0:13 Good morning, and welcome to today's webinar entitled the behavioral blueprint, driving revenue with contextualized experiences with Kendra Scott. My name is Matt McCusker. 0:23 I'm the vice president of retail sales at Bazaar Voice, and I'll be your moderator for today. Joining me is Jared Miller. Jared is the senior director of web analytics and visualization at Kendra Scott, and Jared will be leading the majority of the conversation today. 0:37 I'm gonna kick us off, however, first by going over the agenda. So I'll start by giving a brief overview of contextualization and diving a little bit into the Bazaar Voice contextual commerce product itself. 0:54 By the way, we may refer to that as COCO at times, but it's our voice contextual commerce. So we, we sometimes call it COCO. So if that's what we mentioned, that's what we're referring to. 1:03 But then I'll turn things over to Jared who will give a little bit more background on both himself and Kendra Scott as well as the challenge that they were facing from a contextualization standpoint, the game plan that they put in place to address it, which happened to be utilizing Bazaar Voice contextual commerce, and the impact and results that they saw from doing so. 1:22 Lastly, we'll wrap up with some key takeaways and what's next for Kendra Scott. Before we dive in, however, we wanted to, do a brief poll, which is the following. 1:33 If you could answer this, what percentage of your site traffic do you believe to be anonymous today? So I'll give you a few, moments here to answer that question. 1:42 Once again, what percentage of your site traffic do you believe to be anonymous today? Okay. 1:59 As we go to the next slide, the reason why we ask that is when we we talk to our customers, the majority of them tell us that the percentage of anonymous traffic on their websites is is quite high in the seventy to eighty percent range usually, which is quite extensive. 2:17 And that makes it difficult to deliver a personalized experience when you don't know who that consumer is. I'm sure most of you are investing in personal personalization solutions today. 2:26 They're proven, with great results for add to card and conversion of sales. But the problem with personalization is that you need to know that personal information about that consumer. 2:37 And when your, anonymous traffic is in the seventy to eighty percent, if not higher range, that's increasingly difficult to do. Couple that with new rules and regulations that are coming out, it's harder and harder to gather that personal information. 2:51 That's where contextualization comes in. And contextualization is a complementary product to personalization. They work in conjunction, and actually they're great compliments to one another. 3:02 What contextualization does is look at behavioral data to deliver that personal experience. So in some ways, could say that personalization allows you to deliver a personalized experience based on what you know about that consumer. 3:14 Contextualization allows you to deliver a personalized experience based on what that consumer is doing at this point in time. So we're looking at that behavioral data, things like search behavior, what products they're interacting with, how they're scrolling, where they're they're moving their mouse, what they're hovering over. 3:30 Bizarre Voice contextual commerce actually looks at five hundred data points per second to analyze that data and then deliver an optimized message that leads to add to cart and conversion. 3:40 So what we're not doing is blasting out messaging on every SKU or on every page. So you're not gonna see low inventory or top seller on every SKU. 3:50 What the AI technology behind the Bizarre Voice contextual commerce product does is deliver an optimized message to about thirty percent of your consumer traffic that we know leads to that add to cart net conversion and generally leads to a pretty significant increase in revenue per session. 4:06 As we go to the next slide, the three things that differentiate Bazaar Voice contextual commerce is that the first is that that advanced AI technology that I mentioned. 4:17 We've got over thirteen years of session data that that we use in our dataset to analyze consumer behaviors. Alright? And it allows us to deliver that optimized message at the right time that we know delivers that lift for for for you, and for the the consumer to add to cart and convert their sale. 4:36 Couple that with a fully managed service. And and what do I mean by that? We do all the heavy lifting for you. So we've got literally hundreds of campaigns and placements of techniques that we can bring to the table, but you've got a dedicated team of folks whose sole job it is is to help you increase that lift. 4:52 They design the campaigns. They design the strategy. They optimize those campaigns and strategies over time using your style guides and with your full buy in, but the majority of the work is done by Bazaar Voice. 5:04 And we don't nickel and dime you either. It's all included in the price. So you're not paying for additional campaigns or optimizing those campaigns. You're not paying for APIs or sessions. 5:13 It's all built into the price, and their sole job is to, as I said, increase that lift and increase that revenue per share. Last thing is that we're completely transparent on the impact that contextual commerce has on your revenue. 5:25 So you'll be able to tell at a at the high level of what contextual commerce is doing, and it's very quantifiable. You'll know both the lift and the revenue that's associated with it, but we can also drill into the campaigns themselves. 5:37 Which ones are performing well? Which ones need to be tweaks? Which ones perhaps we need to replace and bring in new campaigns. So these three things really are differentiators for Bazaar Voice contextual commerce, which leads us to the next screen, which talks about the lift that our customers have seen over the last twelve months. 5:54 So on the low end, our customers are seeing about a four percent lift, and on the high end, it can be in the low teens as high as thirteen percent. On average, our customers see a seven point three percent lift in revenue per session, which is which is pretty significant. 6:08 But even on the low end, our worst performing client is in the four percent range, which is actually pretty good. And that's generally when you first go live, during after implementation when you have a limited number of campaigns. 6:20 But then that dedicated team comes in and really starts working on optimizing those campaigns, bringing in new placements and techniques so we move you further to the right on this graph. 6:30 If we go to the next slide, it talks a little bit about the long term value of the Bizarre Voice contextual commerce product and that it improves over time. 6:38 As I mentioned, there's there's other products out there that that do something similar without that AI technology and they kind of blast out a lot of messages. You will get an initial lift from that type of product, but over time, it's going to trail off as your consumers become somewhat numb to the messaging. 6:53 What Bazaar Voice does is increases the lift in performance over time for two reasons. One is that dedicated team of folks who are constantly optimizing the campaigns, and the second is the AI technology gets smarter over time. 7:05 So we start with that thirteen years of consumer data and sessions that we have, but then it starts learning your consumers behavior. And then we optimize message based on your website and your consumers themselves. 7:17 My last slide talks about what's coming here or actually this is already available, but we're really excited about, bringing the contextual commerce product, together with the existing Bizarre Voice footprint of ratings and reviews and UGC and social commerce. 7:33 Here are a couple of examples of features that we've recently released. On the bottom, you'll see us bringing in ratings and reviews. So perhaps we're saying that this is a four point nine rated item or doing a summarized, an AI summarized review in the messaging itself. 7:47 At the top, you'll see us bringing in some social commerce posts, whether that be TikTok or Instagram. Perhaps it's an influencer, with two hundred thousand followers that has recently posted something about the product. 7:58 These are exciting ways that we're bringing these products together, and we're just getting started. We're really excited about where these products are going. We hope our customers are as well. 8:06 And with that, I'd love to turn things over to Jared who's gonna take us through the Kendra Scott experience. Thank you, Matt. Good morning, folks. I'm Jared Miller. 8:14 I'm senior director of web analytics and personalization at Kendra Scott Jewelry. Previously, I spent time at The Gap, Pandora Jewelry, Route twenty one, and GNC. 8:25 And I'm really excited today to take you through our journey with Bazaar of Waste Cocoa in contextualized commerce. But first, I wanna talk to you a little bit about Kendra Scott, and then secondly, about the journey that we've been on so that we can kinda contextualize for you how we were able to fit this technology and this solution into what we were doing. 8:46 Along the way, I wanna give you an idea as well. I, you know, I I don't just wanna sit here and say how good of a product it is. It is. I wanna give you some ideas strategically how we brought it alive that you might be able to replicate as well. 9:00 So to start, who is Kendra Scott, and who are we as a company? Kendra Scott, I don't know if you know the story. She's been on Shark Tank. 9:08 She has been wildly successful, but she didn't start that way. She was initially a single mother in Austin, and with five hundred dollars and in a spare bedroom, she began making jewelry on the side in her spare time. 9:23 You know, as as a parent, you know, it's very hard to find that spare time. She was able to find that spare time, start making jewelry, and she would literally go door to door in Austin and and sell her pieces, and she would sell them out. 9:36 Fortunately, somehow, some of her jewelry got picked up on an Oscar De La Renta runway show, and the rest is history, so to speak. 9:44 Here we are. We are the the leading emerging jewelry brand and widely considered one of the gateways, into fine jewelry. 9:56 Perhaps most important, Kendra has brought her values to the to the company, and we have these three these three pillars that are family, fashion, and philanthropy. 10:07 And, you know, my personal testimony here is that I think a lot of companies, despite the best of intentions, might struggle to bring their values alive. 10:17 That's not true at Kendra Scott. We it it is maybe perhaps a little hard or intangible to put into words, but every day, you can feel those values of family, fashion, and philanthropy come through in everything we do. 10:31 Everybody is amazing. It is by far the best place that I have worked. So why are we here today? What was our big challenge? 10:40 So I started at Kendra Scott in May of twenty twenty three. And I think Kendra Scott, like of so many retailers in the post COVID world, finally realized that they had a website and that perhaps they needed to rethink their their website strategy. 11:00 And what that entailed for us was we went through a number of trials of trying to find what the right combination of team and mix should be in ecommerce, and we did land on there. 11:12 There's three pillars within the ecommerce org. That is analytics and personalization. That is digital merchandising, and that is product in UX. 11:21 And and that is working. But in May of twenty three, when we came in, that was just getting off the ground. And we were in a situation where we had due to the the increased scrutiny on ecommerce and and the increased focus on ecommerce and the website post COVID, We we had the right technology. Right? 11:42 We had a pretty standard retail ecommerce tech stack. We were on Salesforce. We had Monotape for testing and product recommendations. 11:51 We had Google Analytics, Content Square. We had a a survey provider. I'm not sure, though, that we were actually driving any revenue from any of these things. 12:02 Right? We we had the tools. We had the data. We had copious amounts of data. We had an amazing IT team modeling this data into Snowflake, and I'm not sure that our outcomes were were keeping par with what they needed to be. 12:17 And so when I came in, as you can see on the screen here, we know that about eighty five percent of the traffic to our website was anonymous and and unidentified. 12:28 And we knew that we had a long ways to go from having some tools to having a a legitimate modern personalization program. 12:37 And so the real challenge for us is really this first bullet here that as we were starting to think strategically, how do we get from point a to point b? 12:49 How do we become a major force and player in personalization? We have to generate revenue along the way. There we have to to be very tactical today. 12:59 We have to take action today because, otherwise, we'll essentially never have time to see that strategy materialize. And I wanna introduce a concept to here to you here that we leveraged. 13:10 There's a lot of different names for this. And before I give the name to the concept, that essentially was our strategy at the time, I wanna give you a story. 13:18 So there was a a pharmaceutical company called Endovus Pharmaceuticals, and they were working on a novel testosterone therapy. This was back in two thousand five, two thousand six. 13:29 Right? And they had actually gotten a letter from the FDA saying, like, hey. This is not approved, this, that, and the other. And they knew that while they had, you know, this potential gold mine they were developing, right, their strategic road map, their road to modern and good, they needed revenue today. 13:46 So they started selling generic testosterone. Right? That was their baseline. Something to get revenue today, to take action today, to learn the market today while they're developing their road map, while they're coming up. 13:59 They did ultimately get approved and got acquired immediately thereafter. And this concept has a lot of names. One of the names is scaffolding. 14:07 But, you know, the the basic idea is that as you're building your empire, Rome wasn't built in a day. As you're doing that, how do you focus on something simple that is foundational that can run-in the background and drive you revenue today. 14:24 For us, that was contextualized commerce. And so what we did that so let's stop for one second, and we will pop another poll. 14:35 How confident are you in your current strategy for engaging anonymous shoppers? Are you very confident, somewhat confident, not confident, or you don't have a strategy yet? 14:44 And by the way, while you're taking that, I'll give you a few minutes to I'll give you a few seconds to take that. The results of the last poll came in, and forty percent said that they had greater than eighty percent anonymous traffic, and another forty percent said they had forty to sixty percent. 15:02 So we're we're kind of bimodal on this call. We have some folks that have a lot of anonymous traffic and some folks that don't. But go ahead and answer this one, and we'll give the results to that a little bit later. 15:17 I'll give you ten seconds or so, fifteen seconds. Okay. 15:39 And so to pick up where we left, we knew that we had this road map. We had this long way to get to modern personalization. We're still on that journey, but we knew that we needed to drive revenue today. 15:49 We had eighty five percent anonymous traffic. That is where we have the most juice for the squeeze and the most opportunity. I had come from the gap where we worked with the company that is now GraniteFi Cocoa, and contextualized commerce. 16:04 And I I knew I'd heard so many good things, and I got to Kendra Scott, and I spoke to my boss, who's an amazing leader. And I said, KK, have you heard of this concept? 16:15 So let's go talk to them. And we ended up talking to them and additionally speaking to a number of their competitors. 16:26 And so we really got educated in this space and what this space could be. And we decided to continue with those our voice COCO for a couple of reasons. 16:35 One is it was clear the algorithmic background, Collecting five hundred data points per second and quickly being able to take action on that data was far more robust than competitors. 16:48 And secondly, the white glove service. All we do is meet with them, give our business strategy to the Coco team, and have these robust discussions on how we can take action on the data, but they actually build the campaigns for us and take action. 17:03 So next few slides here, I wanna show you what was this initial game plan. Right? And and, you know, what what what are we what is it that we're talking about here? 17:14 And so you can see on this one, there are I I I'll introduce with this that the Cocoa team has hundreds of campaigns they can run on your site. 17:22 And a campaign is a combination of two things, a message to nudge at a particular point in the customer journey, and secondly, the method through which that is presented to as an endpoint to the user. 17:34 And they have a number of those that come together, and we call that our campaign. And so there are four that we're gonna show you that were particularly effective for us. 17:44 So carding frequency was one of the most consistently, statistically significant above the baseline. 17:52 And that that goes something like this. You know, someone's browsing our site. They're leaving all these anonymous behavioral cues of what they're doing. The cocoa brain is picking it up and saying, I'm gonna show them this message in this form at this location. 18:05 We are constantly actioning the anonymous behavioral data. And so what you see here now the the examples here are pop ups. 18:13 They do have pop ups. We're gonna talk about that in a second, but it is one potential mode of delivering the message. But this message goes something like, hey. 18:21 One hundred and twenty two shoppers have added this to bag today. That is immensely effective delivered at the right time to the right anonymous visitor. 18:31 Purchase frequency is another one that is constantly and regularly statistically significant for us, and that looks like an in line message on the PDP. 18:40 There's a couple ways we can deliver this. Forty seven shoppers purchased this item today. The ratings amplifier goes in and out of significance for us, honestly, and we're we're showing one of the versions here. 18:51 The but we are starting to test into this in a different way by leveraging some of the other bizarre voice features with the star ratings and the UGC. We can come back to that in a second as well. 19:01 I'm trying to show you here is a diversity. We have a diversity of messages, a diversity of delivery modes. Those come together to a campaign that the brain based on your behavioral anonymous footprint delivers to you. 19:14 And limited inventory, although we we can't show this all of the time because, again, it's dependent on on inventory and the item being viewed. 19:22 This has been immensely successful for us. Now one thing to think about, we are very cognizant that we don't want too many pop ups on the site. 19:31 And to be to be frank with you, we probably have a little bit too many today. Right? That is not due to these. So what you can work with with Cocoa and their white glove service is we set a limit that a visitor can only see one pop up in their session. 19:47 Right? And something to keep in mind is that not all of the traffic is eligible to even see any message. And even if they are eligible, they're only gonna see that message when when their behavioral footprint indicates that they should see it. 20:03 And only a subset of those would even see a pop up, and we limited that to one. And I think in total, our pop ups are somewhere around ten percent of traffic, and only thirty percent are even seeing the Coco message. 20:16 So this gives you an idea of what some of the techniques look like. You can customize these any way you want. You can ask for UI revision UX revisions. 20:26 You can ask for messaging revisions. You your team the the Coco team will develop it. Your team will have a chance to QA these and approve these. 20:36 And one thing I wanna give you is an idea of how this went for us, and there's another slide I'll show in a second that kind of extends upon this. 20:46 But of everything we've done so far, there's one thing I want you to take away is remember this concept of scaffolding. Right? This concept of you have a base layer, get something tactically moving in the background today. 21:00 And I think in personalization, I think when it comes to retail ecommerce, for us, it's very much that anonymous traffic because most of us have a lot of that. It is it is sexy to say we're gonna focus on identified user experiences, and that's great. 21:13 We're all marching on that journey. The reality is those are usually pretty narrow, and they're more engagement feature and less revenue where you can get revenue and a bigger gain in revenue from focusing on that anonymous traffic. 21:27 And so the the message is monetize your anonymous layer and keep that running in the background and keep it running nonstop. It is worth mentioning in ancient Rome when they would build buildings. 21:38 They would use a lot of scaffolding so they could climb up and build. Frequently, the scaffolding, the foundational layer, the base, they actually left with the buildings when the buildings were completed because of the aesthetic that it gave, and it kept delivering value. 21:52 So something to think about perhaps there's an analogy here. On this slide, the way this went for us, so we signed the contract, and, you know, we wanted to put Coco through it. 22:01 We didn't want them grading their own homework. So we actually went through, and we engineered it so their tag only even fired on a portion of the traffic. 22:10 So we had a portion of traffic they didn't see to keep them honest. Right? And what we found was we ended up with two baselines. We had the group eligible to see Coco messages. 22:20 We had a group that was there, which was Coco's holdout, their baseline. So group they know about, but they're gonna use as their control. And then we had our own control. 22:29 And, you know, I'm happy to say that we saw a statistically significant, consistent, and sustained lift over both groups. 22:38 And so something to think about is engineering that you start with a fifty fifty test. Later, you can move to ninety ten. Once you trust the program, you trust the team, you've seen the results. 22:49 And that way, you're also shifting more traffic to to be available to drive that revenue. And what this do for us? We are at about a an average seven percent lift in revenue per session, and this has been sustained. 23:02 For us, this actually goes up when it's not peak and goes down a little bit during peak season. It's around five percent during Outside of peak, it's over seven usually. 23:12 Most of that materializes with a conversion rate lift. We have done you know, we partnered with the team to do some unique, innovative, and different programs to try to lift AOV. 23:24 AOV is very meaningful to us. That drops that that additional incremental AOV generally drops right to the bottom line. And we were able to find a couple winners there as well to give us a little bit extra revenue per session materializing from AOV. 23:37 So if you do work with the bizarre voice COCO team, challenge them a little bit. They'll they'll play ball. What do you wanna take out of this? 23:46 It does drive a measurable impact. We can attest to that. It has given us the revenue oomph that we needed while we're starting to build more computationally complex things, and we're on our journey to that modern standout industry leading personalization. 24:02 We think we'll be there next year. The UGC driven content, we're testing that now. We are pulling the UGC content that Matt mentioned into some of the the campaigns. 24:13 And those usually the the look and feel and the way those come in the site, they're very different. We see higher engagement with that, and we're still testing, so we're not to the point of being able to to claim revenue, but it is a real win that integration with others, our voice products. 24:27 And the real time urgency, the best messages and campaigns we've seen are those that drive urgency. Right? A lot of people edit this to cart. A lot of people have viewed this today. 24:38 Those those things work. Something to think about here. You know, our journey looks like we did the fifty fifty test, then we went to eighty five fifteen, then we went to ninety ten, then we added more campaigns, unique campaigns, and we went to the UGC. 24:53 We're gonna do more ratings and reviews next. You can continue through your existing campaigns and net new ones to add more incremental revenue. 25:03 And I think we're gonna ask see if there's any questions here. Hey, Jared. While we're waiting for questions, there was three quick points I I wanted to make. 25:13 One of which you alluded to just a moment ago in that Bizarre plus contextual commerce does not rely at all upon promotions or discounting. We we those are not part of our campaigns. 25:22 We we don't feel like, you know, so we have to give away revenue in order to to increase sales. The messaging helps you to convert without the need for discounting or promotions, which is great. 25:32 The second is that while we're primarily focused on anonymous shoppers and we're really impactful there, we actually have a significant positive impact on the consumers that you do know, as well. 25:42 And then one example is that is that, we we also run on the app, So iOS or Android, and we do see Lyft, where you do know the majority of the consumers because they're signing into the apps. 25:52 So that's positive. And then the last thing that I failed to mention earlier is that we do offer a free POV for anyone who is interested, interested in doing so where we'll do the implementation for free. 26:02 We'll develop about eight campaigns that we know are high performers, and we'll launch that for about a thirty day, what we call proof of value POV. 26:10 So you could see firsthand what lift the contextual commerce can drive for you without a cost and and risk. So sorry. I wanted to get those three things in before we we move to q and a. 26:22 Thanks, Matt. Well said. I I know that we we were passionate about the free p POC, and that that did end up working in our favor. I do see a question. 26:32 My my my computer's having a little bit of trouble scrolling over these business. Where do you see the most drop off in your conversion funnel, and how might contextual commerce help. 26:42 You know, for us, specifically, we start to think about the funnel. We we use a nested funnel. There's a lot of funnels out there. And so you visit the site. You don't bounce. 26:53 You see a PDP. You add a cart. You start checkout. You finish checkout. And, hopefully, you buy a lot. Right? The biggest drop off for us is starting checkout. 27:01 And fascinatingly enough, the the most effective contextual commerce campaigns for us have been the carting frequency. 27:10 X amount of people added this to cart today. There is also a nudge that works pretty well to say, like, hey. This is in your cart. I think I think that is called a cart reminder. 27:19 That is actually our most effective campaign. Like, hey. You left this in your cart. Don't forget to buy. That works extremely well. Yeah. 27:32 So I I don't see any other questions, but I will say, you know, I'm always available on LinkedIn. You know, send me a message. Let's chat. 27:40 Let's compare notes. And, you know, happy to show you how the COCO program has worked for us and how it's fit in to our broader personalization and the other things that we've done. 27:53 Well, I'd like to thank you, Jared, for for joining us today and leading this webinar. And that concludes the contextual commerce webinar for today. Thank you, everyone. 28:02 Thanks, Matt. Thanks, everybody.
