Today, we are introducing RichRelevance’s new communications platform, “It’s Personal.” I love this phrase because it captures the essence of our business in so many ways. “It’s Personal!” represents our attitude, the value our retail customers want to deliver to their customers and our biggest market and technology differentiator. Two words, so many meanings.
The “It’s Personal” Attitude – RichRelevance doesn’t merely sell our technology to a retailer and move on to the next sales prospect. We employ an extensive team of Relationship Managers and engineers focused solely on improving our customers’ use of our technology. Their job is to enable each retailer to maximize competitive differentiation, while optimizing their relationship with customers. While metrics drive our analysis and results assessments, our Relationship Managers plug into the emotional connection (read: brand value) the retailer endeavors to create with customers, and then adjusts our technology to deepen this relationship. Succeeding in this effort requires empathy—a trait not often found in software companies. We believe we are succeeding, and our market-leading customer retention rate is a testimonial to this achievement. Our customers’ success is our success; thereby,“It’s Personal” is not an option. It is the key to the success of our customers, and in turn, RichRelevance.
Countless factors affect online shopping, many of which aren’t well known, classified, or understood. Much like the climate system, online sales vary across different time periods–year, month, week, day, hour–with smaller levels of variability often dismissed as so much ‘noise’. Ipads might be trending one day, and blenders the next, but over a month long period, maybe it’s towels that are the top seller. Yet what if we could really examine this ‘noise’? Isolate it? Explain it?
In the dark ages before I came to Rich Relevance, I studied climate change–no joke–and while I gained many insights from my research (global warming = not a hoax), the greatest was a general appreciation for how the environment feeds back onto itself, and how humanity is intrinsically linked to that environment. Thus I set forth with eagerness in this blog post to revisit my old friend ‘weather’ and determine if our environment affects online shopping.
Back in 2006, when Time magazine named “You” as Person of the Year, there were mixed emotions across the board. Some thought the choice was a short-sighted gimmick which ignored other newsmakers that year while Peter Sagal from Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! ventured that “if we truly controlled the media, we should have picked a much better choice for the Person of the Year issue.” ☺
This aside, the simple fact is that We (You) are making choices that surpass the infamy of Time’s cover, and in fact are changing the market dynamics of branding and retailing forever. Today’s consumer – you, me – is complex, demanding, connected and in control of how, when and where we want to interact with brands and retailers. Furthermore, not only am I in charge, I may exhibit different personas based on my shopping intent. I may be a “shopper of workout gear and accessories” in the morning, a “shopper of office supplies” later in the day and then a “darn, I forgot the birthday gift shopper” in the evening.
Chief Evangelist Jake Bailey talks retail targeting on iMedia Connection.
When the movie “Minority Report” was released in 2002, it was pure Hollywood that depicted a world where personalized screens would follow a shopper’s every move — whether walking through a mall or entering the local Gap store. Fast-forward 10 years, and this world of personalized screens is actually a reality driven by the sheer number of mobile devices consumers have access to today. This “ubiquity of screens” combined with the untethering of shopping from physical stores, has created a highly fragmented marketplace making it a greater challenge for brands to engage with consumers in the right context.
However, with change comes opportunity. A consumer’s shopping mode can be turned on at any moment, not just when they’re in the store or watching TV, but when they see something that piques their interest (think of the rapid rise of Pinterest) and want to explore or buy at that exact moment. The smartest brands are shifting their media investments to be in direct alignment with the shopping actions of the consumer by leveraging new and unique marketing channels that directly intersect with the path to purchase.
I’m proud to announce that RichRelevance took another leap ahead today in bringing dynamic personalization to retail, this time focusing on promotions with the introduction of RichPromo™. RichPromo moves us one step closer to our vision for retail of optimizing every pixel on an e-commerce site, creating a truly dynamic shopping aisle for every customer.
RichPromo targets promotional campaigns to each individual shopper thanks to the intelligence of the enRICH platform, and leveraging the same single site integration that begins when we introduce our personalized product recommendations, RichRecs™ to the site. We call this a “segment of one” – which is a way to describe shoppers who will find each campaign relevant, and the platform does the rest. RichPromo watches for affinities shoppers express to specific categories, brands and even product attributes, to select the most relevant promotion available.
Our testing shows that campaigns personalized with RichPromo provide a 4x increase to sales when compared to manually merchandised promotions. As we continue to integrate this new product into our client base we’ll be sure to share success stories and best practices from these learnings.
A recent article in RetailWeek here in UK, “10 Ways to Compete with Amazon” provided wonderful insights as to how retailers can best compete with the “digital Goliath” by leveraging their strengths. The author references Heritage (as in the case of John Lewis), Service (as in the case of Dixons), In-Store Environment and Added Value (as in the case of Marks & Spencer) to name a few. I’d respectfully like to add that there’s a #11 on this list of 10 ways retailers can leverage their strengths and that is taking a page directly from the Amazon playbook: Personalisation. While Amazon (and our very own CEO, David Selinger who led the personalisation effort for the R&D team there) innovated in the space by introducing recommendations, this technology has subsequently and quickly become an essential tool for multi-channel retailers to compete.
Personalisation, when done right, can provide customers with delightful experiences that introduce them to product discovery—essentially replicating the in-store experience like that of a helpful sales person. It’s no coincidence that customer-centric retailers like John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Dixons (all customers of RichRelevance) have adopted personalisation as a way to extend their superior in-store customer service across multiple channels. House of Fraser (another customer) has gone that one step further by leveraging a loyalty program and recognising their customers across all channels.
Leading retailers like these, that choose to put the customer at the center of their business strategies, are having deeper and more relevant conversations with their consumers. And the ones that are able to connect, and realise the lifetime value of their customers, will be the ones that continue to succeed.
-Darren Hitchcock, VP of the UK/European Region