How Carter's is Using Personalization to Drive Sales

In a session at IBM's Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville yesterday, Michael Lahue, e-commerce project manager, and Lisa Langan, e-commerce marketing analyst, both of Carter's, discussed how the cross-channel retailer of baby and children's apparel is leveraging personalization solutions to drive sales across its organization.

Carter's is a newcomer to the e-commerce space, having launched its site in March 2010. However, the retailer has quickly ramped up its focus and investment in the channel, and has identified four goals for its website, said Langan:

1. expand brand reach (Carter's has a significant retail presence with nearly 400 brick-and-mortar stores, and it wants e-commerce to complement that influence);
2. grow traffic, both online and in-store;
3. increase customer and prospect engagement via relevant content; and
4. define "mom" through streamlined data gathering processes.

Helping Carter's to accomplish this is IBM's enterprise marketing management (EMM) solutions. The retailer's unique requirements — it needs custom reporting for its two brands, Carter's and OshKosh B'gosh, and a platform that's scalable since it's e-commerce business is growing at such a rapid pace — made EMM the right solution, said Lahue.

Analytical Insights Lead to Initiatives
Carter's learned from analytics reports that the company's best customers were shopping both its brands, Carter's and OshKosh B'gosh. This was contrary to how the retailer set up its website, noted Langan. So changes were made. Now the two brands share one shopping cart page. Other integrations between the two brands include cross-branding via links to the other site, as well as on-site search functionality that crosses brands.

Furthermore, web analytics revealed to Carter's that there was strong international demand for its products, despite the fact that the retailer wasn't shipping its products overseas at the time. This finding led to the retailer to create an international shipping program (it now ships its products to 80 countries). Plans are in the works to test in-country marketing programs (e.g., paid search, display ads) in some of these international markets, said Lahue.

Carter's also learned from analytics reports that it had an abandonment problem on its checkout page, particularly when visitors reached the billing section. The retailer has addresses the problem, narrowing its checkout down to one page. The result: abandons are down and Carter's is capturing more sessions that start on the checkout page.

Automation Yields Sales Gains
Carter's had a product recommendation solution on its website previously, but it was handled by its merchants manually in real time. It was a time-consuming process and it wasn't terribly effective. Carter's is now using IBM's Product Recommendations engine to automate personalized product recommendations across its digital channels (website, mobile, email).

Pop-up product recommendation displays of "Moms who viewed this also viewed these" and "Moms who bought this also bought these" are now found on Carter's product detail pages. The technology is being rolled out to the site's category landing pages and shopping cart page as well, Lahue said. Product recommendations now account for nearly 15 percent of Carter's online sales, with up to 9 percent coming from recommendations on product detail pages and 5 percent via "add to cart" pop-ups.

Carter's email program has also leveraged automation to its benefit. The retailer has implemented a trigger program that sends automated emails to opted-in subscribers when certain behaviors are exhibited on its website. Those triggers include signing up for the company's email program, abandoning a shopping cart (two emails are sent in this case: a first email is sent one day after the abandonment and a second email is sent five days after the abandonment if a conversion hasn't occurred in the meantime), abandoning the site after browsing for a certain amount of time, writing a customer review, and completing a transaction.

The trigger email program has proven very effective for Carter's. Email drives 10 percent of Carter's brick-and-mortar sales, 20 percent of its total web sales and 35 percent of its total web traffic. In particular, shopping cart abandonment trigger emails have been a major win for the retailer. They account for 50 percent of all the sales generated by Carter's triggered email program. The cart abandonment email that's sent one day after the event averages a 38 percent open rate and a 12 percent conversion rate. To put that into perspective, that conversion rate is a 500 percent increase vs. Carter's average campaign emails, said Langan.