With both wholesale and direct-to-consumer business models as well as three distinct product categories, Mud Pie had a pressing need to personalize each customer’s experience. The online retailer of seasonal baby clothes, women’s apparel, gifts and home décor leveraged the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud as part of a recent upgrade of its web presence.
Since launching the new e-Commerce site and personalization strategy in 2015, Mud Pie has seen strong growth in e-Commerce and mobile metrics, including:
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A 56% increase in e-Commerce conversion rates;
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A 120% increase in revenues overall; and
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A 508% increase in mobile commerce revenues.
Additionally, the retailer significantly reduced the number of customer service calls and emails it receives, lifting the weight off customer service representatives from engaging in constant contact with shoppers.
Personalizing Two Business Models Under Three Families
Mud Pie is still a fairly new player in the B2C sales space, only launching its e-Commerce site in 2010. The company actually sells its products through two separate business models: wholesale through more than 16,000 specialty retailers and department stores, and on its direct-to-consumer e-Commerce site. On top of that, the business has three “families”: baby and kids, fashion and living.
“Since we do have our three families of business, personalization was really important to us,” said Andrea Ouargli, E-Commerce Manager of Mud Pie. “We have more than 8,000 SKUs at this point. When a customer comes to our web site, we want them to be able to see what products they’re looking for. With our old platform, they would come to the site and randomly see baby items or living products, and the experience would be all over the place.”
With the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud, the Mud Pie team can better tailor the content to viewers with a narrow focus. The Cloud platform powers the retailer’s ability to dynamically display promotions targeting various audience segments, and ensures that the customer journey is in sync regardless of the connection point, whether it be the web site, mobile or email.
Mud Pie turned to marketing and design agency Whereoware to build out its personalization strategy and implement the Episerver platform. The Episerver suite platform is integrated in a database within marketing automation platform Silverpop, so that it can gain access to consumer data from interactions with the retailer. This data collection enables Whereoware to establish personas for Mud Pie consumers using numerous criteria.
“We utilize previous purchase behavior, we utilize pages that consumers have visited on the site and pages that they’ve abandoned,” said Faith Albers, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Whereoware. “We also have email preference forms where people can specifically say ‘I’m interested in baby items.’ Using all of that data combined, we identify through our own algorithm what their persona would be. That is constantly being updated through the marketing database.”
For example, if a consumer is shopping for baby clothes today, but in six months’ time begins to shop only for adult apparel, the Mud Pie site will recognize the change in behavior and begin delivering content on the site and through email that matches the customer’s present interest.
Going Mobile-First
As part of the strategy to personalize each consumer experience, Mud Pie felt it was necessary to take a mobile-first mentality, especially with a growing population of shoppers visiting retail sites on their mobile devices. While Mud Pie had a responsively designed web site prior to working with Whereoware, not all aspects of the site had been optimized specifically for the mobile user.
“With more than 50% of our online traffic coming from mobile, we realized that we can’t ignore it anymore,” Ouargli said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Any time we were creating a page or optimizing the layout for what it would look like on mobile, we made sure to utilize the preview feature on Episerver, so we could see what it would look like on, for example, an iPhone or iPad. Each page was automatically configured, so we didn’t have to spend extra time in coding, or utilize our developers to code extra pieces to make them responsive. The site, in its nature, is coded so that we easily have these blocks that can shift and move on a mobile device to give it that seamless experience.”
