By Darren Vengroff, Chief Scientist, RichRelevance
When done right, relevant product recommendations can deliver a 5 – 30 percent lift in conversion and sustain or even increase these levels over the long term. Darren Vengroff offers three best practices that can help retailers deliver on the promise of personalised product recommendations.
Guest Post from Dr. Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com
I am an outspoken proponent of excellence in education. There’s almost nothing more important to our society’s long-term success than providing individuals the opportunity to excel in the life-long pursuit of knowledge.
At Overstock.com we seize the opportunity to give back to the academic community in ways that not only enhance a person’s drive towards higher learning, but also integrate opportunities to leverage business models that support our goal to be the most important shopping destination for our consumers.
Two big new prize contests just getting under way take a page from the innovative, exciting competition run by Netflix. In a nail-biting finish in the fall of 2009, the movie rental service paid $1 million to a global team of data mavens, who just edged out another group, in most improving its online film recommendations.
The Netflix contest was celebrated as a triumph for the company and as a catalyst for bringing new techniques to data analysis. But in 2010, Netflix was forced to cancel a planned second prize because of privacy concerns. Two researchers showed that the supposedly anonymous data from the first contest could be used to identify customers. That eventually brought an inquiry from the Federal Trade Commission and a lawsuit. So Netflix shelved its plans for a second contest.
Today is a day of conflict: I’m returning to work after a week working in Buenos Aires. Although I absolutely love being back in the States (and of course spending most of my weekend with my family!), I must say I really loved the experience in Argentina. Here are some random thoughts about the experience.
Oh, Facebook. Everyday, we log in to check out our news feed, update our status, see who posted to our wall or tagged us in incriminating photos from last weekend. Activities that were meaningless to most of us five years ago are now ingrained into our daily lives. And with a speculated run at a $100+ billion dollar IPO, the analytics (and investor) community has experienced a huge surge of interest in network data and how the insights it generates can be decoded into massive amounts of frictionless cash.
The online retailer is pulling a Netflix, dangling the promise of a rich reward–not to mention some serious bragging rights–to the team that increases customer purchases.