Interactive search experience adapts and learns throughout each shopper’s journey to surface products they want to purchase
Shop.org Retail’s Digital Summit — Dallas, TX — September 27, 2016 — RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, today launched Find™, the newest product in RichRelevance’s product suite. Built on the Relevance Cloud™, Find uses powerful real-time personalization to elevate the site search experience – on every device – by instantly connecting shoppers with the products they intend to buy. Find focuses on the customer, providing highly relevant search results based on real shopping behavior, while also delivering the full range of tools that retailers need to innovate the search experience without reliance on IT resources.
“Find elevates site search to meet customer expectations for relevant and personal interactions at every touchpoint, especially in this mobile-first world,” said Eduardo Sanchez, President and CEO of RichRelevance. “For the past 18 months, our customers have told us they wanted us to build a comprehensive and personalized search solution because it was a critically important function. They’ve told us how they struggle with solutions that are archaic and unable to keep up with new data and devices. Find is our answer to delivering the kind of search experience that consumers want – and that we know is possible.”
Site Search is Broken
Site search technology has stagnated for nearly a decade, and currently almost 50% of all e-commerce site searches end in failure. A bad search experience is amplified on mobile devices, where the smaller form factor leaves a tiny margin for error. This has significant consequences for retailers: research from RichRelevance shows that 73% of U.S. shoppers are extremely likely or likely to leave a retail site that doesn’t provide good search results, and 37% are not at all likely to return.
According to Brendan Witcher, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research: “Site search often falls short in its core responsibility: creating an exceptional online experience by delivering the most relevant, contextually-driven answer from a customer query. Traditional site search simply wasn’t designed years ago to properly handle today’s dynamic online and mobile engagements. Search is limited in its ability to effectively serve today’s customer.”
Find: Personal, Real-Time & Friendly
With Find, RichRelevance has launched the first comprehensive personalized site search solution available in the market in the last decade. Through the Relevance Cloud, Find leverages omnichannel data on current and past behaviors, as well as brand affinities and price preferences to algorithmically surface the most relevant products for a given query, context and device. Find also introduces Findability, a real-time metric that measures the success or failure of a search query at scale to help retailers understand if their shoppers are locating the items they wish to buy.
With Find, for the first time ever, site search is personal, real-time and friendly:
- Personal: Find uses real-time shopper behavior to match individualized results to user intent, increasing Findability across all devices. Find predicts and suggests products and keywords with every tap or keystroke, continuously refining the product assortment displayed on screen as the shopper completes their search.
- Real-Time: Find erases indexing delays, allowing results to be based on signals received less than one second earlier. Global pattern & trend alert notifications allow merchandisers to respond is real-time to changes in search behavior, improving sales.
- Friendly: Find’s intuitive dashboard and reporting empowers business users to execute changes and manage the site search function without relying on IT resource. For shoppers, Find delivers a wholly unique search experience that is dynamic and engaging.
Find: Key Features
Find integrates state-of-the-art search technology into the Relevance Cloud platform to debut the most innovative technology architecture for site-wide search personalization. The key features of Find include:
- Personalized Search & Browse: Attribute Sort Options; Algorithmic Sorting; Contextual Considerations; Real-time Affinities; Multi-language; Assortment Equalizer; Predictive faceting; Wisdom of the crowds
- Shopper Experience: Interactive search results dynamically change as shopper applies filters or additional keywords; Visual feedback with explanation of why shopper is seeing particular results
- Merchandising Controls: Conditional Boosting; Conditional Burying; Filtering; Linking
- Testing & Reporting: Personalization MVT; Wisdom of Crowds MVT; Catalog fields MVT; Findability Monitor; Query Alerting
PRESS CONTACTS
Renee Newby
BPR for RichRelevance
757.651.6554
Today, we are thrilled to announce that RichRelevance Engage, the dynamic content personalization solution, is now out of beta and available to all our customers. Engage enables the delivery of content and campaigns in real time based on individual shopper behavior and shopping history across online, mobile and email channels. 
Traditionally ecommerce and marketing teams have competing objectives regarding conversion rate versus brand; creating disconnects in the customer experience. For example, a simple question such as, “Which four creatives should we
showcase in the home page carousel?” can lead to significant conflict within the organization.
In an effort to make informed decisions, the emergence of testing and optimization tools has caused an explosion in test schedules and reports creating a huge amount of data to manage and analyze manually, as tests are run for each placement. This is multiplied by the frequency of the campaign refresh, demanding a significant amount of resources.
Ultimately, retailers find it difficult to know what content to publish, where to publish, and how to improve the customer experience; meaning content is often difficult to find and/or irrelevant—curtailing the ability to impact the bottom line.
Engage addresses all of these pain-points. It auto-optimizes all your content, making data-driven decisions on which content to show to whom, where and when, saving time by eliminating the need to run hundreds of manual A/B tests – thus leading to increased productivity and improved conversion.
The Marriage of Content and Commerce
The ability to weave together content and commerce is what separates retail winners from also-rans. Matthew Woolsey, EVP of Digital at Barney’s New York, recently said, “Customers who engage with editorial content—whether that’s a Window story,
a designer interview, a video, a lookbook or a personalized editorial recommendation—spend 40% more than our average customer.”*
Engage allows retailers to marry content and commerce by measuring and optimizing campaigns based on commerce KPIs—cart adds, conversions and revenue—not just clicks. It also makes it easy to embed personalized content across the broader e-commerce site, including transactional pages, mobile apps or even email in order to maximize reach.
One customer participating in an early trial of Engage is HD Supply. This home and industrial supplies retailer in the US is using Engage to expose relevant products through promotional banners on their web and mobile sites. Nicole Norris, Digital Marketing Manager at HD Supply, commented, “What I love about Engage is that it
takes us out of the equation in determining what customers would respond to best. Because Engage is based on algorithms, it helps us make that decision.” The results
for HD Supply show 116% increase in conversion and 13% increase in AOV from personalized promotional banners.
Getting Engaged
You can start using Engage right away, in just three simple steps:
- Mass upload your content from your CMS quickly via plug-in or feed
- Apply tags to content from similar cohorts to build campaigns more efficiently – Engage will automatically swap contents in-and-out from that cohort based on the KPIs defined by you
- Define segments and/or contexts to further zero in on to whom, where, and when should the message be delivered
All this may be managed from the RichRelevance Dashboard.
Engage will provide a much stronger toolkit for building richer content experiences, leading to higher levels of conversion and consumer loyalty.
Learn more about Engage here. (French, German, Portuguese)
*Source: The Zoe Report, May 28, 2015 – http://thezoereport.com/habits-of-mobile-shoppers/?mode=view-all