Ecommerce Personalization - Episode 212

INTERVIEW WITH MEYAR SHEIK

DESCRIPTION

In today’s podcast, we talk about personalizing the shopping experience for customers as well as the different ways to gather and use data in order to get to know your customer. Our guest is Meyar Sheik, President and Chief Commerce Officer ar Kibo, and he shares his valuable insights into this issue.

Make sure to tune in to find out more!

Meyar Sheik is the President and Chief Commerce Officer at Kibo. Prior to Kibo, Meyar founded Certona, a leader in AI-Driven eCommerce Personalization, in 2004. He served as the CEO until Kibo acquired the company in early 2019. Before founding Certona, Meyar was the CMO and COO of web analytics leader WebSideStory (now part of Omniture/Adobe). Before joining WebSideStory, Meyar was the Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Strategic Alliances for the Enterprise Application Integration software vendor SuperNova, Inc.

“If you just have information about your shopper, that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily personalizing it.”

— Meyar Sheik

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Personalization in traditional retail means getting to know your customers in person. One-to-one personalization doesn’t scale in the digital era. Personalization technology enables brands to leverage data about their customers to build a better picture and to be able to better predict and serve the customer.
Cross-site data collection causes concerns about privacy. Kibo leverages shopper behavior on a particular site only.
There are privacy-friendly ways of gathering data: store purchase data, intervals between purchases, loyalty programs, shopper data programs, store inventory, store locations, geo fencing, mobile app use, etc. PII is not needed to have an effective personalization program.
Amazon pioneered the concept of data-driven recommendations and personalized journeys. They have a lot of data so it’s effective. They deploy merchandising zones, bundles to make it easier for the consumer to find what they want, etc.
30 to 40% of Amazon’s revenues come from recommendations and personalized zones. They know about affinities between different products as well as the types of media customers consume, so it can give at least a semi-personalized experience.
The Customer Data Platform is the fuel that drives the personalization engine. The two work together in a complementary way. Just having information about the shopper isn’t effective without a way to use it; personalization without data will not be effective either.
When it comes to thinking about when to start investing in personalization capability the size of the catalog is more important than the brand’s revenue. Anything over 500 SKUs or with complex catalogs is worth looking into.
Profitability is a major concern for many brands as their ecommerce sales start to comprise more of their overall revenue. To improve profitability of DTC channels, brands should
- Nurture the relationship with the customer once it is made. There is more focus on the lifetime value of the customer.
- Build in logic to prefer products that are well-stocked, or have higher contribution margin. This can really help profitability especially with supply chain issues.
Kibo does not use Amazon Marketing Cloud to augment their off-Amazon data. Generally, the larger the retailer, the less inclined they are to share information with Amazon or have any dependency on them.
COVID is the new chief innovation officer - it has pushed many brands forward. More innovation is happening and it seems to be happening faster.
There is no brand that can survive that can stay without staying nimble. No-one is immune, not even Amazon.
Kibo is a unified commerce platform that helps online brands and retailers deliver a better shopping experience and individualize every touchpoint on their digital shopping journey. Order fulfilment and order management is also critical to the customer experience.