Why You Should Use Online Retail Carousels More Smartly

Since they offer the chance for a much smoother user experience, carousels are a popular option for online retailers. But if carousels are going to offer a genuinely better browse for the customer, retailers need to use them intelligently, using data, testing, and a personalised approach.

Related Read: Why Online Retailers Need to Optimise Images For Better Engagement

This article will explain why you should use online retail carousels more smartly.

The retailer’s carousel experience

It’s Monday morning and you’re sat in a meeting with each merchandiser trying to push the promotion of their own products. One argues that he is sitting on excess stock while the other wants to bump her seasonal trousers to the homepage. “Let’s put our mid-season sale on the homepage”, “we must promote our new products”, “what about the specialised petite and tall range?”

I’m sure you’re familiar with how the rest of the conversation goes. In a last desperate attempt to please everybody you suggest the obvious – the carousel.

As an ecommerce professional, you know that the carousel is a means to an end. You know that it has confirmed usability issues, for example take eye-tracking: you know that even though consumers browse your site, they rarely focus on the selected images.

You also understand that most users won’t see all the slides in a homepage carousel, even one that auto-rotates. They get bored and do not have time to stick around on the homepage long enough. So, what’s the point?

This broad-brush approach paints the wrong picture, it’s a lose-lose compromise. The carousel is popular for the same reason why pizza restaurants are ubiquitous –  not because it is loved, but because nobody hates it. When planning a restaurant visit, there is always a lone voice who will veto your cravings for fish or Greek food, but almost everyone likes pizza, even the fussy ones will eat it, and that is where you will end up.

Choosing noodles over pepperoni

The good news is that the buck doesn’t stop there – there is more that you could be doing. Personalisation can help marketers and merchandisers to quickly prove that a static homepage image is better than a carousel that has no personalisation.

Firstly, an A/B or MVT test should be conducted, then, taking a continuous-improvement approach, personalisation will enable you to prove that using segment-based personalisation – showing one image based on a category you have established the user has an interest in – is even better.

Take US-based online motorcycle clothing and accessories retailer RevZilla. The RevZilla marketing team were worried that the carousel on its category pages, which cycled through in-depth video reviews, was too intimidating for customers and wanted to see if there was a better alternative.

RevZilla optimised the experience by trialling two alternatives:

• The first replaced the carousel with two banners, linking to a newsletter sign-up and to its product reviews
• The second added a third banner, promoting motorcycle products that RevZilla had awarded with its own badge of excellence

The brand found both test panels performed better than the original video carousel.

The importance of individual decisions

Within the retail space, it is well known that matching different pieces of creative to different market segments allows us to appeal to more customers individually than using a single piece of creative. This is called segmentation. The approach is achieved by reviewing marketing personas, top-line customer data and web analytics to enable us to place customers into neatly defined segments.

Unfortunately, the concept of producing unique creative for every single customer, is simply unrealistic: the incremental gains from designing individual creatives are simply outweighed by the diminishing returns of targeting shrinking market segments and the added work of managing all those segments. However, there is a more effective way; using the technology advances of machine learning enables us to do better than just designing new creative for increasingly granular segments.

Machine driven personalisation allows brands to maximise the return on creative by ensuring they serve the very best choice to each person, every time.

Instead of serving a single variant optimised for the average majority, but losing those outside that group, or sub-dividing an audience into more labour-intensive micro-segments, machine driven personalisation makes individual decisions in real-time to decide which of the available options is best for each individual customer based on their data.

This changes the emphasis from producing infinite creative options; it is about incorporating all known data about an individual to make the best decision, to show them the most relevant experience in that moment.

Serving it up on a platter

Whilst the logic is hardly revelatory, our own data prove that, irrespective of whether retailers utilise segment based personalisation or machine-driven personalisation to deliver content, there are significant business benefits to improving the customer experience in the shape of increased customer acquisition, increased conversion rates and higher customer lifetime value and retention rates.

A recent study found that 78 per cent of brands believe that an integrated ecommerce and in-store experience is business critical. Why is this? Unsurprisingly it all comes down to money. A 2016 survey by Retail Week and Drapers, reported that 36 per cent of respondents saw a return-on-investment of 2-5 times – or greater from personalisation.

Take online clothing brand JD Williams for example; serving different content to new versus returning visitors delivered an 18% increase in new visitor conversion and a 12% increase in revenue per customer.

Conclusion

Whether you like Thai, Chinese or Italian, ecommerce executives now have an abundance of tools at their fingertips that can help to escape the mediocre carousel option and instead, satisfy multiple different tastes and requirements in one swoop. The name? It’s called personalisation.

No carousel is better than a bad carousel. Don’t feel the need to use one. But a personalised approach, in whatever context, improves your homepage enormously.

Remember:

• Use data to offer recommendations that suit the visitor
• Test
• Machine driven personalisation optimises the process