eSpotlight - Foreign No More
Personal product recommendations boost clickthroughs, average order values and revenue for Peruvian Connection.
September 2009 By Joe Keenan
Problem: Peruvian Connection, a multichannel retailer of men’s and women’s handcrafted garments native to the Andes, wanted to cross-sell and upsell products to its customers and prospects more effectively.
Solution: The merchant contracted MyBuys, a provider of personalized product recommendations for online retailers.
Results: Clickthrough rates, average order values and revenue have increased by 72 percent, 23 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Differentiation is nothing new for Tonganoxie, Kan.-based apparel merchant Peruvian Connection. With a unique line of knit and woven sweaters, tops, skirts, and more products inspired by Andean designs, it isn’t your typical apparel retailer.
That couldn’t be said of its website, however. Lacking the resources to merchandise every product uniquely for each customer, the site had grown static. One experience was the same as the next.
Realizing that personalization could spur incremental growth online, Peruvian Connection hired MyBuys to bring “personalized product recommendations” (PPRs) to its site.
By building profiles for each Peruvian Connection customer — based on past buying behavior, in-session behavior, product attributes and other factors — MyBuys is able to serve more relevant content.
Personalization proves value
Instead of offering the same earrings and skirt to every customer on a sweater’s product detail page, MyBuys’ engine customizes merchandise recommendations to each customer’s profile.
Peruvian Connection uses PPRs three ways:
- as a cross-sell tool on product detail pages;
- an upsell tool on checkout pages; and
- in email campaigns sent to customers every Friday.
Peruvian Connection is testing further uses for PPRs, including within transactional emails, landing pages based on search terms and site search results.
It was especially critical for Peruvian Connection to test the effectiveness of the technology before implementing PPRs on its website and in its emails. The MyBuys technology, for example, had to generate increased ROI in order to be a part of the company’s online marketing strategy.
“The first test we ran was on our product detail page,” says Erik Martinez, director of e-commerce at Peruvian Connection, “testing the idea of coordinated items versus personalized recommendations. The results showed we increased clickthrough and average order value with PPRs. We were generating a marginal lift for every time a customer visited that page, saw that product, and then chose to look at and potentially purchase another item.”
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