Personalization quickly is evolving from a luxury to a necessity for online retailers. Due to the high bar set by eTail giant Amazon, shoppers have come to expect relevant offers, incentives and, of course, product recommendations.
Smart Furniture, an interior design, home décor and furniture retailer, is moving beyond the traditional forms of personalization by leveraging solutions from Adobe.
Called “prescriptive personalization,” this marketing and engagement method is powered by Smart Furniture’s overall knowledge of customers and the products being sold, according to Gil Cayabyab, VP of Marketing at Smart Furniture. “We’re not just taking customer input in, but also a lot of product knowledge and years of experience from our sales and customer service reps. We have customers asking all types of questions every day, so over time, we’ve essentially become product experts.”
Advertisement
This “conglomeration” of data and information is a healthy combination of “what we know and what customers tell us,” explained Cayabyab in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. This is a far more daunting undertaking than establishing an algorithm for a recommendation engine based on what customers are looking at. “Prescriptive personalization is about becoming shoppers for our customers using what we know and what they know.”
Smart Furniture uses a series of Adobe solutions within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, including site search, testing, recommendations and analytics. Additionally, the retailer has become a loyal user of Scene7, which enables marketers to enhance, publish and deliver marketing assets to the web, mobile, social, email and print. Customer data can be used to present a rich digital experience in real time.
Scene7 has “been phenomenal for us,” Cayabyab said. “We really wanted a one-stop shop and a solution that integrates together. That’s what drew us to the Adobe Marketing Cloud. The site search and testing tool, recommendations tool and analytics all play together in the same ballpark so we can make sure it all runs smoothly.”
Ready, Set, Create
The Adobe Marketing Cloud has played an integral role in helping Smart Furniture create a more highly visual and relevant shopping experience, which in turn, makes customers feel confident in their purchases.
“Our products are typically mid- or high-ticket items, so when people drop this kind of money they want to know they’re getting the right product for their needs,” Cayabyab said. “With help from Scene7, when customers come on the site they know exactly what a product looks like.”
The sensory experience carries on through the entire online browsing and buying journey, starting with the SmartProfile quiz, which asks customers a series of questions about their interior design and style preferences. As a result, a plethora of data is given back to the retailer, Cayabyab noted, so products can be recommended based on past responses.
SmartProfile “gives customers the best experience,” Cayabyab added. “They don’t have to peruse the site all day long. We can get in front of the customers right away with what we think will work for them. It makes the shopping experience a lot more seamless.”
If customers are in the process of moving or remodeling, they can use SmartSpace, a customization tool that enables users to drag and drop products into a space and create new room designs. A series of products are available based on room and product type. Customers can either select a ready-made background, a white background or upload an image of their room. As customers develop their interior designs, a running price tally is updated in real time, making it easy to adhere to a budget.
“We want to make this process as easy as possible so customers don’t have to take the time to go to a showroom and basically guess about what works for them,” Cayabyab said. “So we basically bring the showroom to their laptops and tablets. We’ve received a lot of good feedback from customers.”
The tools from Adobe “have made it a lot easier for us by cutting a lot of development time out of the process,” Cayabyab noted. The Scene7 tool allows products selected in SmartSpace to be customized based on the variety of colors and finishes available. All products also are catalogued by search keywords already implemented on the site so customers can easily find products based on room and item type.
Smart Furniture is making a “very big push” in personalization in 2014 and the foreseeable future because “we think it’s the way people are going to shop down the road,” Cayabyab said. “If you don’t do it, you’re going to be left behind. Having the tools handy is going to be really helpful but we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do.”
