2 Retail Success Stories on Personalization and Preferences

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The NRF - retail's big show kicks off in New York. It will feature a lot of product, a lot of innovation, and most of all a lot of retailers keen on learning how to engage their consumer.

Here are two case studies from brands that have done a good job in driving consumer engagement.

Leveraging The Registry

Many big department stores have bridal registries, it is a very simple concept – couples come in, register and select items they’d like to receive. This one company allowed couples to announce their wedding via email and give those recipients the option to congratulate the couple via personalized email messages and browse through their registry.

After the wedding, the newly married couple received an email offering an exclusive three-day sale. They wanted you to come to their store and purchase all the items you did not receive as gifts. You could even earn a discount based on the product, the service, or your "segmentation status."

All purchase information was recorded – by knowing the consumers interests, the store decided to retain the information for future marketing. The marketing possibilities were endless and all offers were completed targeted.

Lesson to retailers - remember what people purchase and leverage this information to build up preferences.

Leveraging The Contest

I was consulting for a home décor company; they sold window treatments, carpets and other home furnishings. They had a lot of traffic at their website – it seemed that people loved to browse through their site. I looked for a way to engage the web traffic by offering a $10,000 shopping spree. To win, you had to select the items you would like to win, and answer some trivia.

We awarded a grand prize, multiple small prizes, and gave discounts to most others for the items on their wish lists. We used the information that the consumers provided to create personalized offers to them - results in higher open, clicks, and eventual conversions.

What can make your “contest” different is that you actually use the information collected to build up preference information about the consumer and you use it for your future communiqués.

Retailers have multiple opportunities to watch how we browse, and what we transact - they need to leverage this information to build up preferences.