Apparel-Specific Personalization Drives 6% Revenue Increase in 12 Months at River Island
Generic personalization providers weren't delivering revenue
River Island is one of the UK’s leading fashion retailers. Generating millions of pounds of annual revenue, the brand boasts over 350 stores worldwide and six dedicated online sites operating in four currencies.
River Island believed that personalization could make a difference to their customer experiences and in turn, their online revenue. Despite this, they were struggling to see any material difference with the two generic personalization providers they were using.
They wanted to explore other options.
Apparel-specific personalization provides a better customer experience
River Island were intrigued by Dressipi’s fashion focussed approach and understood that a fashion focus vs a generic approach was likely to provide a much better experience to customers.
The team wanted to test Dressipi’s personalization in a very simple, light touch way and so decided to start with personalization on the womenswear Product Listing Page (PLP).
The team at River Island didn’t consider it could make such a big difference. The initial results surprised - Dressipi outperformed the 2 other generic providers with a 3% increase in revenue per visitor.
“Fashion is a really complex vertical with so many moving parts. We have to contend with seasonality and trends, and that’s before we even layer on personal preferences. We saw an uplift in the Dressipi segment and saw a worse performance vs our control in the recommendation engine that wasn’t in the fashion vertical, so the non Dressipi variant was actually having a detrimental impact on performance”
Delivering a 6% revenue increase in 12 months
Given the success of the initial test, River Island were then prepared to extend personalization to all parts of the customer journey and expand across their menswear and kidswear categories.
Since then the partnership has gone from strength to strength. Rolling out personalized outfits and similar items on the Product Description Page and PLP saw results get better and better increasing revenue from the initial 3% to 6% in just 12 months, increasing AOV by 5% and increasing conversion by 3%.
“We have huge amounts more to explore with Dressipi. The bit that really excites me is how we come together on insights. Getting beyond personalization has really helped us understand our customer base and what they want and need.”
6 %
MORE REVENUE
5 %
AOV increase
3 %
Conversion Increase
This led into the integration of Dressipi’s API’s into the River Island emails with exceptional results. Click-Through Rates on average against the control group are up around 34% with a Click-to-Open Rate increase of 52%. For sessions that hit the site, there is an average conversion increase of around 45% and overall Revenue per Email is up around 99%.
“Not only are the emails great on performance and engagement on the customer but on our teams as well, the time frames that we can turn these emails around are quicker than if we were to send a normal trade email. After the success of having Dressipi within our BAU emails, we’re looking at ways we can explore other use cases with emails. As part of a retention and acquisition plan, we’re looking at how we can talk to customers post-purchase by using Dressipi’s outfit recommendations.”
99 %
REVENUE per email
45 %
conversion increase
52 %
click-to-open rate
34 %
click-through rate
From implementing personalization on the front end, it became apparent that there was new access to data that did not exist before. This was not only useful to the commerce team but also many other parts of the business. The different approach to the data with a customer lens and product specific lens were especially helpful for the buying and merchandising teams.
River Island are hugely excited about what the future holds with the full Dressipi ecommerce partnership as they can see the growth isn’t static but exponential.