How Boden Personalizes Every Visitor’s Experience Through Digital Merchandising
Boden is a British clothing retailer founded in 1991. While Boden originally operated as a mail-order business, the company now has websites in 7 countries, a £300m annual turnover, and 2 million customers across the globe — with 98% of sales coming from online.
Bloomreach Discovery enabled Boden to:
The Challenge
Boden realized that personalizing their customer journey was the key to their future success — but legacy tools kept them from making the changes they needed. And so the team set about on a multi-year transformation project to upgrade their platforms.
Site merchandising is crucial to providing a strong digital customer experience. However, the team was working with tools that required a lot of manual work and were, therefore, time-consuming and slow to market for trading changes. As part of the digital transformation project, they looked for a solution that would allow them to use their time more wisely and strategically.
To fit their needs, the team wanted an all-in-one platform that could provide a personalized experience, reduce time spent on manual rule-writing, and give Boden more agility and flexibility to react to customer needs.
Bloomreach is the perfect blend of art and commerce. It enables us to set rules to influence machine learning to drive key trends and metrics like margin, Average Order Value, and conversion rate.
Harriet Dowell
The Solution
With Bloomreach Discovery, Boden is now able to build a personalized experience for each of its visitors. The solution is powered by AI which eliminates the time-consuming manual work and offers capabilities in A/B testing, slot-based merchandising, 1:1 personalization, segmentation, analytics, and more.
With these features, courtesy of Bloomreach Discovery, Boden was able to implement personalized experiences in new and innovative ways. The team uses A/B testing for ‘outfitting’, which is the process of offering customers a collection of clothes that go together, rather than just individual products. They have run a series of A/B tests to identify which collections resonate with customers and have seen a significant increase in conversion and revenue per visit.
Boden is also now able to serve up climate-appropriate products to shoppers by creating location-based audiences and targeting relevant products to them. This has made Boden more relevant to their audiences and has driven commercial performance in the target states. And finally, their site is feeling fresher than ever before thanks to the ability for product sort order updates to happen every 15 minutes as opposed to only 2-3 times a week. Instead of the updates being largely based on intuition, they are now based on customer-driven performance data as well as their top business priorities.
All of these changes have had a significant impact on their revenue, especially during sale periods as they can respond quickly to changing stock and customer behavior.
The Results
Since implementing Bloomreach Discovery, the Boden team has become more customer-centric and innovative than ever before.
They’re able to make decisions based on customer behavior rather than guesswork and intuition — and leveraging Bloomreach’s data-driven testing and personalization capabilities have increased top-of-funnel engagement. Not only that, Boden is now able to easily make key changes and optimize their site for the metrics most important to their team’s success like conversion rate, average order value, and revenue.
And while these changes have made significant improvements to the Boden customer experience and the team’s bottom line, it’s also made a world of difference for the team members themselves. The Boden team is now able to work more efficiently across teams by setting up and localizing rules for different markets, instead of manually handling multiple spreadsheets. Happy team, happy customers, and impressive results all around.
