Room & Board Sees Conversion Rates Spike From AI-Based Personalization

Room & Board has created modern furnishings designed to be practical, timeless and comfortable for more than 35 years. The home furnishing company, which has 16 U.S. showrooms, wanted to deliver personalization that leveraged the retailer's rich customer data and large library of creative assets.

Through a scalable AI-driven program, Room & Board personalized more than 100 elements across its website, working with cloud commerce company Kibo's Monetate to get it done. The company increased the online conversion rates of visitors that engaged with personalized content by 80%. In addition to significant increases in conversion rate, Room & Board experienced a 30% lift in click engagements for customers that received personalized messages and a 10% increase in average order value for engaged customers.

“We wanted to be able to use our content library and our data in an environment that would set us up for scalable personalization success. Setting up in the Monetate system was so easy and the results speak for themselves,” said John Schroeder, director of Business Intelligence, Room & Board.

Room & Board worked with Monetate to create different testing and personalization capabilities that would be driven by the retailer’s customer data and large product creative library. Starting with small tests on their homepage, Room & Board quickly experienced lifts in performance, which led to expanded personalization across many elements of the website. Now Room & Board can deliver personalization to known customers, as well as new visitors, with confidence and ease.

The frictionless nature of the personalization solution also supported the Room & Board staff during COVID-19, when many people at home started to search for and buy more furniture and home decor. With the team working from home, Monetate allowed for easy creation and deployment of different personalization experiences that could be analyzed and adjusted in near-real time. The company plans to rely on the solution’s machine learning to adapt and improve experiences as they roll out significant personalization expansion.

“We were thrilled to be able to drive so much value from Room & Board’s extensive customer and product assets. The company has seen direct increases in conversion from Monetate’s personalization solution with a frictionless offering that was able to flex with the company as they expanded and adjusted to COVID-19,” said Brian Wilson, COO, Kibo.