In a fast evolving retail landscape, where the battle for customers and revenue is being fought on many fronts, where should retailers seeking instant advantage focus their efforts and investments?

1. Monetise the Maybes
How personalisation converts
browsers into buyers
transforming multi-channel personalisation

2. “If I have 3 million customers on the Web,
I should have 3 million stores on the Web”
Jeff Bezos
In a fast evolving retail landscape, where the battle for customers and revenue is being
fought on many fronts, where should retailers seeking instant advantage focus their
efforts and investments?
The answer is to give more customers what they are most interested in more of the time.
The way to achieve this is personalisation. Specifically, the introduction, improvement and expansion
of personalisation tools across ecommerce activities – for demonstrably increased revenues,
maximised return on investment in traffic building and painless implementation.
“The secret of success in personalisation is a rapidly deployed solution, that can be painlessly
managed on an on-going basis and which delivers stable, predictable ROI.”
Roger Brown, CEO, Peerius
Get personal
It’s not easy to find a commentary on
the future of ecommerce and retail
that does not highlight personalisation
as a key component of success.
Econsultancy describes personalisation in 2013
as “…back big time. In part this is simply because
more companies’ digital capabilities have
matured to the point where they are actually
in a position to do it rather than just talk about
it. In part it is because customers simply expect
Amazon-like capabilities on all sites. In part it
is because most companies aren’t struggling
with getting traffic to their digital presences
but they could be converting much better.”
Accenture’s Technology Vision 2013 report
goes further, suggesting that organisations that
build deeper and richer digital relationships
with their customers in order to deliver more
personalised experiences and interactions,
are winning the global race to thrive.
Personalisation can take several forms; typically
an ecommerce site will personalise content, email,
recommendations, landing pages and navigation.
More detail is provided later in this paper.
“The key is to make sure that personalisation
improves site performance and the customer
experience, so that browsers’ buy and sales
revenue increases.”
Roger Brown, CEO, Peerius
www.peerius.com
1

3. Traffic conversion: Make the horse drink
Millions of pounds are invested in attracting visitors to retail websites everyday. IAB’s
October 2012 research reported that in the UK, digital advertising spend was somewhere
in the order of £2.6 billion for the first six months of the year, of which 59% was
paid-for-search.
In addition, Cap Gemini statistics show that less than 4% of all e-Retail site
visitors make a purchase; 96% of visitors leave a site without buying.
The goal must therefore be to increase browser to buyer conversions.
Personalisation ensures that the page a visitor arrives on, either via a PPC
campaign, organic search, advert or email promotion, the content is as
relevant as possible to that visitor based on their reason for clicking.
The Hut Group
Average order value (AOV) increased by 7.8%
Conversion rates increased by 39.9%
Revenue per visit increased by 48.7%
It is a recommendations solution that is simply smarter than
anything else on the market. The Peerius solution combined
with our platform means that The Hut Group and Peerius
can remain agile to the customer opportunity
Andrew Booth, CMO, The Hut Group
1. Ashley Friedlein The four Ps of Personalisation http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/11328-the-fourps-of-personalisation [accessed 20/02/2013] 2. Accenture Technology Vision 2013
transforming multi-channel personalisation
2

4. The facts: How personalisation
drives revenue
Peerius now has over five years’ data from over 100 different retailers, which demonstrates
the impact of personalisation on converting browsers to buyers. Much of this data is from
A/B split-tests – data that is immune from the bias of before-and-after comparisons.
Here are two case studies from Peerius clients.
Fashion
Figure 1 shows A-B test data demonstrating how a site performs with recommendations manually selected
by retail staff against recommendations driven by sophisticated recommendation algorithms. The site is a
major fashion brand and the data was recorded over six days and 170,447 visitor sessions.
Figure 1
www.peerius.com
3

5. Not on the high street
31% increase in average order value
78% boost in average units per order
The Peerius SMART-recs engine doesn’t look at ‘a customer’,
it looks at our customers’, to understand what they’re
interested in and connect them to the perfect products.
Dave Thomson, Head of Product Management,
Not on the high street
Health and Beauty
These results are from a UK high street health and beauty brand. The data is
taken from a month of trading, during which there were 1,433,804 user sessions.
Figure 2
3. IAB http://www.iabuk.net/about/press/archive/uk-digital-ad-spend-grows-126 [accessed
20/02/2013] 4. http://www.uk.capgemini.com/news-centre/news/online-conversion-ratesdrop-by-55-in-5-years-as-purchasers-become-shoppers/
transforming multi-channel personalisation
4

6. Painless gains
Personalisation involves some of the most
complex mathematics and logic to deliver
intelligent results. However, from a retailer’s
point of view, the right solution can be a
cost effective and low risk implementation
that can be deployed quickly with next
to no disruption to the operation.
Defining
personalisation
There are many ways retailers can
personalise the online shopping experience
and drive more revenue, including:
•
Recommendations: Drawing on sophisticated
algorithms in hybrid combinations with
hints and/or filters to offers alternative or
complementing products as a browse
advances towards the checkout. A good
recommendation deployment can increase
sales by as much as 20%.
•
Content: Content presentation is built around
a user’s preferences and behavioural patterns.
They see the most suitable content for them
on every page, whether the content is images,
articles, banners, promotions, documents or
any other piece of html content.
•
Email: Solutions of varying capabilities exist,
ranging from what amounts to a simple mail
merge to dynamic tags that updates an email
with live information. Using the right
personalised email approach has resulted in
email conversions increases of up to 18%.
•
Navigation: Personalised that allows a site’s
navigation to be moulded around the user.
A dynamic category listing based on the
behavioural patterns of an individual, and any
merchandising strategies that are in place,
means customers see more things they are
interested in on their path to purchase.
•
Landing: Personalised landing pages relate
to a user’s entry point on a site via PPC ads.
Intelligent solutions allow retailers to
dynamically generate dedicated landing
pages for each and every keyword in a PPC
ad campaign – to dramatically reduce bounce
rates and increases browser to buyer
conversion.
More importantly, the gains are well
documented and predictable:
•
Retailers providing personalised ecommerce
experiences convert more browsers to buyers
•
Personalisation done well is proven
to drive revenue growth
•
When so much investment is made in
attracting visitors to a site, it makes sense
to ensure that they can achieve their goals
when they arrive
•
Implementation is low risk, causing
little disruption.
Charles Tyrwhitt
36% increase in average order value
24% increase in average units per order
The Peerius SMART-recs differentiator
is its intelligence”
Jennie Blythe, Head of Web
Development and Trading,
Charles Tyrwhitt
www.peerius.com
5

7. Conclusion
Retail operations are changing swiftly and there is an array of opportunities
for ecommerce decision makers to choose from. Maximising the personalised
functionality of a retail site can deliver quick results in terms of increased
revenue, is inexpensive and can be implemented without disruption.
By monetising the maybes, personalisation can be a quick win.
Lovehoney
Average units per order up by 43%
Average order value up by 74%
“You plug Peerius into your system and it just works, running
silently in the background to drive sales. That’s great, but we’re
a company that’s keen to experiment and there’s huge scope to
tweak and tailor to our very specific needs”
Matthew Curry, E-commerce Manager, Lovehoney
Find out how advanced personalisation from
Peerius could increase your conversions and drive
revenue, to deliver instant ROI.
Visit
www.peerius.com, or call +44 (0)20 3397 4940
transforming multi-channel personalisation
6

8. Units 207-211,
Great Guildford Business Square,
30 Great Guildford Street,
London SE1 0HS
T: +44 (0)20 3397 4940
F: +44 (0)20 3397 4950
www.peerius.com