Utilising a customer’s shopping history, retailers can now automatically match cross and up-sell opportunities with individual customers to significantly boost sales. Also, it enables the discovery of products from across the entire inventory that customers might not know were offered by the retailer.
Intelligent Offer is a closed loop application that lets retailers automate product offers and recommendations to online customers, whether it be on the website, in the call centre or at the point of sale for bricks and mortar shops.
According to online marketing and business optismisation company Coremetrics’ ANZ general manager, Kevin Mackin, retailers throughout the region have been crying out for a simple hosted service like Intelligent Offer, that drastically reduces the time and resources demanded by effective online marketing:
“Most retailers in ANZ understand that customers want to shop online and that they don’t want to be bombarded with irrelevant product offers. So the challenge for retailers is to pitch the right offer, at the right time and in the right manner. Because this can take a lot of time and preparation, many ANZ online retailers have fallen into the trap of issuing blanket cross and up-sell offers.”
Intelligent Offer has been available in the US for some time, with users seeing online revenues grow by as much as 70 per cent.
“Basing product recommendations and special offers on individual actions, history and interests is easy to do and generates amazing results,” said Mackin.
“Take Orvis in the US, as an example, they’re a very large apparel and homewares retailer that’s seen revenues from product recommendations increase by 70 per cent. This result has been sustained and the company has also saved themselves between eight and 10 merchant hours per week, thanks to the automated service.”
The danger with a one-size-fits-all approach to offers and recommendations, said Mackin, is that it’s simply too easy for customers to shop elsewhere.
“The worst thing you can do is irritate your customers with irrelevant dialogue. Just because you’ve over-bought on a particular product and you’re willing to knock 50 per cent off the price, doesn’t mean you should offer it to every person that visits your online store.
“Unfortunately, this is where much of the ANZ market sits at the moment. Retailers are struggling to find the time, resources and technology to maximise the cross and up-sell opportunities they’re presented with on a daily basis, and so all their hard work during the conversion process comes undone without ongoing tailored communication,” he said.