More and more marketers are boosting conversions and revenue by using dynamic personalization to deliver targeted product recommendations to Website visitors. Not nearly as many, however, are incorporating these product recommendations into their email marketing. But those that do, such as Century Novelty, are seeing an increase in clickthroughs and sales.
An online retailer of party supplies, Century Novelty uses the MyBuys personalization engine to provide dynamically generated product recommendations on its Website home page, category and product pages, and “view cart” pages. The solution uses complex algorithms, customer data, and online behavior to serve each visitor his own targeted recommendations.
“In every placement we put [the targeted recommendations], it makes money,” says Century Novelty vice president/general manager Ian MacDonald. So it seemed worth integrating the recommendations into email as well.
MacDonald decided to implement twice-monthly email alerts regarding new products and line extensions. These are personalized so that customers receive only alerts featuring merchandise that the recommendation engine has deemed relevant to them. For instance, someone who bought items for a princess-themed party most likely wouldn’t receive an email alert about the latest “pimp daddy” accoutrements.
“An alert is triggered only when something new happens that would be of interest to that particular person,” MacDonald says. “They perform phenomenally well because they’re so personalized.” On average only about 10% of Century Novelty’s email subscribers receive each email alert.
The alerts complement Century Novelty’s monthly enewsletter, which is distributed to the entire opt-in database. The newsletter includes targeted recommendations on the bottom, which are again tied in to the MyBuys solution, so that someone who has bought only items for children’s parties, say, would see different products than someone who regularly purchases adult-themed products.
Century Novelty places product recommendations on all order confirmation and transactional emails. The recent purchases determine which products are spotlighted. “The trigger emails perform so well, it’s surprising,” McDonald says. “We have customers who are ordering more items within 24 hours of their order, even though they haven’t even received the original order yet.”
The company is now testing the use of personalized recommendations in direct mail as a means of reactivating email subscribers. Its first test of postcard mailings with targeted product recommendations, which took place last year, broke even. But MacDonald is hoping that the second test, implemented last month, will prove more effective, as both the recommendation algorithm and the database segmentation have been tweaked.
For the second test, mail went to three groups of its house file. Email subscribers to whom recent messages bounced were sent a postcard with two personalized recommendations and a $6 coupon, along with a message along the lines of “It appears we lost contact.” In addition, high-value customers who had placed an order in the past 12 months but hadn’t shown any activity received a postcard with $6 coupon and product recommendations, and new customers were sent a letter mailing.
The lift in response from the product recommendations is all the more valuable in that the process is pretty much automated. Century Novelty sends MyBuys an automatically generated report each night of all its orders for the previous 24 hours, which MyBuys uses in conjunction with the Website traffic and navigation data it tracks to continually refine its recommendations.
Century Novelty does retain control over which products or categories to recommend, however. “We will tell them what [product] categories are in season, so MyBuys takes that information and starts featuring them. We can suppress certain SKUs and price points, and really push certain items,” MacDonald says.
“Even though we know our product, they’re able to look at the data and find relationships we didn’t know about,” he concludes. “It’s very easy to integrate. I wish we’d done it sooner.”
