wehkamp.nl retargeting drives relevance, reach and ROI

Retailers cannot afford to let near-sales slip through their fingers. The next generation of personalized retargeting engages online shoppers with personalized content through multiple channels and touch points. This multi-prong strategy optimizes the user experience, drives conversions, and fosters customer retention.

Online shoppers are discriminating. They browse pages, compare products and add items to a shopping cart—only to abandon their sessions to continue researching elsewhere on the web. Retailers are challenged to quickly reacquire these consumers after they leave a site, or risk losing sales to their competition.

wehkamp.nl, the Netherlands’ largest online retailer, is grabbing the attention of browsers and abandoners with a comprehensive behavioral retargeting program that uses display ads, emails and on-site product recommendations to weave greater relevance into the customer experience, expand brand reach, and drive impressive sales gains.

IBM Coremetrics offers the ability to help businesses rapidly gain intelligence into social networks and online media sources through a cloud-based delivery model and incorporate this insight into their business processes to create smarter, more effective marketing campaigns

At the center of the wehkamp.nl initiative is a personalized display ad retargeting solution powered by IBM AdTarget data syndication platform and Criteo, a leading pay-per-click retargeting solution that delivers billions of dynamically personalized banners per month.

Rather than retarget prospects with broad generic ads such as brand-level display ads, wehkamp.nl uses the Coremetrics and Criteo solution to deliver real-time ads of browsed and carted merchandise to would-be buyers in the hours, days, or weeks after their last wehkamp.nl visit. The product-focused ads deliver a higher degree of relevance and personalization than brand-level ads—and the ads are paying off.

The wehkamp.nl display ad retargeting campaign builds on the company’s success with using emails personalized to the individual’s interests and history to drive repeat visits, conversion, and purchases. It’s part of wehkamp.nl’s business strategy to optimize personalization at every customer touchpoint, enabling wehkamp.nl to stand out to consumers in an era of non-stop information overload and diminished attention spans.

Retargeting generates 15 times the ROI of untargeted ads
The results from ad retargeting have been remarkable. wehkamp.nl, with thousands of products ranging from televisions to trampolines, is realizing ROI more than 15 times higher than its ROI from untargeted banners.This ROI figure takes into account the revenue that the ads divert from email, paid search, affiliate networks, portals, and direct load.

“For every Euro we put into the display ad solution, we see a huge increase in ROI compared to untargeted ads,” said Ewald Hoppen, senior web analyst at wehkamp.nl.

Generic, non-targeted display ads, or banner ads, have traditionally generated low response click-through rates when compared to paid search and email marketing. But by making display ads relevant to a shopper’s known product interests and recent website activity, wehkamp.nl is seeing click-through rates of nearly one percent with targeted banners—about five times better click-through performance than untargeted banners.

“You read a lot about people being tired of banners or not seeing banners, but it turns out they do see banners if they are relevant,” Hoppen said. “It’s a real eye-opener to see banners are still a very viable marketing channel.”

wehkamp.nl initially experienced a spike of inquiries from shoppers who wondered how and why the retailer’s ads were “following them around the Internet.” But it was a short-lived reaction as shoppers began to appreciate the personal touch, indicated by higher clicks.

Cultivating relevance and personalization
wehkamp.nl is among the leaders in using personalization to retarget customers. While most organizations use generic email and display ads, 79 percent of businesses name personalized email as a future priority, and 73 percent cite personalized display ads as a future priority, a study conducted by Bloomberg BusinessWeek Research Services for Coremetrics found. The divide between actual capability and aspirations provides a competitive advantage for marketers who can successfully utilize personalization today.

“We firmly believe that retargeting is a valuable way for improving our marketing communications,” said Hoppen. “We are open and willing to using every piece of information we have about a customer to improve our communication with the customer—to be more personal and more relevant.”

The Coremetrics and Criteo analytics solution captures customer behavioral data, such as browsing and shopping history, which is compiled with profile data to deliver optimized recommendations and marketing communications. At wehkamp.nl, online marketers simply reused existing Coremetrics tags and had the solution ready to operate in a matter of hours.

Aligning with on-site, targeted recommendations
Personalized retargeting for cross-sell and up-sell is also in place at the wehkamp.nl site with the IBM Product Recommendations product recommendations engine. IBM Product Recommendations retargets wehkamp.nl visitors with recommendations of products that they or people like them have browsed or carted in the past as they visit product detail, shopping cart, thank you, main shopping, and category pages.

“It’s performing very well in adding extra sales. We already saw a significant increase in the numbers,” Hoppen said. With some tuning of underperforming main shopping and category pages, he believes IBM Product Recommendations might be able to help wehkamp.nl double the percentage once more. What’s more, wehkamp.nl was able to repurpose five full-time employees who ran a custom cross-sell recommendations solution once IBM Product Recommendations was deployed.

Personalized email rounds out retargeting
Both personalized ad retargeting and product recommendations build on wehkamp.nl’s success with personalized email to retarget shoppers and cultivate a relevant dialog. With a personalized email solution based on IBM LIVEmail and the Responsys Interact Suite, wehkamp.nl has seen a 23 percent higher open rate than standard promotional emails, a 68 percent higher click-through rate, a 67 percent lower opt-out rate, and a 271 percent higher sales-per-send ratio.

wehkkamp.nl recognizes that retargeting can and should be an essential component in a broader strategy of personalized online marketing and is continuing to balance its display ad and email initiatives for optimal performance. With its impressive results, personalized retargeting is clearly a win-win for both retailers and customers.

The combination of interconnected technologies is a smarter way for companies to buy, sell and market their products by integrating operations and enhancing interactions through community, collaboration, process and analytics—all within an industry context.

IBM helps companies swiftly adapt to rising customer demands in today’s digitally transformed marketplace. IBM software and services offerings, supported by global sales and marketing resources, address greater customer loyalty in the era of mobile and social networks.

For more information
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