Waitrose Drives 66.8% Engagement Lift Using AI Experience
Known for the quality of their products, high standards of customer service, and ethical sourcing, Waitrose has over 350 shops in the United Kingdom and exports products to 52 countries.
Many users from across the globe regularly interact with the brand through the content they offer on their website. This means that the site must serve several audiences with different goals, all while reinforcing the Waitrose brand identity as a trusted source of premium products and experiences.
One of the most popular features of the Waitrose site is the recipes page, in which the brand shares recipes along different themes such as “Quick and Easy”, “Comfort Food,” and “Healthy Ideas.” The marketing team began exploring which contextual factors would be most influential in determining the best recipe to display to each customer.
Success with Strategy
Monetate All-In-One Action
- Automated Personalization was used to drive engagement on the Waitrose recipe page
- AI selected the optimal content and type of recipes to serve to each visitor
- When moved to the homepage, Automated Personalization drove click-throughs to the recipe page
The various recipe categories have all been shown to appeal to Waitrose customers, but they carry very different context and message: choosing the right content to capture a visitor’s attention is essential, especially on the homepage where page real estate is at a premium.
Automated Personalization Serves Up the Right Recipes
We leveraged AI to drive engagement by selecting optimal content resulting in:
when exposed to the heavy traffic on the Waitrose homepage
Automated Personalization revealed what factors had been influential when picking the right recipe
Waitrose learned that customer data points such as family income, population density, and shopper’s OS were influential in recipe selection. The team was also surprised to learn that day of the week was one of the most important factors.
The results from Waitrose’s initial Automated Personalization Experience have given the team confidence that AI can help them deliver an online customer experience that meets the brand’s in-store standards.
“That’s where Monetate came in and suggested that Individual Fit Experiences [now Automated Personalization] would be the perfect way to test this. Instead of us trying to decide which customer should see which type of recipe, why not let the machine decide?”
JANE GODFREY,
Digital Optimisation Manager, Waitrose
Waitrose Continues Its Personalization Journey
In this Monetate Success Story video, Optimization Specialist Adam Ireson describes how Waitrose continues to explore homepage personalization, by leveraging customer behaviors and past orders to build custom tailored experiences.
If we’re targeting younger, busy people who live in London, for example, we now know that they are more likely to want quick and easy products and recipes. It’s another layer that we can add on to our knowledge of our customers.
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