Dreams is moving towards full-scale personalisation as it sets its sights on becoming the UK’s biggest, best and most recommended bed retailer.
The retailer, which sells online and through more than 170 stores, started using Monetate’s testing and targeting technology last year. Since then mobile bounce rates have fallen by more than 10%, and changes have helped boost sales. Tweaking the user shopping basket, for example, by adding a free delivery banner to the top, increased revenue per session by 8.9%, and generated an extra £31,300 of incremental revenue. The company also saw its best-ever trading day last August bank holiday, when revenues rose by 198%.
Now the company is to use data generated in the testing and targeting phase to move towards full personalisation.
“We have a goal to be Britain’s biggest, best and most recommended bed retailer,” said Richard Voyce, head of ecommerce at Dreams. “For us our success rests of putting the customer first and doing the right thing.
“Since adopting Monetate’s technology we have managed to cut external agency costs dramatically, increase our conversions and reduce mobile visitor bounce rate by 10.8 per cent. Monetate allows us to do things we couldn’t before with ease and agility.”
Dreams found during that initial testing phase that online customers came from a mix of 50% desktop, 25% mobile and 25% tablet users and that desktop users were dropping rapidly as visitors from mobile devices increased. Dreams used Monetate technology to show users a lightbox when they first visited the site that allowed them to navigate to key areas of the website including the store locator and sales sections. This lightbox lowered the bounce rate of mobile users by 10%.
The next step for Dreams is to launch a responsive site using the customer insight and intelligence gathered from Monetate’s testing and targeting platform. This will enable the company to integrate testing and targeting into its next site and also allow them to look into personalisation in more depth.
Richard Voyce, head of ecommerce at Dreams said: “The bed industry is quite far behind when it comes to technology so it’s great that Dreams has a head-start. Working with Monetate has allowed us to create an industry-leading digital offering and continually strive for improvements. The next step of the Dreams journey is to look into personalisation in more detail and use it to provide our customers with a better, more customised shopping experience.”
• As part of a wider ecommerce upgrade over the last 18 months, Dreams has also implemented Rackspace’s dedicated server solution to ensure its website continues to function well when visitor levels are high. It says this helped it to handle higher levels of visits over Easter, when the site saw 30% more visits than at the same time last year. The website conversion rate also rose by 25% over this period.
Voyce said: “When I started in this role 18 months ago, my first challenge was to update our eCommerce offering as it was struggling to cope with the traffic that was being attracted to the site by big marketing campaigns across national TV and other media. Turning to the high performance and reliability of the Rackspace Dedicated Server Solution has been great as it has allowed us to concentrate on our core business, rather than making sure the website is always up and running.”
