In its quest to boost business, Scentiments has combined product recommendations with another marketing technology to great effect. The perfume and cologne e-retailer has been placing product recommendations based on customers’ past purchases and web site behavior in e-mails, suggesting related products or other scents the customers might like.

The result: personalized e-mails have a click-through rate of 16% and a conversion rate of 8% compared with an 8% click-through rate for product recommendations on web site pages and a 9% conversion for recommendations on the site. Scentiments’ overall conversion rate is 4.9%.

“The personal shopping e-mail alerts have been so effective that we have decided to increase their frequency,” says Howard Wyner, CEO and chief of e-business. “The alerts keep us top of mind with our customers and provide them with useful, pertinent information. Since the e-mails are relevant and focused on each shopper, we see higher open rates than with our traditional in-house e-mails. That level of personalization fosters loyalty, enhances the user experience and boosts sales.”

Next up for Scentiments, which uses personalization and product recommendations technology from MyBuys Inc., is personalized online display ads, generated by technology that anonymously creates cookies for shoppers to associate web site behavior with potential products.

“We are participating in MyBuys’ beta group for personalized display advertising,” Wyner says. “Now our shoppers can get personalized recommendations wherever they are surfing on the web. They can select from a set of products generated by MyBuys within our ad and be driven right back to our site to complete the conversion.”

Scentiments is No. 384 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

 

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