Top 5 Monetate Personalization Use Cases for Retail
For retailers, it is more important than ever to provide the most engaging and satisfying customer journey for all new visitors and returning customers who land on your eCommerce site.
Your eCommerce site is an important brand touchpoint that not only serves the function of selling products and goods but is also a prime spot to continue to build customer loyalty through various personalized ecommerce experiences.
Building personalized experiences and an engaging customer journey enables top brands and retailers to provide high-quality care and product recommendations for shoppers searching for the perfect items to purchase.
Customers are happy when they can easily find the products they want and need quickly and easily through your eCommerce site. And as a retailer, you have the prime opportunity to impact your key KPIs, including Average Order Value, Add-to-Cart Rates, Conversion, and more.
To build upon your brand’s personalization excellence, Monetate has collected five of our favorite retail use cases to provide inspiration for your eCommerce personalization strategy and experiences.
Ready to check them out? Here we go!
Top 5 Personalization Use Cases for Retail
#1: Engage on Arrival with Machine Learning
When a visitor or returning customer arrives at your eCommerce site, you have a short time to make an impression and capture their attention. Think of the potential of your homepage – are you making the most of this prime real estate?
Consider the following example:
The Challenge:
A sports retailer wanted to increase its conversion rate by finding the optimal homepage hero for their site. In order to make the homepage hero resonate with site visitors and returning customers, they decided to leverage machine learning to maximize ROI and reduce risk.
The Solution:
The sports retailer chose a maximum of three images to show in their homepage hero. Using machine learning, they decided to serve Majority Fit experiences, that would re-order existing content to drive the highest conversion. Why Majority Fit? Our sports retailer wanted to maximize ROI in the time that the experience is live on the homepage.
And with dynamic testing, our sports retailer was able to serve the most optimal homepage hero to site visitors resulting in a 20% increase in conversion rate. Amazing!
The lesson here? Leverage machine learning to make your value homepage real estate work for your on-site entry.
#2: Deliver Engaging Personalized Experiences at Scale
If you have a lot of customers, it can be overwhelming when considering the implications of providing personalized experiences for such a large, diverse group who are looking for different products and potentially different experiences when interacting with your brand.
Consider the tale of Monetate customer Reebok:
The Challenge:
As you would expect Reebok has lots of customers, each with differing intent.
Initially, Reebok tried to cater to everyone visiting their product pages on their eCommerce site, but the pages were packed with too much brand and experience-led content. Therefore, nothing stood out. Something had to be done to improve this experience for site visitors and customers.
The Solution:
Reebok decided to cut down on the clutter by transforming their Product Detail Pages (PDPs) into dynamic pages tailored to each visitor. Reebok used Automated Personalization Experiences to reorder the PDPs to accomplish this feat, prioritizing reviews over recommendations, content, etc.
So, what happened?
Reebok was able to leverage Automated Personalization to deliver 1-1 personalization at scale on critical pages, which resulted in the following:
- 4.2% lift in RPS (Revenue Per Session)
- 5.5% increase in ATC (Add-to-Cart Rate)
The lesson here? Use Automated Personalization Experiences to deliver 1-1 personalization to make viewing PDPs easier for customers by prioritizing the most relevant information.
#3: Slotted Recommendations for New Visitors
When a new visitor arrives on your eCommerce site, how can you serve the most targeted, engaging experience?
Consider the story of Helly Hansen:
The Challenge:
Helly Hansen has a widely varied customer base, thanks to its global presence and its specialization in a broad swath of apparel. Therefore, Helly Hansen knew that creating a shopping experience on its eCommerce site that would be as relevant for a Spanish sailor as it would be for a professional skier in Colorado and a commuter in London was extremely important.
Here’s how they made it happen:
The Solution:
Helly Hansen used Monetate’s easy-to-use personalization platform to test, segment, recommend, and automate personalization. The retailer set up slotted recommendations for new visitors, who were shown product recommendations based on items that were trending and popular. They even took it one step further by splitting product recommendations into menswear v. womenswear for both warm and cold weather gear.
By crafting such a curated experience for new site visitors, Helly Hansen saw the following results:
- Increase in Revenue Per Session by as much as 100%
- Decrease in Bounce Rate by as much as 4%
- More clicks on the Product Recommendations by as much as 50%
The lesson here? Slotted Recommendations enabled Helly Hansen to serve a tailored experience with a greater chance of capturing attention and conversions from site visitors.
#4: Leverage Social Proof for Top Results
Social Proof is a phenomenon that taps into the basic human instinct to follow the group. Tool retailer Toolstation decided to leverage the notion of social proof and FOMO or the Fear of Missing Out, to see if the actions of other shoppers would influence conversions.
The Challenge:
Toolstation wanted to increase conversion during a busy January sales season. They turned to Monetate Social Proof to make it happen.
The Solution:
In five minutes, Toolstation managed to set up a social proof experience on their eCommerce site. This experience revealed to shoppers how many products or tools had sold that day, creating the right sense of ‘FOMO’ needed to boost engagement.
Here’s what happened:
- Toolstation saw 30X ROI from implementing social proof
- 2% increase in Conversions
- 5% uplift in email-driven sales
So, based on these results, it appears that the social proof is in the pudding after all. You cannot beat a 30X ROI from an experience that took 5 minutes to create!
The lesson here? Something simple such as implementing social proof can yield big results! Also, don’t underestimate the influence of the actions and opinions of others in guiding purchasing decisions.
#5: Drive Traffic to Physical Stores
While there are many personalization experiences that you can build and launch on your eCommerce website, you can also use these same tools to impact consumer behavior offline.
For example, if your business has physical brick-and-mortar stores, you should consider leveraging your eCommerce site to drive foot traffic and store visits.
Here’s an example:
The Challenge:
A sporting goods retailer found that its customers with the highest LTV (Lifetime Value) tended to rely on both its eCommerce site and physical stores when researching and purchasing products. Therefore, the retailer wanted to test the impact of online offers aimed at driving customers to its physical stores through localized messaging on their site.
The Solution:
The sporting goods retailer decided to deliver specific offers and nearest store information with “tippy top” banners on its eCommerce site. They leveraged Monetate’s geo-targeting data along with its own proprietary custom metrics to deliver the right offer to site visitors. The retailer attributed online visits to offline purchases using matching customer identifiers.
So, how did this experiment go? Apparently quite well since the retailer experienced a $600K increase in revenue from customers leveraging these specific offers.
The lesson here? Make your eCommerce personalization extend beyond your website. Use all your brand touchpoints to impact customer behavior.
We hope you found the stories shared in this blog to be useful as you work to craft personalized customer journeys for your brand.
If you have any questions or want to learn more about the Monetate personalization platform, please contact us. We’re here to help!
