Dive Brief:
- Home furnishing company Room & Board reported an 80% increase in conversion rate by working with cloud commerce firm Kibo on personalizing online content, Kibo shared with Marketing Dive via press release.
- Room & Board worked with Kibo to use its customer data and library of creative assets to serve up personalized content to shop visitors. Using artificial intelligence (AI), the retailer was able to customize 100 elements across its site.
- The personalization program also led to a 30% lift in click engagements for customers that received the personalized messages and a 10% increase in average order value.
Dive Insight:
As consumers stayed home this spring during the early days of pandemic lockdowns, many people decided to redecorate their homes or bought furniture for home offices and home schools. While retail was hit especially hard during the global health crisis, certain categories including home goods and decor saw a spike in online sales during this period. The sector was still up 46% from May 26 to June 1 as compared to Feb. 24 to March 1, according to Digital Commerce 360.
Room & Board wanted to take advantage of the growing number of homebound consumers redecorating by improving its online shopping experience in order to compete for market share in the crowded sector. The retailer developed a more personalized shopping experience on its site, allowing for consumers to view personalize content from Room & Board’s database and content library.
The retailer developed the program with Kibo by creating small tests on its homepage and used the insights to optimize pages across the site. The company’s personalization program is now able to adapt in near real time to identify known visitors and deliver content accordingly based on visitors’ individual browsing behaviors.
A successful use of personalization like Room & Board’s use of Kibo provides some counterbalance to Gartner research that found that 80% of marketers will drop personalization efforts by 2025. Some marketers said that data is the main obstacle to effective personalization because of issues with collection, integration and protection.