As consumers’ expectations around the shopping experience continue to rise with the advent of newer technologies and additional sales channels, more retailers are realizing the urgent need to personalize their offerings.
Spiraledge now delivers personalized shopping experiences across its two e-Commerce sites, SwimOutlet.com and YogaOutlet.com, and their corresponding mobile sites, via the RichRelevance Relevance Cloud product suite.
Spiraledge used the suite to leverage the Recommend product recommendation platform and the Discover personalized search platform. The retailer has been able to:
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Launch a 90-day A/B test on the SwimOutlet site that produced improvements in conversion rate and average order value (AOV);
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Expand the testing to YogaOutlet.com and the two brands’ corresponding mobile sites;
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Achieve an 11% increase in conversion rate for returning consumers through a new sort testing feature; and
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Use “type-ahead suggestions” to cater to consumers’ browsing and buying habits.
To first test the RichRelevance platform, the retailer included basic product placements on its home, product, category, search and cart pages to gauge which pages were most appropriate for specific product recommendations. In using the platform’s sort testing feature, the retailer could re-sort products on category pages based on consumers’ past activity.
“If it recognizes that you like a particular brand such as Speedo, the site is going to display those products up near the top when you’re on different category pages,” said Steve Foust, VP of E-Commerce Marketing at Spiraledge. “This is important because we have up to 80,000 parent products, and that’s not even including all the different sizes and colors offered. It can be a challenge to navigate a site that has that many products. Customers might click the next couple of pages, but if you can deliver the products on the first page, that’s even better.”
Positive initial results encouraged the retailer to increase placements on category and home pages (both mobile and desktop), and the company has implemented recommendations on numerous guide pages throughout the site to provide the added value of content.
“We have a lot of guides that our content writers create around particular topics,” Foust said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “For example, we could create a competition swim guide, or serve up product recommendations on our blog as well.”
While the sort testing feature has only been deployed on the SwimOutlet e-Commerce site, Foust indicates that it will eventually be rolled out to the YogaOutlet and mobile sites.
The retailer also is optimizing the consumer experience through the Discover platform to include “type-ahead suggestions,” which present personalized suggestions for brands, categories, products and recommendations within the search bar. Similar to the results generated via Recommend, Discover yielded increases in conversion rate for returning customers to SwimOutlet.com.
As a whole, the adoption of the Relevance Cloud has enabled the retailer to focus on a more consumer-oriented mindset, according to Foust. With the platform, Spiraledge can now more consistently test alternatives on its web sites and mobile sites to further understand what is working and what is not.
“Because mobile and desktop are such different experiences, it’s important to test each site individually,” Foust concluded. “Something that might do well on desktop might not necessarily do well on your mobile site. Our desktop site isn’t responsively designed, so it’s definitely a different experience for both.”
