Attract more customers
Personalisation technology can predict what your customers wantââ,¬"and sell it to them.
West Marine, a leading aftermarket reseller of boating accessories in the United States, has 240 stores nationwide, plus a successful catalog and Internet business. The company figured it could improve Web sales even more by offering customers a personalised shopping experience.
When Tony Gasparich, vice president of Internet operations for West Marine, went looking for a way to up-sell and cross-sell products online, expensive setup costs nearly killed the project. "We didn't know whether we'd get a huge pop in sales or see increased conversion rates, so we wanted to experiment in a way that wouldn't be too risky," he says. "Making an investment of, say, half a million dollars in one year for licensing software and hiring one to two people to manage the personalization program just didn't make any sense for a site of our size."
Gasparich found an affordable personalisation service that was also easy to add to the West Marine siteââ,¬"a simple matter of pasting HTML tags on each page. For six months, the hosted service successfully tracked online shoppers and instantly offered up specials based on the products that customers were considering. The personalisation serviceââ,¬"along with other site additionsââ,¬" helped boost the time spent browsing by 20 percent and the number of page views by 30 percent. But then Gasparich noticed the system's performance dragging, so he removed the feature from the site. At press time, the company that offered the personalisation service sat on shaky financial ground.
Though frustrating, the experience has not soured Gasparich on personalisation technology. "I absolutely believe that there is value in it," he says. "We would give another chance to a service that's affordableââ,¬"and secure."
And Gasparich hasn't shied away from using other hosted services to drive sales. For example, West Marine customers can search and view sailing maps. The free service from MapTech also links shoppers to maps and books for sale. West Marine gets a small profit for every MapTech item its customers purchase. "After we turned it on, the sales of MapTech products rose 5 percent more than total online growth," Gasparich says.
If you're looking to give your customers a unique experience at your e-store, Be Free Bselect offers a personalisation service at prices that won't rile the folks in accounting. Setup costs around US$5,000; after that you pay $5,000 per month, plus 15 cents every time someone buys a suggested sale item. Bselect works by tagging and tracking each page of your site. Frequent guests to your online store see products based on where they've been in the past and what they've bought. Bselect saves profile information by key, not a name or address. The system tracks customers anonymously, and they can delete profile details or opt out of future profiles through an online control panel (although Bselect saves customer purchase information indefinitely).
Steven Laff, Web developer for Supergo Bike Shops, started using Bselect about a year ago for the company's e-commerce site, Supergo.com. Before that Laff had developed his own recommendation tool, which didn't allow him to keep track of sale items. "If you have 600 items, manually recommending something becomes a nightmare," he says. "Bselect is ingenious. It doesn't recommend the same thing twice, and if it's a consumable product, you can set it up to be recommended again. Best of all, [Bselect] pays for itself five, 10, 15 times over per month."
Before Bselect, e-commerce orders made up only 33 percent of Supergo's overall mail-order sales; now they make up 60 percent.
