Marks & Spencer Provides Online Shoppers with Relevant, Meaningful Product Recommendations
Reading, UK — January 23, 2012— RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalisation for the world’s largest retailers, today announced it has it has integrated its personalisation and analytics technology online at MarksandSpencer.com. To create a more customer-centric user experience online, Marks & Spencer is using RichRelevance to deliver personalised product recommendations to shoppers as they browse the site. Recommendations are based on shopping patterns such as best-selling lines or items customers also viewed or bought and adjust in real-time to ensure that each customer is presented with products that are highly relevant and meaningful.
“Our customers are at the heart of every improvement we make. Through the RichRelevance integration, we can more efficiently deliver personalised product recommendations to each customer,” said David Walmsley, MultiChannel Development Director. “The RichRelevance team has domain expertise in personalisation solutions and that gave us confidence in selecting the company as our partner.”
“At a time when consumers have an increasingly broad range of options for where and how they shop, adopting a customer-centric strategy—where retail operations are considered from the customer’s perspective—is the best approach,” said David Selinger, co-founder and CEO of RichRelevance. “Marks & Spencer have recognised that personalisation is paramount to the customer experience and we’re delighted to work with them on this initiative.”
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalised shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Wal-Mart, Sears, Overstock.com and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalisation at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and effectively monetise site traffic by providing the most relevant products, content and offers to shoppers as they switch between web, store and mobile. RichRelevance has delivered more than £1 billion in attributable sales for its clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of personalised advertising called shopping media which allows brands to engage shoppers where it matters most – at the point of purchase on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is located in San Francisco, with offices in Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.co.uk.
Retailer Experiences £1.1m in Attributable Sales and 18% Increase in Average Order Value for Orders Containing a Recommended Item within First Month of Implementation
Reading, UK — 14 July 2011 — RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalisation for the world’s largest retailers, today announced a partnership with Ideal Shopping to deliver personalised shopping experiences for customers on the Ideal World and Create and Craft websites. As a TV shopping company, Ideal Shopping customers typically come to the websites with the intention to purchase. With conversion rates already hitting Ideal Shopping’s high benchmarks, the company tasked RichRelevance with the challenge of increasing the average spend per customer through the introduction of relevant cross-sell, up-sell and personalised shopping strategies. Following a rapid four-week implementation, Ideal Shopping has experienced an increase in average order value of 18% for orders containing a recommended item, resulting in £1.1m of sales attributed to RichRelevance onsite placements.
For Ideal Shopping, personalised recommendations are a form of site navigation and content curation. Mark Russell, head of ecommerce for Ideal Shopping, said: “Home, as a category, means different things to different people. We turned to RichRelevance because we needed a way of surfacing more products in an algorithmic fashion to generate an increase in sales opportunities without expanding our merchandising team. I love the fact that customers can curate the site to create an experience that is unique to them, while constantly adding value to thousands of other customer journeys, all without any additional resource requirements from my team.”
By taking the wealth of information Ideal Shopping has on each customer, including personal preferences, shopping history and demographic details and combining it with data they hold on relationships between products or product categories and the behavioural patterns of similar shoppers, RichRelevance’s technology enables Ideal Shopping to provide recommendations that are highly relevant to each shopper. Shoppers on Ideal World and Create and Craft now receive personalised product recommendations that adjust in real-time as they browse. With the most relevant products curated and displayed for each unique visitor, nearly one in 10 shoppers clicks through to recommended products.
Ideal Shopping selected RichRelevance based on three criteria: scalability, ease of implementation and cultural fit. “We were looking for a partner with domain expertise in e-commerce personalisation that could implement a complete solution quickly without jeopardising our core systems,” said Russell. “With RichRelevance we were up and running within four weeks and seeing a significant increase in average orders immediately. Furthermore, we feel confident that the team and technology can grow with us as our business expands.”
The RichRelevance implementation marks the start of Ideal Shopping’s personalisation initiative. Over time, Ideal Shopping intends to build out its product catalogue from 10,000 to 30,000 SKUs and will use RichRelevance to dynamically merchandise products across all customer touch points, including email, online marketing campaigns and the contact centre.
“With the explosion in content across the web, consumers are naturally gravitating toward merchants and publishers than can offer a more relevant, personalised experience. As a result, retailers have a powerful opportunity to connect with their customers and create revenue-generating opportunities by making personalisation a priority,” said David Selinger, CEO, RichRelevance. “Ideal Shopping has demonstrated a genuine understanding of what their customers want and we’re excited to be helping them execute on their vision to deliver a personalised experience to their customers.”
About Ideal Shopping
Ideal Shopping Direct Ltd launched into the TV shopping market in 2000, and currently owns four TV home shopping channels: Ideal World, Create and Craft, Ideal Extra and Ideal & More. The first channel launched on Ideal World in 2000, with Create and Craft following in 2003. Ideal Shopping broadcasts to more than 23 million households in the UK.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalised shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Wal-Mart, Sears, Overstock.com and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalisation at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and effectively monetise site traffic by providing the most relevant products, content and offers to shoppers as they switch between web, store and mobile. RichRelevance has delivered more than £1 billion in attributable sales for its clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of personalised advertising called shopping media which allows brands to engage shoppers where it matters most – at the point of purchase on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.co.uk.
Leading Electronics Retailer Launches Personalised Product Recommendations Across its E-Commerce Sites
Reading, UK — 29 June 2011 — RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalisation for the world’s largest retailers, today announced it has integrated its personalisation and analytics technology online at Dixons.co.uk, Currys.co.uk and PCWorld.co.uk websites. Shoppers on these sites now enjoy an enhanced shopping experience with personalised product recommendations as they browse through Dixons sites. A variety of recommendation types based on shopping behaviour adjust in real time to ensure the most relevant products are just a click away. Dixons expects to increase online revenue by improving conversion rates and strengthening customer relationships through the integration of RichRelevance’s technology.
Personalisation offers retailers the ability to connect with consumers on a deeper level. Using RichRelevance’s technology, Dixons will be able to provide customers with a completely individualised experience based on the preferences and personal attributes each shopper has shared, the data the merchant holds on relationships between products or product categories and the behavioural patterns of similar shoppers. The result is a more engaging and useful shopping experience for the consumer and greater revenue opportunities for the merchant.
“Delivering a personalised shopping experience across multiple customer touch points will give us the opportunity to better understand and engage with our customers and provide them with more meaningful product suggestions,” said Andy Barratt, head of online marketing at Dixons. “RichRelevance offers an unmatched combination of technical innovation and retail industry expertise that we expect will help us significantly increase customer engagement and online sales.”
Dixons elected to introduce personalisation initially across the company’s websites, with plans for additional implementations across other customer touchpoints such as email. The company plans to offer shoppers a seamless personalised experience across multiple channels using RichRelevance’s enRICH Personalisation Engine which facilitates competition among 60 independent recommendation strategies to deliver the most relevant experience. All recommendations include an explicit message about why a product is being suggested, framed in a way that will resonate with the consumer.
“A personalisation strategy is no longer just a nice to have. More than 40% of UK consumers have made a purchase recommended to them by a retailer, and today’s multichannel shoppers expect a personalised experience as they head online or onto their mobiles to shop,” said David Selinger, co-founder and CEO of RichRelevance. “Dixons understands the value of providing relevant, personalised recommendations for shoppers and we’re excited that they are one of the first merchants to implement our technology in the UK.”
About Dixons
Dixons Retail plc is one of Europe’s leading specialist electrical retailing groups. It operates a multi-channel approach to electrical retailing and trades through more than 1,300 retail and online stores, spanning 27 countries and employing nearly 40,000 people. More than 100 million customers shop in-store and online with Dixons Retail every year.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalised shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Wal-Mart, Sears, Overstock.com and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalisation at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and effectively monetise site traffic by providing the most relevant products, content and offers to shoppers as they switch between web, store and mobile. RichRelevance has delivered more than £1 billion in attributable sales for its clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of personalised advertising called shopping media which allows brands to engage shoppers where it matters most – at the point of purchase on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is located in San Francisco, with offices in Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.co.uk.
Ann Summers is making visits to its website personal, thanks to the use of recommendations technology.
Shoppers on the sex toys and lingerie website will see personalised recommendations that are uniquely relevant to them, thanks to the use of RichRelevance’s enRich Personalisation Engine.
Personalised Product Recommendations Provide a More Pleasurable Online Shopping Experience for Ann Summers Customers
Reading, UK — 15 June 2011 — RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalisation for the world’s largest retailers, today announced it has partnered with leading high street brand Ann Summers to personalise the online shopping experience. When they shop online, Ann Summers customers will now receive personalised product recommendations to help each shopper discover products that are uniquely relevant to them. As a result, customers have a more engaging and pleasurable shopping experience while Ann Summers is able to create new sales opportunities.
RichRelevance’s enRICH Personalisation Engine facilitates competition among 60 independent recommendation strategies to deliver the most relevant experience. Using RichRelevance’s technology, Ann Summers will be able to take the wealth of information known about each customer, including preferences and shopping history, demographic details and referral sites, and marry it to the data the merchant holds on relationships between products or product categories and the behavioural patterns of similar shoppers.
Led by prominent CEO Jacqueline Gold, Ann Summers reports an annual turnover of more than £117.3 million. AnnSummers.com, launched in 1995, is the company’s third largest channel behind its 150 high street shops and Ann Summers Party, which produces more than 4000 women-only events per week in the UK. By establishing a personalisation initiative, Ann Summers hopes not only to create a deeper connection with its largely female online customer-base, but to gather information about shopping behaviour and product associations that will increase sales across all channels.
“Through our personalisation initiative, we are gaining valuable insight into our customers and the way they shop for and discover our products. For example, we can access vastly more kinds of associated data about what people viewed after viewing a certain item,” said Andrew Harber, eCommerce Director at Ann Summers. “By partnering with RichRelevance to manage and analyse our customer data, we are more in-tune with our customers’ behaviour and can take a more holistic approach to merchandising and promotions.”
“Many multi-channel retailers struggle to extract actionable information from all of the data they have on their customers. It is not uncommon for data from the various channels to be siloed and for the customer experience to be fragmented as a result,” said David Selinger, CEO and founder, RichRelevance. “It is exciting to see Ann Summers take a customer-centric approach. By looking at all of their customer touch points as a whole and considering how data can be used to improve the customer experience across channels, Ann Summers will be able to offer a better and more consistent shopping experience.”
In selecting RichRelevance, Ann Summers cited the company’s Amazon.com heritage as a key factor in the decision, alongside ease of implementation and technical knowledge. “Everyone is familiar with Amazon’s recommendations and to be able to tap into the intellect behind the algorithms was very appealing,” said Harber.
About Ann Summers
Ann Summers is one of the UK’s leading lingerie and seductive lifestyle brands for women. Ann Summers offers fun, sexy ranges with luxurious design, injecting ‘everyday glamour’ into the high street. Ann Summers is passionate about offering something for every shape and size, as we believe that every woman can feel sexy. Ann Summers operates three successful sales channels; Party Plan, Retail and Ecommerce.
From its acquisition by David and Ralph Gold in 1972, Ann Summers has built an innovative brand empire that now holds presence in 150 primary high street locations in the UK and Ireland and their first international store in Valencia, Spain. In 1981, David Gold’s daughter Jacqueline Gold introduced the Party Plan concept, allowing women the unique opportunity to get together with friends, have a fun girly night in and buy Ann Summers products in their homes. Party Plan today boasts over 7000 Party Organisers throughout the UK who hold on average 4000 parties per week. Ann Summers’ Ecommerce site, www.annsummers.com, boasts over 1.5 million individual visits per month.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalised shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Wal-Mart, Sears, Overstock.com and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalisation at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and effectively monetise site traffic by providing the most relevant products, content and offers to shoppers as they switch between web, store and mobile. RichRelevance has delivered more than £1 billion in attributable sales for its clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of personalised advertising called shopping media which allows brands to engage shoppers where it matters most – at the point of purchase on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is located in San Francisco, with offices in Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.co.uk.
Highly relevant wine and gift recommendations drive nearly 10% of all site sales and deliver a 15% increase in average order value for #1 online wine retailer
Las Vegas – September 22, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, today announced that Wine.com is using the enRICH™ personalization platform to create an online experience that both mimics and surpasses the experience of choosing a bottle at a local specialty wine store. Through enRICH, the nation’s #1 online wine retailer now delivers highly relevant personalized recommendations of varietals, vintages and related accessories throughout the Wine.com site. Recommendations are tailored to each shopper’s current browsing behavior and geographical location and incorporate the point of view of the Wine.com community – what they looked at, how they shop, what they buy – in order to expose shoppers to relevant products that they might not have considered otherwise.
“We offer a huge assortment of wines to an extremely diverse customer base of wine lovers who could be looking to restock their cellar, buy a statement gift, pick an inexpensive party wine, or just find something that they love to drink,” said Amy Kennedy, Vice-President of Marketing at Wine.com. “The idea of personalization has always been attractive to us but difficult to realize in our market. RichRelevance helps solve this problem and delivers an unmatched customer experience. With recommendations already driving a 15% increase in average order value on Wine.com – and as much as a 26% increase in recent weeks – we’re very pleased with the results of personalization.”
Wine.com implemented RichRecs™ from RichRelevance in under six weeks to deliver a more relevant customer experience by offering personalized product recommendations on product, category, home and search pages. RichRecs leverages multiple recommendation approaches including collaborative filtering, personalization, analysis of current and past individual and “crowd” shopping behaviors, cross-placement optimization and a closed feedback loop to deliver the most relevant recommendations for each shopper at every moment. Automatic “competition” among 40+ recommendation types ensures accuracy and immediacy in the product recommendations.
As a result, no two shoppers at Wine.com are recommended the same products – even when considering the same bottle of wine. Both recommendation types (such as “people who bought this also bought…”) and recommended products constantly evolve and adapt to provide a targeted and unique customer experience.
“RichRelevance provides an intelligent technology that can assess multiple inputs – including geographical availability and pricing – to deliver an engaging shopping experience,” Kennedy continued. “Even better, their team took the time to understand our business and our goals. We expect the partnership to deepen as we look to integrate more of their personalization products across our customer lifecycle.”
“Wine.com is on the forefront of using data and technology to provide shoppers with an online experience that parallels if not surpasses the offline experience,” said David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance. “With personalized recommendations, customers can immediately find products that they love but would have never discovered on their own. In the case of Wine.com, these are varietals they would have never encountered at a local wine store with a restricted inventory and no means to optimize data on behaviors and preferences. As the online experience continues to evolve, it’s companies like Wine.com – who harness the power of personalization to drive sales and loyalty – that will emerge as real ecommerce leaders.”
About Wine.com
Wine.com is the nation’s #1 online wine retailer, according to Internet Retailer magazine’s annual ranking of websites by revenue, offering thousands of wines, wine gifts, gift baskets and monthly wine clubs. Wine.com’s mission is to be the ultimate resource for wine enthusiasts, whether shopping for themselves or sending a gift, by offering a great selection, low prices, convenient delivery and helpful information. Wine.com is the world’s most visited wine web site, according to research conducted by comScore Media Metrix. For more information, visit http://www.wine.com.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.com, BassPro.com and Walmart.com. The company’s suite of SaaS-based offerings, including RichRecs™, RichMail™, and MyRecs™, are easily integrated and drive a range of key performance indicators by enhancing the entire shopping lifecycle, from interception through engagement to re-interception. Built on the enRICH™ platform, RichRelevance products offer robust merchandiser control and employ over 40 different recommendation types with cross-placement optimization and a closed-feedback loop to display relevant, clearly-explained product recommendations. Founded and led by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco.