A MARKETER’S GUIDE TO RICHRELEVANCE Mobile Success · A MARKETER’S GUIDE TO RICHRELEVANCE MOBILE SUCCESS 2 Executive Summary The purpose of this guide is to help you develop a

OMNICHANNEL SUCCESS GUIDE

A MARKETER’S GUIDE TO RICHRELEVANCE

Mobile Success

http://www.richrelevance.com

A MARKETER’S GUIDE TO RICHRELEVANCE MOBILE SUCCESS

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Executive SummaryThe purpose of this guide is to help you develop a successful strategy for using and maximizing the RichRelevance personalization platform (the Relevance Cloud™) on your mobile app or website. We’ll show you how and why each part of the platform will increase your shoppers’ revenue per session and add incremental revenue to your business.

Deploying RichRelevance on your mobile platform supports a true omnichannel experience. It engages your shoppers by giving them a more robust product-research tool and the opportunity to purchase on the device of their choice. A more personalized mobile experience can also drives offline sales (if applicable), leading to greater customer lifetime value.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Mobile Personalization Blueprint: What Is It and Why Is It Important? 3

Your Richrelevance Platform & How to Use It 6

Mobile Touchpoints: Where to Use Richrelevance 8

Layout & Design for Mobile Pages: Best Practices 14

Which Strategies Should I Consider: Best Practices 16

Testing, Optimizing & Reporting 18

Commonly Asked Questions 20

Additional Information 22

What Can I Find in This Guide?


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Mobile Personalization Blueprint: What Is It and Why Is It Important?People depend on their smartphones more than ever, and are constantly connected to people, places, information and businesses. The use of a smartphone is a very personal experience—from the protective cases customers buy to protect their investment to the apps used on them. Everything is personalized about the experience except, ironically, the information most apps and websites deliver. RichRelevance helps retailers exceed the one-size-fits-all experience by delivering content and products personalized for each smartphone user.

The Mobile Personalization Blueprint is a plan for successful mobile engagement with your consumers. The Blueprint includes:

I. Which RichRelevance products to use

II. Where is the optimal placement of these products in my mobile app or website

III. Configuring RichRelevance and common sense business rules

IV. Measuring results

V. Testing and improving performance

Google recently announced that the number of searches performed on smartphones now surpasses that on desktops and tablets. Ninety-one percent of smartphone users turn to their phones for ideas while doing a task, according to a Google/Ipsos survey conducted in March 2015.

Improving shopper experience on smartphones should be a top priority for maximizing customer acquisition, retention and revenue. Simply stated: If you don’t meet your customer’s needs based on their preference of shopping on smartphones, your competitors will.


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The number of devices through which a consumer engages with your brand is increasing exponentially. It’s critical that you make the experience “seem” seamless across this increasing number of touchpoints. The more consistent an experience you foster for your customer, the higher lifetime value (LTV) you’ll drive.

So, how does RichRelevance help my mobile app or website experience?

There are essentially three ways website shoppers find products:

1. Keyword search

2. Menu navigation

3. Product recommendations

By utilizing the Relevance Cloud in each of these areas, you can deliver the most relevant content and products in real time to your consumers however they choose to shop, increasing the likelihood of a purchase. What’s more, this positive impact on their customer experience creates repeat purchase potential and referrals from those happy customers.

Our own research (based on data from hundreds of millions of shoppers) shows that shoppers who click on product recommendations visit sites (on average) three times more than shoppers who don’t.

DID YOU KNOW?Of consumers using mobile to research:

55%want to purchase

within the hour

93%go on to make a

purchase

RESTAURANTS

70% considered

54% purchased

APPAREL & BEAUTY

63% considered

40% purchased

ELECTRONICS

61% considered

36% purchased

83%want to purchase

within a day

Source: Google/Nielsen Mobile Path to Purchase custom study, Nov 2013.


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What are we going to measure and improve over time?

To measure the incremental impact of RichRelevance, we target revenue per session (RPS) lift. The incremental lift in RPS is a measurable, directly attributable metric to your personalization efforts and the RichRelevance platform, enabling us to track improvement over time.

And that’s what RichRelevance is all about: improvement.

Measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) for mobile is just as important to your business as measuring KPIs for your other channels.

Conversion and average order value (AOV), while important metrics to consider, can be manipulated to drive RPS and are considered secondary success metrics. We do still recommend measuring and noting trends for these as well as other KPIs: visitors (traffic), orders, sales revenue, and engagement (mobile time per session).

Also, many consumers use mobile as their go-to product research tool, but not the place where they ultimately transact (desktop or tablet). View-through conversion metrics can also be used as a means of truly understanding the value of a personalized mobile experience.

The keys to a great mobile experience are ease of use, speed, and convenience. We’ll help you take advantage of small screens while maximizing real estate and revenue opportunities.

BEFORE & AFTERThe effectiveness of RichRelevance on mobile: Kalahari.com

METRIC IMPROVEMENT

Revenue from app (% of total revenue) Up to 25x

App conversion ~4x

Orders placed through app 30x

Revenue attribution from recommendations Up to 30%

Improvements compare to Kalahari mobile app without personalization.

As a small team, we managed to leverage Recommend to implement automated merchandising on our mobile channel and show significant ROI very rapidly—without investing much development time or reallocating resources.

- Dennis WilliamsFormer Head of UX & Design

“


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Your Richrelevance Platform & How to Use ItThe Relevance Cloud encapsulates four tools for creating world-class, winning personalized experiences. Each has its own purpose, but when used together, the true power of omnichannel personalization is harnessed. Each of these tools is powered by an unparalleled set of algorithms and data to intelligently serve the most relevant content and product selections to your customers. The best part? It gets smarter over time and automatically keeps up with purchasing trends, new product additions, and merchandising strategies.

Recommend™

Imagine browsing through a mobile experience where the products recommended are specifically suited just for you—color, size, brand, price and more. This is the idea behind our industry-leading product recommendations. The big data-based decisioning engine behind RichRelevance Recommend provides the most effective product discovery to your customers. It’s based on your business rules, your customers’ preferences, history and real-time online shopping behavior. You can even allow your data teams to create their own set of custom strategies to feed back into the platform, giving your business even more flexibility and control.

Learn more about the Relevance Cloud™ at richrelevance.com/relevance-cloud

build™

discover™ engage™ recommend™

™

http://www.richrelevance.com/relevance-cloud/


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Engage™

Remember, the most relevant answer to a shopper’s question often isn’t a product at all, but content found within your mobile app or site. That’s where RichRelevance Engage comes in. It serves relevant content and promotions to your customers at the most opportune times—including your navigation paths to optimize mobile real estate. Personalized campaigns on your mobile site or app help customers along their purchasing paths and lend your business even more credibility.

Discover™

There’s nothing more gratifying than useful shortcuts—or, in this case, a mobile app or website that knows exactly what you’re looking for. RichRelevance Discover allows you to engage quickly with shoppers by anticipating their keyword search terms (aka type-ahead search). With Discover and Recommend together you can present personalized product or category recommendations within your keyword search window, enabling speedy product discovery. If they choose to browse search results or category pages, Discover can sort those results instantly, boosting products toward which the shopper has demonstrated an affinity.

Build™

As your mobile business and RichRelevance experience matures, our API-based service, Build, is ready to help manage and route your data to personalize any application, such as CRM tools, campaign management, in-store POS systems and call centers. It’s your data, so why not maximize its potential for a true omnichannel personalized experience for your customers?

DID YOU KNOW?Of consumers considering a purchase:

Source: Google/Nielsen Mobile Path to Purchase custom study, Nov 2013.

Mobile users

who make

a purchase

visit mobile

websites

6x on average

59%visited a business’s

website


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Mobile Touchpoints: Where to Use Richrelevance Your mobile app or website has numerous “placements” where RichRelevance works best. Let’s take a look at the most common placements page by page, where we recommend you start utilizing RichRelevance.

Home Page

This is likely your most visited mobile page, so why not make a positive, lasting impact? Using advanced personalization techniques on your home page will engage your users and get them into your catalog. We recommend using a combination of Recommend and Engage here. A minimum of three placements to immerse the shopper in relevant, value-added content will progress shoppers to the next phase of the purchase funnel.

Enabling Engage placements here can really bridge the gap in an omnichannel experience. RichRelevance can recognize a shopper who has seen a product or brand on the desktop and display that content here on your mobile store to increase familiarity and immerse your shopper faster.

Shown here in “scroll view”, strategically

placing personalized content on your home

page keeps the viewer engaged. Displaying

products or content that aren’t relevant to

the user increases the chances of them

leaving your app or mobile website.


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Keyword Search

It’s estimated that 50% of your mobile customers will use keyword search to locate the product or service they are looking for. RichRelevance Discover enables you to make that very task easier and more enjoyable by suggesting keywords and recommending products as your customer types into the search field.

Called “type-ahead search”, Discover can display personalized keywords to assist your customer with the most likely search they are performing. This is also an opportunity to merchandise products or areas of your website that are otherwise not easily found. Boost product discovery based on a shopper’s current and past behaviors, brand affinities, and price preferences.

Precise rules and controls let you manage brand or product placements right in the RichRelevance dashboard.

DID YOU KNOW?

Source: Google Analytics aggregated data, US, April 1 – 14, 2014 and April 1 – 14, 2015.

Mobile conversion rates increased

29% in the last year.


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Browse & Search Results Pages

Delivering the most pertinent results based on either a keyword search or guided navigation is critical to moving shoppers through the purchase funnel. It’s a good idea to reinforce the keyword that got the shopper to this point in your app or mobile site by clearly stating that these are, in fact, the search results for that specific category, brand, or keyword.

A combination of highly qualified and sorted search results (Discover), supporting content (Engage), and specific item suggestions (Recommend) results in a captivated customer who will spend more time navigating your app or site as they identify their purchase options.

Serving Engage content at this stage can be quite effective for a few reasons. It can reinforce a particular brand message, satisfy partner obligations or even introduce alternative products with a higher gross profit contribution to your business.

With Discover, you can emphasize which product attribute(s) drive the best type-ahead experience for your specific customer base. Some retailers change their results by emphasizing the brand, while others emphasize price.

Adding a section for Recommend product recommendations may increase the likelihood of conversion at this stage as well if the shopper is not 100% sure of their intent.

A great rule to follow where pages have more content than usual is to keep it simple. Forty-six percent of mobile users report having difficulty interacting with a web page, and 44% complain that navigation was difficult (Keynote Mobile User Survey).

http://www.keynote.com/docs/reports/Keynote-2012-Mobile-User-Survey.pdf


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Product Detail Page

This is one of, if not the most important page on your mobile app or website. This is the point where shoppers decide whether or not they are comfortable enough with your mobile experience to execute a purchase. Emphasis on the product details should be priority here however supporting content for that particular product or brand can further convince a shopper to purchase. Showing alternative/complementary products at this point can also influence a purchase by providing a better product recommendation than the customer’s initial choice.

While adding Recommend product recommendations on the product detail page has been shown to increase conversion rates, it’s still important to arrange your placements where they will not interfere with the shopper’s intent to purchase. Make sure your “add to cart” or “buy now” buttons or calls-to-action are clear.

Product detail pages are viewed early and often by shoppers intending to buy, making this highly valuable real estate, worth much care and consideration. You’ll want to display the most important product information at the top of these pages, and customer reviews and less important technical details well below, knowing that if a customer is interested they will scroll.

Use Engage to display pertinent content for a particular product or brand in conjunction with Recommend for product accessories, upsells or alternative choices.

Customers who engage with editorial content—whether that’s a Window story, a designer interview, a video, a lookbook or a personalized editorial recommendation—spend 40% more than our average customer.

- Matthew WoolseyEVP of Digital

“


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Store Locator Page

Your store locator page can be an extremely informative page when personalized. Understanding the customer’s desires (other than directions or their closest store) can increase a shopper’s understanding of your omnichannel strengths. Including store events or locally pertinent information (Engage, Recommend) is a great example of utilizing common, mundane page space.

404 or No Results Page

No one wants to land on a page where there is no relevant content. This can be a result of not meeting a user’s needs, an inventory issue or simply a programming error. So take advantage of this unfortunate result by instead delivering some useful links and content to shoppers to keep them engaged in the purchase funnel.

If your 404 page is, as we hope, not a highly trafficked one (and rarer still for mobile), we suggest displaying the most aggressive sales or campaigns here to keep shoppers engaged (Engage). Display the current seasonal sales, promotions for red-hot deals, personalized recommendations (Recommend), etc. Give shoppers every reason to stick around and reacquaint themselves into the purchase funnel.


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Cart Summary Page

The cart page is the most common place during the checkout process to recommend additional products to your shoppers. Our most successful clients employ Recommend to suggest additional items before checkout. These upsells and cross-sells are typically related to the items the shopper has already placed in their cart, such as matching accessories or other products commonly purchased together. Recommend will determine which products are most appropriate by choosing from among multiple strategies for this placement. Advanced Merchandising (a feature of Recommend) gives merchants complete control when recommending product associations—on any page type.

Order Confirmation Page

Once a shopper has checked out, it’s important to reassure them of their purchase by displaying an order confirmation formatted specifically for a mobile device. It’s also an ideal opportunity to suggest additional items one last time with Recommend before their order ships, which could significantly increase RPS.

You should also consider reminding your customer of any loyalty programs they may be a part of. Using Engage to display such messaging can increase the social aspect of the mobile experience.

It’s important to test the effectiveness of recommendations on the order confirmation page, especially if suggestions were made on the cart summary page prior. This is an ideal scenario to test which placement is more effective with your shoppers.

Purchases are most often followed up by a confirmation email—another opportunity to test recommendations and offer your shoppers a more meaningful experience with additional items they may have overlooked.


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Layout & Design for Mobile Pages: Best PracticesWhen designing the placements for each of the RichRelevance products there are a few points to keep in mind:

Tip: Treat your mobile app and website differently than your desktop website.

Why: Screen real estate is at a premium. Design your placements to feature only the most pertinent information (e.g., a large, clear photograph; product name; price; discount; and incentive). Strategically placed recommendations and content can increase attributable revenue by 15% to 30%.

Tip: Take advantage of vertical layouts, using a maximum of two products displayed side-by-side.

Why: Mobile shoppers aren’t afraid to scroll. A placement can extend well below the visible screen to accommodate the right product recommendations or content. Each product or piece of content within that placement, however, should fit on the screen in its entirety while the user scrolls. Limiting product recommendations to two side-by-side will still allow for larger product images and a cleaner design.

Tip: Take advantage of carousels.

Why: Swiping comes as naturally to mobile users as scrolling. Adding up to 12 product recommendations in a carousel is a winning tactic that keeps the user engaged by using a familiar, interactive UI convention. Don’t waste space with carousel arrows; instead, show partial product images on the sides to hint that there are more products there.

Tip: Use the right type and number of products in each placement.

Why: Having too many choices leads to indecision. Allow RichRelevance to choose the best products to display, but stay within our suggested number of maximum products. Many shoppers have a more limited attention span when it comes


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to mobile. While we encourage testing for ideal performance, start with these best practices for product recommendation placements:

LAYOUT TYPE MAX # OF PRODUCTS

Carousel 12

Horizontal Side-by-Side 16, with no more than 2 side-by-side (8 rows total)

Vertical 8

Tip: Place content where it will have the most positive impact for both the user and revenue opportunity.

Why: Those mobile screens are small, and giving your customers any reason for distraction deters them from a purchase. Limit your content to maximize its impact. For example:

• Adding promotional information when browsing only certain categories where its applicable

• Display more technical, less-commonly viewed product information, detailed reviews, or testimonials below the fold or in a tabbed layout on product pages.

• Avoid static, run-of-site, or common messaging that is found in other areas—e.g., shipping messages, brand and promotional ads, etc. Value-added content will help ring the cash register!


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Which Strategies Should I Consider: Best PracticesEach component in the RichRelevance platform is configurable to take full advantage of the data it’s collecting along with certain business rules. Complex algorithms (also referred to as “strategies”) work at each customer touchpoint to deliver the best results possible during the mobile experience.

When enabling strategies for each of the RichRelevance products, there are a few key points to keep in mind:

Tip: Enable 10 – 15 Recommend strategies per page type.

Why: This accelerates the optimization and learning process of the RichRelevance engine. It will focus on known, proven strategies that support merchandising objectives. For example, on a cart summary page we emphasize cross-sell items, while on a product detail we recommend a mix of similar and complimentary products.

Tip: Use Engage content delivery to support Recommend product recommendations.

Why: Enabling your customers to learn more about the products they are viewing adds a sense of familiarity and comfort, therefore increasing the likelihood of purchase. For example, on a category page you can display a carousel of product recommendations (Recommend) and insert an informative video supporting those products’ attributes, quality, value, or brand directly below.

Tip: Use “fallback” strategies in your recommendations.

Why: While focusing on the proven, revenue-driving strategies, it is wise to have a “plan B” in the event none of the primary strategies qualify for displaying relevant products (this could be due to inventory, business rules or other factors you can control). A good example of a fallback strategy is one that displays subcategory bestsellers.


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Tip: Use “tags” to organize content and fire rules.

Why: Tags add an additional layer of control to content delivery. Tags can be called when setting up rules to deliver numerous pieces of content all related to one another. For example, you could use tags to deliver different promotional ads for the same campaign. Each ad could have different messaging, but they all share a common tag. The Engage product delivers the content most likely to engage/convert that user based on existing rules and other available data (context, increasing site engagement, time on site, etc.).

Tip: Use Discover’s machine learning to auto-optimize product attributes.

Why: Due to limited screen sizes, fewer products are displayed per mobile page. When shopping on mobile devices, shoppers have shorter attention spans and are less willing to spend extensive time navigating through page results to find the products they seek. It is innately easier to navigate around a website online with a mouse and big screen at your disposal; but as devices get smaller, navigation becomes more complicated and frustrating. RichRelevance Discover can automatically re-sort category or search results on mobile devices based on the product attributes you choose.

THE VALUE OF DISCOVER FOR MOBILE SCREENS


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Testing, Optimizing & ReportingWe have built sophisticated yet easy to use testing options into the Relevance Cloud. In order to further optimize the strategies behind each of your placements, it’s important to test which performs the best in your mobile environment. Again, we measure RPS here and recommend running each test to at least 85% statistical significance to ensure a positive impact.

Our testing methodology has been proven with dozens of clients and your Client Success team can assist with setting up A/B tests right in your RichRelevance dashboard.

Below is a list of tried-and-true tests to get you started. While each client has unique needs and testing will differ based on business objectives, these provide a good starting point for most businesses.

1. Test the number of placements you have on a particular page. For instance, test placing recommendations visible on the mobile screen without scrolling (high prominence) in addition to more subtle placements farther down. We recommend at least 2 to 3 placements per page however you may find 2 placements outperforms 3 depending on where they are located.

2. Test the size of the images for your recommendations. Larger images tend to outperform small ones however you may be able to fit more applicable recommendations using slightly smaller images.

3. Consistently test the verbiage being used to introduce your recommendations. Be transparent as to why those particular items are being shown. Statements like “Other customers who have looked at this item also chose:” and “People also viewed and purchased these products:” work best because they provide clear indications as to why they are being shown. Questionable “black-box” recommendations such as “We recommend:” and “We think you’ll like:” don’t perform nearly as well.

4. Diversify your category results. Showing only one particular brand in a category or subcategory may be advantageous for co-op dollars or branded strategies, but how much is it truly costing you in lost sales? Showing alternative brands may increase gross profit


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dollar opportunities or give your shoppers a richer experience by exposing them to items they may not have found otherwise.

5. Try limiting recommendations to a certain price range. Recommendations that are at least 85% the value of an item being looked at has performed highest in tests. Showing too much of a range may give your shoppers more reason to abandon if items are too dissimilar in features and price.

The true benefit of testing is removing any uncertainty from your mobile optimization. Having a continuous testing plan and implementing winning variations can lead to significant RPS and conversion gains. RichRelevance optimizes all of your tests and placements specific to the mobile channel. What works well on your website may be entirely different on mobile, and you can rest assured that RichRelevance takes care of that automatically.

Robust reporting is available in your RichRelevance dashboard to determine clear test winners and further optimize performance. You can also export the complete results for more in-depth data analysis.


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Commonly Asked QuestionsQ: Does RichRelevance work well with my mobile app, website or

responsive design?

A: In a word: yes! The RichRelevance toolkit is platform-agnostic, meaning it can be easily implemented in a specific app, on a separate mobile website (where we can share data from the desktop, retail stores and other sources) or displayed differently on a mobile device in a responsive design.

Q: When should I consider personalization as an addition to my mobile strategy?

A: The earlier, the better. Too many retailers wait until their mobile app or website is launched to consider personalization. If you instead consider personalization during the design and implementation phases, it is easier to integrate personalization placements without having to restructure layouts. Plus, you will have more customer data collected to influence the RichRelevance personalization platform for more relevant product and content delivery.

Q: How does the RichRelevance engine determine the best strategy to use?

A: RichRelevance does not hardcode a single strategy to a placement. Instead, the engine will test the eligible strategies against each other and determine—for the particular placement, shopper, device type and category context—which perform the best. This is optimized primarily on engagement or click-through, but other metrics—such as purchases and inventory levels—also factor in. The engine will then display the top performers most often while continuing to test the remaining in perpetuity. The advantage of this agile, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately approach is that strategy utilization remains performance-based, ensuring that you’re putting forth the best possible recommendations despite changes in shopping trends.


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Q: What kind of messaging should I use to promote my recommendations?

A: Be transparent! Understanding why recommendations are presented elicits trust among shoppers and drives engagement. While “You may also like” doesn’t lend any credibility to the products being displayed, more explicit messages such as “Customers who bought items in your cart also bought” or even “Our experts suggest” expose the source of recommendations and are more trustworthy.

Q: Do you have any tips to help me organize my placements in the RichRelevance dashboard?

A: The Relevance Cloud dashboard automatically organizes your placements for you, by page type. What this means is that all of your category page placements are grouped together, e.g. home page, category page, product detail page, etc. A good practice is to create specific placements per device (mobile, desktop, tablet), so you can enable different, device-specific strategies and target the shopping behaviors unique to the way customers browse and purchase on different devices.

Q: What should I include in the content areas on my mobile site?

A: Engage is extremely flexible and can handle a wide variety of content types and information, the most common being images and video. You can use Engage to supplement Recommend with brand collateral (such as video) to reinforce product choices. Additionally, fulfilling co-op or manufacturer obligations with only those customers for whom such content is relevant will allow for maximum impact.

Q: What’s the difference between a “Segment” and “Context” when using Engage?

A: A “Segment” can be defined as a group of visitors who meet certain criteria. Think of this as the “who” you are marketing to. If a visitor meets these criteria, they are then qualified to receive the specific content assigned. The “Context” can be thought of as the “when” this content is displayed. It can be triggered by specific actions and browsing habits that you can control.


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Additional InformationWe’re always improving our methodologies and strategies based on user feedback and testing. We publish our findings and helpful resources to maximize the Relevance Cloud on the RichRelevance Product Support & Documentation Center. Contact your Account Manager for instructions on how to access this knowledge repository.

In addition, we have a complete library of technical documentation for developers to assist with implementations and enhancements at developer.richrelevance.com.

We hope you found this guide helpful and will refer to it regularly as you find your successes and further optimize your mobile experience with RichRelevance.

http://developer.richrelevance.com/


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ABOUT RICHRELEVANCE

RichRelevance is the global leader in omnichannel personalization and is used by more than 200 multinational companies to deliver the most relevant and innovative customer experiences across web, mobile and in store. RichRelevance drives more than one billion decisions every day, and has generated over $10 billion in sales for its clients, which include Office Depot, Costco, Marks & Spencer and Galeries Lafayette.

Headquartered in San Francisco, RichRelevance serves clients in 42 countries from nine offices around the globe. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com.

http://www.richrelevance.com/

© 2015 RichRelevance, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.richrelevance.com

Documents

A MARKETER’S GUIDE TO RICHRELEVANCE Mobile Success · A MARKETER’S GUIDE TO RICHRELEVANCE MOBILE SUCCESS 2 Executive Summary The purpose of this guide is to help you develop a