Home page personalization sets the tone for the rest of the e-Commerce experience, and what better way to personalize an online store than through product recommendations? Outdoor wear retailer Fjallraven takes this advice to heart. The brand used machine learning to drive a 45% conversion uplift on shoppers’ “favorite” items.
Since March 2016 when it adopted the Dynamic Yield personalization platform, Fjallraven has seen a 150% uplift in click-through rates on recommendations within its product pages.
All dynamic content on the Fjallraven home page is personalized, whether it is the “hero banner,” the most prominently placed image on a web site, or the product displays that appear as a user scrolls down the page.
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Browsing history, objects added to the cart and other behavioral triggers dictate which images the site selects and how they arrange them. The “2016 Favorites” section on the home page leverages this data to highlight products a user is deemed most likely to buy.
The diversity of Fjallraven’s consumer base convinced the retailer that personalization was the next necessary step to achieve its main goal: reducing the number of clicks a shopper needs to find a product.
“Our Kanken bags consumer is much different than the consumers of our core hiking/trekking/backpacking brand,” said Sam Minassian, Digital Marketing Manager for Fjallraven North America. “One would be more of a fashion consumer, while the other is more of an outdoor consumer. Fashion consumers are likely 18-to-25-year-old females, while the outdoor consumer is usually a Millennial male.
“We wanted to be able to get that bags consumer more interested in our outdoor products,” he added. “How do we get a 22-year-old female that wants a pink backpack to look at a knee-length down jacket for the winter? Now we’re doing a pretty good job of offering a gender-specific experience based on past web site behavior, and we can pinpoint consumers more easily.”
Fjallraven also is in the early stages of layering in weather-based targeting to ensure the site provides recommendations that are relevant to the shopper’s location.
“We want to offer a snowy experience on the web site to consumers coming from a snowy location by highlighting parkas,” Minassian said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “If it’s raining, we want to offer them waterproof jackets or eco-shells.”
Personalized On-Site, In-Cart Notifications Prove Effective
While Fjallraven partnered with Dynamic Yield to build out the new e-Commerce experience and carry out ideas for the site at a quicker pace, the brand also sought to implement on-site and in-cart notifications for consumers.
“We did a case for the holiday where we had different free shipping thresholds based on order value,” Minassian said. “In a very short amount of time, we were able to get on-site overlay messaging for the different thresholds, test them and figure out which ones were the most effective. Also, the best thing we could do was add the in-cart notification to try to entice people to add more value to the cart. For example, a consumer might get a pop-up promoting them to add another $50 to their cart to get free overnight shipping.”
Minassian noted that the brand has since experimented with urgency notifications to incentivize consumers to add products to the cart. To expedite the purchase funnel, Fjallraven added notifications informing customers that items are running low in stock, and personalizing these notifications for different user segments. The brand also started to target consumers demonstrating the intent to exit a page prior to making a purchase.
Moving forward, Fjallraven expects to focus heavily on mobile, using Dynamic Yield to implement a countdown timer for the holidays and enabling a scrolling product discovery feature to optimize for mobile web.
