How the B2B supplier Carl Ras succeeded with personalization
Carl Ras
Industry: B2B
Partner: Impact
Solutions:
%
of online revenue is influenced by personalization
Customers interacting with recommended products are
%
more likely to convert than customers who do not interact
About
Carl Ras is a leading B2B supplier of tools and equipment for craftsmen and industrial use. The company has existed for 89 years and primarily serves the carpenter and woodworker segment. Carl Ras has 19 physical stores all over Denmark and more than 150.000 item numbers in their product catalog.
Their journey
At this point, the personalization efforts at Carl Ras consisted of manually connecting tools and equipment in order to find suitable combinations for customers when they browsed on their website. This process was manually heavy and depended on expertise from craftsmen, who worked with thousands of product combinations across categories. However, while the recommendations would often be relevant, the results in terms of revenue didn’t measure up to the time-consuming efforts.
Becoming online
experts
The recommendations were created manually by experts within Carl Ras. A time-consuming activity that required too many resources internally.
It wasn’t until 2019, when the company needed a new website, that personalization, in a more automatic form across contact points, was brought to the table. This time Raptor’s solutions, website, and mail personalization turned into central components in their online infrastructure.
The goal was to make the expert knowledge the customers knew from the stores available online, and this could be achieved by combining the all-important manual recommendations from the experts at Carl Ras and the data-based recommendations provided by Raptor’s solutions.
“We wanted to replicate the “role of experts” that customers have come to know and appreciate in our physical stores and make that knowledge available online. We transfer expert recommendations from our PIM into Raptor, and with the combination of human knowledge and machine learning, we build the expert role digitally.”
Their recommendations now contain several modules relying on aggregated data from all customer touchpoints. In the example above, the first module contains a combination of expert recommendations and recommendations deemed relevant for the customer by the algorithmic process. The module below lists products other people have looked at. The one right above the newsletter sign-up contains personal recommendations from users’ previous purchases or behavior on their website or other platforms.
Carl Ras’ recommendations have increased the experience amongst customers with accounts, who now experience more accurate recommendations of tools and equipment.
Account customers’ recommendations derive from transactional data, online and offline behavioral data stitched together via e-mail addresses. In B2B businesses, persistent first-party data is central to ensure accurate recommendations and strengthens customer and brand loyalty.
“A powerful tool for measuring impact”
Merchandising has helped Carl Ras plan their supplier campaigns and use Raptor modules as advertisement or space management tools.
Above, you see how Carl Ras has listed their popular campaign products in their “most popular items right now” module. Carl Ras gains control over which products should appear in the module, creating more exposure to some brands as part of a supplier agreement.
What is Merchandising?
Raptor’s Merchandising enables Carl Ras to use recommendation modules as advertising space. They gain more control over the recommendations along with creating extra exposure around specific products.
Merchandising allows you to take control over which products should be introduced in specific modules on every landing page, increasing the product exposure right where you want it.
It’s a powerful tool that allows us to measure impact and have dialogues with suppliers based on their campaigns’ performance. The nudge we provide our customers through supplier brands is extremely successful. We can even prioritize high-margin products and decide how much we need to boost the products in each module.”
What Carl Ras gained by personalizing their online space
“The more we nurture our customer data, and the more data we collect, the better recommendation we can provide our customers. Personalization allows us to maintain the position as experts in both the digital and physical world, but to become a trusted advisor, you need to understand the relations between data points. Why does the algorithm suggest rubber boots next to a toilet seat or screws next to that screwdriver? You need to connect the data dots if you want to succeed”, Søren finishes.
Results
%
of Online Revenue has been influenced by personalization
%
increase in Average Order Value when interacting with personalization
%
increase in Conversion Rate when interacting with personalization
%
increase in average order of unique products when interacting with personalization
According to Søren Elgum, personalization in itself does not necessarily lift order value. For that they use other tools. But it does mean more unique products end up in the basket. Customers engaging with recommended products have +60% more unique products in their basket and that does lift the order value.
The Future
They also want to improve their e-mail marketing and make content and product recommendations as relevant on this platform as on their website
Raptor Solutions
Merchandising
E-mail & Triggers
Website Personalization
Take-aways
- They have become trusted advisors and experts online as well as in the physical stores
- The customer service team and staff in the physical stores now use Carl Ras’ website as a sales tool for their customer interactions
- Their website is also an ad platform for suppliers’ brands
- Customers with accounts find it easier to navigate on Carl Ras’ site and find the products they need
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