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Large Chinese Online Retailer: Improving Customer Relevance and Conversion Rates
Executive SummaryIn a booming Chinese economy, a large business-to-consumer online retailer, wanted to improve its marketing operations, sales and customer loyalty to achieve its goal of becoming a leading e-retailer in China. An Accenture team from four continents worked closely with the online retailer to apply innovative, analytics-based solutions that will help power and customize its sales and marketing activities. Over the course of eight months, the number of daily orders nearly doubled.
Business challengeA large Chinese online retailer is benefiting from the country’s rapid GDP growth with a steady increase in traffic. It operates at a national scale across a vast country with different dialects, cultures, regions and shopping behavior. But such swift growth and high customer variation brought practical difficulties; the online retailer faced a deluge of customer data with many, but disparate, tools to sift the information. As a result, the company found it very challenging and time-consuming to offer personalized
experiences. It often resorted to mass campaign methods, offering one price, one product strategy and one shopper experience to its entire customer base. It became clear that it needed to improve its product recommendation capabilities and web page design to suit individual consumer preferences.
The company believed that gaining a better understanding of its customer behavior, improving product recommendations and enhancing web page design, could help achieve its market expansion and sales goals. Digital customer segmentation that takes data from insights to action would help to better engage shoppers, influence buying behavior through more targeted marketing, and even anticipate customer priorities. It would also form the basis
for innovative solutions that can get a handle on a profusion of customer and transaction data, as well as help convert site visits into sales. The company engaged Accenture to help transform the business. Its digital and retail industry experience and willingness to share risk with the client demonstrated Accenture’s commitment to delivering high performance.
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How Accenture helpedThe online retailer had good knowledge of its categories and products, but not its shoppers. To help the company better understand its customers and influence buying patterns, a team of Accenture Interactive, Global Talent & Innovation Network and Retail skilled professionals from four continents harnessed a wide range of offline and online data. The compiled data, including customer browsing, searches, purchases, product information, and post-purchase behavior (such as customer reviews and customer support) enabled the company to get a holistic view of customers’ activities and preferences. In addition to collecting and analyzing customer data, Accenture helped the company convert insights into actions quickly.
1. All of the collected data were merged into a consolidated database to allow for a single view of the customer. All customers were divided into actionable groups or “microsegments” that were then used to drive onsite and offsite targeted marketing and promotions.
2. The enhanced customer insight and microsegmentation created a foundation to help transform site visits into sales. With the sheer volume of page views per day, conducting digital optimization work could prove tricky. Accenture helped the company test—without disruption to its business—82,000 combinations of product and promotional web pages to influence browsers to purchase items more quickly and increase basket size. Rather than designing web pages based on gut feel or past experience, the company can now quickly test page designs to determine which will produce the most sales, complementing designer experience with actual user statistics.
3. The project team helped the online retailer improve its ability to recommend the most appropriate products to its consumers. Although it provides a range of products, the company tended to recommend only its “Most Popular” products to customers, depriving other, more relevant products the opportunity to sell. The project team converted customer data into broader, more accurate recommendations.
High performance deliveredFor the online retailer, having a strategy coupled with innovative analytical solutions was not enough. The company culture demanded immediate and tangible results. The Accenture team “rolled up its sleeves” and worked with the client to drive high performance e-commerce marketing. In just over six months, conversion rates across all channels had double digit improvements, which resulted in significant additional annualized revenue for the client. The number of daily orders nearly doubled over the course of eight months.
The work will also enable the company to:
• Improve the return on marketing investment • Give marketing a more integral, strategic role by setting and steering the growth agenda • Build new processes to drive efficiencies in marketing and merchandising • Design more customer-centric websites now that it has a better idea of its customer segments and behavior • Gain value out of the abundance of customer data at its disposal • View customer behavior at the company level, not just the product level
• Drive conversion rate improvements without promotional costs
And most importantly, by offering its customers more relevant products and offers, the online retailer will help improve the customer experience, increase the loyalty of existing shoppers and capture new customers.
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About AccentureAccenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 289,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$28.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2013. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
