Men’s apparel retailer Woodhouse Clothing needed a better way to showcase its 50-plus brands to a diverse customer base.
Consumers were having a difficult time navigating the site and finding what they were really interested in buying, says Imran Khan, head of ecommerce for Woodhouse Clothing.
“The main challenge we had and still have is that each of our customers is different,” he says. “We were treating everyone with the same stroke of a brush. There was no intelligence behind that. We were presenting all of our stock to all of our customers.”
The U.K.-based apparel retailer in summer 2018 enlisted the help of personalization ecommerce company Nosto to add artificial intelligence-based personalization across WoodhouseClothing.com. Woodhouse Clothing introduced Nosto to small parts of its website at first, but it has increasingly become part of its ongoing customer acquisition and retention strategy—from the homepage to product detail pages and pop-ups to email marketing, Khan says.
With artificial intelligence implemented into the website, Woodhouse Clothing can treat each of its customers individually and determine a browsing and buying pattern, or customer profile, that will help it better show more relevant brands and products. The Nosto program tracks Woodhouse Clothing’s shoppers via browser cookies.
“Any time the shopper goes back to the site, the system will recognize and welcome them back with a completely personalized experience tailored to them,” says Nosto CEO Jim Lofgren. “Going beyond product recommendations, Nosto can personalize the entire on-site experience from the pop-up offerings, navigation bar, content, imagery, text and more.”
For example, a shopper that purchases a pair of Diesel jeans (No. 418 in the Internet Retailer 2018 Top 1000) might not necessarily be interested in New Balance Athletics Inc. (No. 382) sneakers, so the AI tool will instead show the shopper something more relevant, such as other Diesel products or other jeans brands, such as Hugo or True Religion.
“When you land on the homepage, you’ll see a completely personalized homepage for those types of customers. And when you go to a product landing page, that will be different than anyone else,” Khan says. “We give assurances to our customers that it’s completely different to anyone else visiting on the website.” And the personalization is responsive across the web and mobile web, he adds.
The personalization elements from Nosto added to Woodhouse Clothing include:
- Product recommendations throughout WoodhouseClothing.com, including on product detail pages, the shopping cart page and even 404 error pages. For those who have landed on a 404 page from an external link and have no browsing history, Nosto’s recommendations display the most popular products on its site, according to Lofgren.
- Pop-up messages on both desktop and mobile web show discount messages for brands the shopper prefers, as well as pop-ups regarding the shoppers’ first time visiting, leaving without purchasing and adding items to their shopping cart.
- Personalized emails that include a welcome email with product recommendations, shopping cart and browser abandonment-triggered emails and order-related recommendations for follow-up purchases.
Since implementing AI-based personalization, Woodhouse Clothing saw a 44% higher conversion rate, 7% higher average order value and a 3% decrease in cart abandonment year over year.
After its personalization implementation began in summer 2018, Woodhouse Clothing plans to complete it by the end of Q2, Khan says, but declined to reveal associated costs. In addition, the retailer will be launching a mobile app “in the near future,” which will also incorporate Nosto’s AI-based personalization.
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