As competition increases more than ever in the digital space, retailers must provide a seamless personalised experience to engage shoppers. Drapers explore what some tech savvy retailers are doing with personalisation and how this is benefiting the customer experience of their shoppers.
E-retailers increasingly realize the importance of using data about their shoppers to connect on a personal level, but challenges persist.
Getting to know customers is easier than ever, even if most e-retailers never meet them. Consumers leave behind a mountain of data when they browse, buy or otherwise interact with a merchant online, and e-retailers can draw insights from that data to personalize future product recommendations and promotions to consumers’ interests, leading to sales and increased loyalty.
Barneys New York uses the Relevance Cloud™ personalization platform to digitally enhance in-store service and engagement through customer-centric personalization
San Francisco, CA — April 25, 2016 — RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, today announced that Barneys New York is using the Relevance Cloud™ personalization platform to power a first-in-kind digital customer experience at its new flagship store in downtown Manhattan.
The new store offers a unique and timeless luxury shopping experience, with an emphasis on bringing digital aspects into the store with state-of-the-art technology. Barneys New York is the first luxury retailer to integrate iBeacon technology with the Relevance Cloud personalization platform to deliver personalized editorial content to store shoppers. Barneys New York is also using the Relevance Cloud to connect online and offline behaviors and preferences to help sales associates better serve their clients via a customer clienteling app.
These innovations enhance the customer experience with instant access to informative and entertaining content, while also ensuring that associates are highly informed and have better background information on brands and products of interest to each individual consumer.
“The customer experience in this store runs parallel in importance to the design, product and historic location,” Barneys New York COO, Daniella Vitale, commented at launch. ”We want the customer to feel as though anything is possible when they walk into the store. With the seamless integration of technology, our incredible staff, and a deep appreciation of our customer, we really do feel that everything is possible.”
Content Personalization: iBeacons & The Relevance Cloud
Barneys New York is using iBeacon technology to share informative and relevant content (videos, look books and designer interviews) from The Window, Barneys luxury editorial site, with shoppers as they move about the store. Beacons are integrated with the Relevance Cloud platform to deliver personalized recommendations of content to users who choose to opt-in for this experience via the award-winning Barneys New York app. The app also delivers personalized notifications when a shopper nears items in their mobile shopping bags or on wishlists, creating a seamless and efficient shopping experience for the knowledgeable Barneys customer.
“The most important touchpoint is the phone,” Barneys Vice President of Digital, Matthew Woolsey, recently told Digiday. “We’re proud of the way we’ve used our customer data online and offline to be fluidly connected — it allows for a personalized, consistent experience in store and online.”
Data-Driven Clienteling & The Endless Aisle
Barneys New York is also using RichRelevance to power a new clienteling system that uses customer-centric personalization to empower sales associates to better serve their clients. The clienteleing app is available on associates’ iPads, which are also used as mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) devices with Apple Pay.
Through the Relevance Cloud personalization platform, the new clienteling app connects consumer, product and inventory data to deliver personalized product and content recommendations based on each shopper’s unique history with Barneys New York. The app also provides ‘endless aisle’ capabilities: associates can access inventory across all Barneys New York stores and, from the store floor, key an order to be fulfilled immediately.
“Luxury is at a place where we can make strategic investments for our brand, rather than playing catch up everywhere,” continued Woolsey in his Digiday interview. “The goal is to create an elevated customer expectation.”
These new digital initiatives build on a long-term partnership between Barneys New York and RichRelevance to personalize the digital experience, including an increased focus on personalization in Barneys recent redesign of its digital platforms barneys.com and editorial site the window.barneys.com.
Explained RichRelevance CEO, Eduardo Sanchez: “Luxury shoppers expect a premium experience and personalized service at every touchpoint. By extending the Relevance Cloud into the store, Barneys has become the first luxury retailer to use iBeacon technology content and consumer insights to bring a more personalized and editorially-driven experience to customers everywhere they shop.”
About Barneys New York
Barneys New York (Barneys) is a luxury specialty retailer renowned for having the most discerning edit from the world’s top designers, including women’s and men’s ready-to-wear, accessories, shoes, jewelry, cosmetics, fragrances, and gifts for the home. Barneys’ signature sense of wit and style is manifested in its creative advertising campaigns, original holiday themes, and celebrated window displays. Founded as a men’s retailer in 1923 in downtown Manhattan, it became an international arbiter of high style for both women and men in the 1970s, renowned for discovering and developing new and innovative design talent. Today, Barneys New York operates flagship stores uptown on Madison Avenue and downtown in Chelsea in New York City, as well as additional flagships in Beverly Hills, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, along with a preeminent luxury online store, Barneys.com, as well as 18 other stores and outlets across the United States. For more information about Barneys New York, please visit www.Barneys.com and explore its luxury content site, The Window, for an insider’s look into the Barneys world: a behind-the-scenes visit with exciting designers, fashion, events, and the Barneys team.
PRESS CONTACTS
Renee Newby
BPR for RichRelevance
757.651.6554
Analysis of Internet Retailer’s 2016 Top 500 Guide shows RichRelevance is top personalization vendor based on client revenues
San Francisco, CA — April 19, 2015 — RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, today announced that it is the #1 personalization vendor for the Internet Retailer 500. The top ranking is based on a combined $67.7 billion in online sales across RichRelevance’s clients listed in Internet Retailer’s 2016 Top 500 Guide®.
According to analysis of Internet Retailer’s 2016 Top 500 Guide® data, RichRelevance’s customer base represents nearly 50% more online revenue than the nearest competitive vendor. RichRelevance also significantly outperformed Oracle (#7), Adobe (#8) and Salesforce (#13) in the personalization category with more than double the client revenue of all three platforms combined ($29.4 billion).
Retailers who named RichRelevance as their personalization vendor include prominent retail brands such as Best Buy, Costco, Dell, GoPro, JC Penney, Kohl’s, L.L. Bean, Macys, Office Depot, REI, Under Armour and Walgreens, as well as luxury leaders Barneys New York, Burberry, L’Oreal, Michael Kors, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and others.
“RichRelevance ranks #1 for personalization in the Internet Retailer 500 because of the powerful advantages the Relevance Cloud platform offers for large retailers,” said Eduardo Sanchez, President and CEO of RichRelevance. “We remain completely focused on strengthening the Relevance Cloud by building and bringing in the best technology, whether for call center, POS, search or even virtual reality, to support digital sales in a complex omnichannel environment.”
More than 240 leading retailers use the Relevance Cloud to power personalized content, offers and product recommendations to shoppers across web, mobile, call center and store. Forrester Consulting recently found that the Relevance Cloud personalization platform delivers revenue increases of at least 10% and over $400K in annual maintenance savings. The open, real-time personalization platform combines advanced data science with a world-class Hadoop installation and 12 global data centers that support more than one billion decisions per day.
Sanchez continued: “Faced with an explosion of marketing systems and customer data, our clients are using the Relevance Cloud to unify customer information and orchestrate a real-time customer experience that is consistent – and continuous – across every touchpoint. This is a crucial strategic advantage for our clients, and a significant re-writing of the retail CMO playbook to online and offline sales.”
Methodology: The ranking is based on RichRelevance’s analysis of the collective online revenue of the client bases of the personalization vendors represented in Internet Retailer’s 2016 Top 500 Guide®. The annual Guide provides exclusive rankings and analysis of North America’s 500 leading e-retailers. The merchants ranked in the 2016 Top 500 Guide represent collective U.S. web sales of $286.2 billion, an 84% share of total e-commerce sales in 2015.
PRESS CONTACTS
Renee Newby
BPR for RichRelevance
757.651.6554
50 years ago, a unique, real-time personalised customer experience was the norm. You loyally entered your local store, were served by a brand who knew your preferences, offered help, and could reserve, deliver or sell goods in a way that suited you. Today, consumer expectations haven’t changed, but their purchasing channels have.
Real-time personalisation goes further than the personalised email marketing you often find from brands online. It means being able to serve relevant, compelling information during a live interaction with a consumer that is only milliseconds long. Real-time personalisation has the power to encourage consumers to complete the purchasing process and develops a loyalty that pays dividends long term.
Recently we participated in the event E-Commerce One to One in Monaco. In its sixth year, it yet again proved to be THE event for ecommerce leaders. With over 1,000 carefully selected participants, the three-day event made for a rich exchange of ideas and innovations.
Some of the key topics discussed ranged from the shopping experience on mobile devices and developing a ‘mobile first strategy’ to customer service excellence and loyalty programmes. A survey of retailers attending the event uncovered the following top six investment priorities for retailers in 2016:
- Creating excellence in customer service
- Enhancing the shopping experience for mobile
- Building customer-centric financial indicators
- Developing a mobile first strategy
- Building innovations for loyalty programmes
- Developing branded content
For RichRelevance, E-Commerce One to One represented an opportunity not just to make new acquaintances, but also to meet and network with existing customers through dinners and receptions. The speaking sessions also featured one of our valued customers —children’s apparel retailer, Petit Bateau — who presented a workshop about their omnichannel journey with us.
In her workshop, CRM & Digital Director, Christel Hennion talked about the challenges faced by Petit Bateau and why they needed an omnichannel approach. With nearly half (44%) of their customers first searching online before visiting a store, Petit Bateau needed to connect online and offline sales channels to better understand their customers so they could make the right omnichannel recommendation.
To do this, Petit Bateau leverages RichRelevance’s user profile service to gather and access the necessary information about their customer both online and offline. With this customer knowledge, Petit Bateau used RichRelevance product recommendations to personalize the relevant offer on each channel for their shoppers. As a result, they have seen increased engagement and frequency of purchase from their customers.
Petit Bateau also shared an interesting cohort analysis. Even though a small percentage of shoppers interact with product recommendations, this segment represents 50% of orders and 60% of global turnover.
This segment leverages personalization as a means of navigation and catalogue discovery. They are often strongly committed and provide high value to the retailer.
See the E-Commerce One to One blog post for more on Christel’s talk.
Similarly, Google presented a separate workshop where they further expanded on the topic of analysing the influence of online and offline sales, again using Petit Bateau as the example. Laureline Serieys, Retail Industry Head at Google, discussed how they helped Petit Bateau map their customer journey and measure the influence of online and offline purchases. Read more on this session here.
Thanks to all those we met at E-Commerce One to One! The stellar group made it such an insightful event to attend. We’re looking forward to 2017 already.