United Colors of Benetton personalized product cards and increased order conversions by 10%

Mindbox helps United Colors of Benetton marketers grow their direct marketing and personalize their website. Currently, UCoB has three website personalization solutions in place. They cover item card personalization, the item advantages block, and a personalized loyalty program signup form.

To evaulate the results and effectiveness of these solutions, we use a control group in Mindbox. Our first results are in: people that view clothing items via personalized item cards, convert into an order at a 10% greater rate than those who view a basic, non-personalized page.

In this article, we will cover the personalization mechanisms that we configured on the website.

Item card personalization “X people bought this item”

This notification shows how many people bought an item that a customer is browsing on the day that that it’s shown. Data on the quantity is taken from Google Analytics. This is the average value for a single item on that day. On-site, the card looks like this:

We presumed that customers would finalize their orders faster if they saw how many people bought the exact same sweater over the course of the day. In order to check our hypothesis, we ran some tests on a control group. The website’s audience was divided in half: 50% of people were shown the block that displayed how many times the item had been purchased, the other half was not shown this block.

After a month of testing, we found that the people who landed on the personalized card converted to a successful order 10% more frequently than those who didn’t see a personalized product card. These results have a 98% confidence level.

Item advantages

Any personalized Mindbox block is installed onto websites via an API. This is the fastest and most simple way to change something on the website without having to hire a team of developers. It took us no longer than 5 minutes to add an “Item advantages” block. And if need be, we can change the design, content or targeting conditions in around the same time.

United Colors of Benetton’s “Item advantages” block works with potential customer objections and discloses delivery options. For example, the “not tried on” block was added after UCoB marketers found out that some people are worried about purchasing clothes from their website because they think the items have been tried on by others prior to their purchase.

The effectiveness of the “Item advantages” block was also tested with a control group. Conversions of visitors that saw this block were 6.5% greater than those who did not see it. The confidence level of these results is 92%.

Personalized invitation to join the loyalty program

This is a form inviting people who are not yet registered on the website to join the loyalty program. If a person is already a member, the system automatically picks up on this and removes the form from the website.

The best part of this approach is that it works on the segments that are created by Benetton marketers inside Mindbox. This means that marketers can create unique website versions for each individual customer, using their purchase history or on site actions as a base point. For example, we can show a block with underwear and socks only to buyers that have recently purchased pajamas. Or raincoats and umbrellas to those who recently purchased trench coats.

The main work in relation to website personalization remains to be completed, but the first results are already in:

• Increased order conversions by 10% thanks to the “X people bought this item” block.
• Increased conversions by 6.5% on pages where we list item advantages.

We spent just 15 minutes were on setting up and installing these personalization mechanisms. All our client needs to do is track effectiveness reports.

Further plans:

• Install personalized recommendations. This mechanic operates on machine learning principles and on site customer behavior.
• Develop a comprehensive personalization strategy and implement conversion solutions.