Hobbycraft Drives Up RPV with Data-Driven Personalization Tech

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered stores and forced citizens across the globe to spend a lot more time at home due to stay-at-home orders, the online business for arts and crafts retailer Hobbycraft was booming.

The retailer counts 95 stores across the U.K., and it attributes its success partly to its investment in digital commerce technologies. This includes personalization, which allows the Hobbycraft team to deliver a data-driven shopping experience to their customers.

Hobbycraft partnered with Qubit, which provides AI-driven experiences to the retail market, to employ specific personalization strategies that allowed them to meet their goals and exceed expectations. For example:

Social Proof

Utilizing social proof — which reassures customers and increases confidence in purchases — Hobbycraft deployed a social proof experience on both mobile and desktop sites that highlighted how many times the product had been “bagged” in the last 48 hours. This experience proved successful with Hobbycraft customers, with results showing a higher uplift than industry averages:

• 8.3% uplift in Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) on mobile and 10.6% on desktop
• 4.35% uplift in conversion rate

Using social proof strategies led to an uplift in RPV and conversion and a major increase in incremental revenue of $1,257,400 yearly.

See also: How Olivela is Leveraging Virtual Experiences During COVID-19

Realizing the importance of customer reviews, Hobbycraft found these reviews to be an effective way for consumers to view what other shoppers purchase and how they rate specific products. The Hobbycraft team used highlighted reviews as a badge on the product description page to convey that the viewed item is “top-rated,” which drove an 8.13% increase in conversions.

Product Recommendations

With more than 25,000 products, Hobbycraft also leaned heavily on personalization to expand the reach of its large product catalog to more visitors. Product recommendations are an effective method of creating a seamless purchase journey by displaying relevant items to the visitors who are showing buying intent.

By identifying the points in the customer journey where product recommendations would be most compelling, Hobbycraft implemented the experience on the “add to basket” pop-up, which culminated in a 4% uplift in RPV, and enabled Hobbycraft to get exposure for products that customers may otherwise not find without doing an extensive site search.

Customized Messaging

Re-engaging lapsed customers is an issue frequently faced by retail brands, including Hobbycraft. The brand employed personalized abandonment messaging to combat basket abandonment by reminding customers that they had items in their basket when they were about to leave the website. This allows shoppers to pick back up where they left off for a frictionless purchase journey. By using basket abandonment messaging, Hobbycraft was able to increase the RPV by 2.82%.

By first determining company goals before making the investment in personalization technology, Hobbycraft was able to measure the success of their social proof, product recommendations and customer re-engagement efforts over time, and assess ROI of Qubit’s personalization offering.

“We wanted to put the customer at the heart of our e-commerce strategy, so we chose Qubit to help us implement personalization experiences that would help us to meet the evolving demands of our customer base. With Qubit, we’ve been able to make use of the wealth of data available to us to target visitors with the right messages at the right time,” said Jenny North, head of digital experience, Hobbycraft.