real-time behaviors
Take your general understanding of how customers interact with your site to the next level with personalization that offers a real-time view into exactly how and why your customers shop the way they do. Collect and retain insights about brand, product, and category preferences with user-centric personalization features that engage customers as they shop. RichRelevance offers features like the Customer Preference Center and the the User Profile Service to synthesize online clickstream behavior and purchases with explicitly input preferences, so that regardless of channel and frequency of purchases your customer is always recognized. With knowledge like this, it’s easy to greet customers each and every time with products, promotions and categories that are relevant to their unique needs.
The User Profile Service synthesizes online clickstream behavior and purchases with explicitly input preferences—to recognize your customer regardless of channel.
#3 Communicate to the individual, not the masses…
A sophisticated retailer doesn’t cater to the masses, but rather understands the nuanced needs of individual customers. At its core, personalization must respect the shopper, and deliver the most relevant experience possible. A good personalization platform doesn’t merely offer comprehensive product recommendation technology, it also takes learned knowledge of your customers to offer relevant content and promotional messages across mobile and desktop sites, as well as within email communications. With an understanding of what messages resonate with different customer segments, HD Supply delivered curated messages to customer segments via email using RichRelevance’s Engage solution, and saw a subsequent 116% increase in conversion. Read more about their success story here.
Deliver curated messages that resonate with customer segments using RichRelevance Engage™
#4 But curate at the account level
In contrast to a traditional B2C retailer, successful B2B personalization must consider account level pricing and product assortments. It must offer region-based strategies and user tools that personalize a site based on unique business needs. RichRelevance enables customers to offer different pricing and product assortments at the account level so that B2B retailers can maintain the right assortments at the right price points. This ensures that customers not only see the appropriate products, but that the personalization is further tailored to them.
B2B retailers should consider these four fundamental opportunities across key pieces of real estate: your website, email communications, and/or contact center. Even in its simplest form, product recommendations aimed at ensuring your customers or contact center agents have a full view into your product assortment can guide buying decisions; targeted promotional and marketing communications to customer segments after a certain navigation path has been demonstrated can also be impactful.
Personalizing the path to purchase ensures that you meet and exceed customer expectations, before your competitor has the chance to do so.
Contact us today to get started!
The upscale chain strives to make it easier for online shoppers to find products and see recommendations.
Online customers of Barneys New York Inc. face challenges that might seem alien to shoppers who tend to buy from less luxurious retailers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Personalization is what empowers retailers to create a 1-1 relationship with customers online. By tracking engagement and other KPIs, you can quickly take stock of how are you doing with those relationships.
The new RichRelevance dashboard is the perfect tool for putting richer reports with more data at your fingertips, so that you’re always in tune with your site personalization. The new dashboard pulls back the curtain to showcase your data in a more digestible, visually appealing way. When your reports are eye-friendly, organized and automated, you can assess the status and impact of your site personalization within minutes.
Here are three quick ways to dive into the dashboard.
1. Check and share the vitals
Our brand new Lookback Summary is a detailed tile band that displays an at-a-glance summary of your sales and recommendation metrics. You can configure the lookback period to be a day, week, month or any number of days up to 90. You can also click any tile to access an expanded view of the graph. Take a screenshot and share metrics with key stakeholders in just a few clicks!
2. Track the value add
The Attributables Report tile is another new addition to help you track the impact of RichRelevance recommendations on your site–specifically through change in average order value (AOV) and items per order (IPO).
3. Access more detailed data and then some
Other significant enhancements include the Page Type Performance tile, where you can view the performance of different metrics for various pages on your site, and the Viral Products tile, which displays the most viewed products and takes you to detailed Merchandising Reporting. Best of all, feature documentation can be accessed within the feature page itself.
Try today
The new RichRelevance dashboard is designed to upgrade your experience and provide site health visualization, easy controls and usability improvements throughout. If you haven’t done so already, we encourage you to log in to your dashboard and play around. We believe that in order to provide you with more of the tools that you love, we need to work together. So, tell us what you’d like to see in the next set of improvements using the comments section below.
Working in consumer innovation, I have the unique opportunity—and dilemma—of deciding whether or not to invest my team’s energy on the dozens of brilliant ideas that cross my desk each week. Many ideas are attention grabbing, but don’t drive revenue; others are ridiculously interesting, but unrealistic for any retailer to implement. Rarely is something both pioneering and substantial in terms of delivering real returns for our retail clients.
But when Pinterest rolled out their first APIs earlier this month, I was more excited that I had been in a long time. Because while social networks always generate a ton of buzz, Pinterest stands out for its singular stance of letting folks effortlessly curate their point of view through their amazing boards. Being able to broadcast a highly personal inspiration and inspire a broader audience was instantly compelling for me.
So when asked by one of our retail partners “if you could do anything with Pinterest’s APIs, what would you do?” I jumped at the opportunity. Naturally, there were a few restraints due to timing: this could not involve any engineer hours from either the retailer or RichRelevance and the end result had to look good and be amazing (of course).
In the end, my team decided to build a POC to showcase top pins in a category, with recommendations off of those pins (based on product popularity) driving further product discovery.
We called Pinterest’s APIs to get “top” and “recent” pins for the retailer’s domain, and mashed up that data with RichRelevance’s APIs to map category- and product-level information in order to build a table of all pins to categories offline. From this, we built mini JSON databases for each category that had Pinterest info, retailer info and pricing. So now, when a customer visits a category page like Home Décor, our recommendations widget asynchronously loads the Pinterest pin data for that category ID from our CDN, and we display top pinned items in Home Décor, along with recommendations for similar popular products. A great “v1” proof-of-concept!
Eighty hours and one week later, we were up and running. Along the way, I gleaned a few lessons in on-the-fly, homegrown development:
- You don’t know how to build something until you’ve done it three times. Only on version 3 does it start looking like you might have a good product. Having a flexible, agile team also gets you closer to a product that the market wants. Be delighted with v1, but know it’s not built right yet.
- Test in Internet Explorer last. If you spend all your time fixing problems on IE before iterating on core ideas, you’ll spend too much time dealing with Microsoft issues. Chrome has a robust set of developer tools that will quickly get you going, so leave the 3-4 problems that exist for IE at the end.
- Use the console.log and console.dir in your browser’s developer tools; they are your best friends for rapid JS app development. In addition to letting you debug your code along the way, they work seamlessly in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. You can verify code while the page is loading, set flags for when functions are called, and even print out contents of a JS array to verify data integrity.
- Hardware is cheap. Over-invest in hardware when doing something customer-facing. For this POC, we spun up a 2GB dual-core virtual server for $150/month so that we could scale up to 4GB of memory if needed to. Don’t let hardware be the reason that your POC fails.
- Sometimes you just need to wipe your screen. One early morning at 3 AM, I was re-factoring a JavaScript function; the console kept throwing an error, stating that I should have a semi-colon on line 219, and not a colon. After much head scratching and denial, I realized I had a food crumb on my screen that made a typo in the code look like a semi-colon. In the wee hours, remember that there’s no such thing as magic. Sometimes it’s just a crumb on your screen.
Going through this on-the-fly innovation led to an exciting way to marry social innovation and personalization to merchandise landing pages, and we can’t wait to leverage our learnings even further.
If you’d like to learn more about how to do this, please reach out to your account manager today!