Digital-first retail.
M&S scales personalisation across millions of customer interactions and creates culture of experimentation with Adobe Experience Cloud.
500M
Personalised interactions annually, a 24x increase in two years
Objectives
Deliver exceptional customer service both in shops and online
Encourage data-driven decision making across teams
Expand personalisation to eventually deliver five billion personalised interactions annually
Measure and demonstrate value of personalisation and testing
Results
80% increase in click-through rates and 56% add-to-bag rates by personalising a website carousel
24x increase in personalised interactions in two years
Achieved £100 million in incremental revenue through personalisation
Scaled experimentation 11.5x with decentralised testing model
There are few brands as quintessentially British as Marks & Spencer. Since 1884, generations of Brits have grown up with M&S as their retailer of choice for everything from clothing and home goods to groceries.
One of the reasons that M&S has found such long-lasting success is that it adapts to keep up with changing retail trends. With 1,500 shops, worldwide, a strong digital presence and a respected commitment to sustainability - including a goal of net-zero emissions and ethical sourcing, M&S has earned the respect of other retailers and customers around the globe.
In recent years, the digital revolution continues to transform how M&S does business. With more customers browsing virtual shelves and purchasing items online, M&S has invested heavily in its e-commerce strategy. The COVID-19 pandemic further reinforced the importance of delivering outstanding digital experiences. And while M&S adapted in many ways, one challenge remained: delivering its trademark exceptional customer services across all digital touchpoints, whether the customer is in store, at home or on the go.
In the spring of 2020, M&S launched “Never the Same Again,” an ambitious plan to accelerate a company-wide digital transformation and establish M&S as a digital-first retailer. Alex Williams, Head of Growth and Personalisation at M&S, was tasked with supporting an initiative to create personalised interactions for millions of customers.
With Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, both part of Adobe Experience Cloud, Williams and his team reshaped the digital experience and nurtured a culture of data and experimentation across the company. By relying on data, M&S can leverage insight into customers’ shopping habits and to serve up personalised recommendations and experiences.
“We went with Adobe apps because we had confidence in their ability to help us to achieve personalisation at scale,” says Williams. “The apps are easy to use, which also means that we can increase adoption across a wide range of our colleagues.”
“Using AI and data science to power recommendations introduced a new way of operating at M&S. Our team can focus on deciding the strategy and configuring the right types of recommendations to achieve our goals, but leave execution up to Adobe Target algorithms.”
Alex Williams
Head of Growth and Personalisation, Marks & Spencer
Personalisation at scale for hundreds of millions
Williams and the personalisation team started the personalisation journey using the product recommendations engine built into Target. For instance, a customer browsing M&S’s cashmere jumpers might be presented with tops, accessories and outerwear that can be styled together to complete a look. M&S also displays recommendations throughout the shopping journey - such as on the home page, product description pages or checkout basket - based on previously browsed or purchased products.
Analytics fuels the personalisation programme by providing insights into every customer interaction. This allows teams across the company to measure the power of personalisation.
Just months after kicking off the recommendation programme and as more customers turned to online shopping during the pandemic, M&S saw online sales for clothing and home goods jump almost 50%. Making the switch from generic messages to personalised recommendations on one website carousel increased the click-through rates by more than 80% and add-to-bag-rates by 56%. The percentage of revenue attributed to that carousel also increased by 318%.
“Personalisation is about finding what’s right for each customer at an individual level, but we had to convince stakeholders of the value,” says Williams. “Adobe Analytics allows us to deliver self-service reporting and insights to product managers, commercial teams and merchandisers to help them to understand the value of personalisation and become more data-driven in their approach.”
Over the years, M&S has expanded the scale of the personalisation programme dramatically across web, mobile app, paid marketing and email. M&S has also changed how it prioritises messaging. Rather than just focusing on short-term goals, such as increasing basket size, the retailer also personalises interactions that increase customer lifetime value, such as encouraging customers to download the mobile app, apply for a credit card or join the Sparks loyalty programme.
Today, the company delivers 500 million personalised interactions with customers annually, up from 20 million towards the start of the programme. This has contributed to more than £100 million in incremental revenue in one year, which corresponds to an 8% uplift in total online sales.
“Using AI and data science to power recommendations introduced a new way of operating at M&S,” says Williams. “Our team can focus on deciding the strategy and configuring the right types of recommendations to achieve our goals, but leave execution up to the Adobe Target algorithms.”
“When working with physical shops, the reality is that you need to get things right the first time as failure can be costly. With Adobe Target, we have more freedom to experiment and uncover strategies that deliver the greatest value.”
Alex Williams
Head of Growth and Personalisation, Marks & Spencer
Creating an experimentation culture
The growth of personalisation has influenced a similar growth in experimentation at M&S. Teams are encouraged to challenge traditional ways of working by taking advantage of Analytics data to gain insights, form hypotheses and test content and experiences across digital properties with Target.
“Adobe Target has been the reason that we could scale our experimentation culture,” says Williams. “Teams could quickly understand how to use Adobe Target to set up and run their own tests, which allowed us to establish a decentralised model for experimentation. As a result, we went from fewer than 20 annual experiments to 250 experiments in just two years.”
The ability to experiment quickly has pushed M&S to optimise and refine its approach with customers. For instance, M&S tested the use of AI-generated personalised language by integrating Persado with Target. The retailer personalised the copy used in a pop-up that invited customers to join the Sparks loyalty programme. The personalised copy was a big success, leading to 4x improvement in click-throughs and 2x improvement in sign-ups.
“When working with physical shops, the reality is that you need to get things right the first time as failure can be costly,” says Williams. “With Adobe Target, we have more freedom to experiment and uncover strategies that deliver the greatest value.”
“With the power of Adobe Experience Cloud, we have been able to accelerate our digital transformation, changing perceptions and performance of personalisation at M&S.”
Alex Williams
Head of Growth and Personalisation, Marks & Spencer
Evolving digital experiences for a new era
Digital transformation continues to define how M&S envisions new customer experiences. M&S plans to take experimentation to the next level, giving each test an experiment quality score and creating a searchable repository of knowledge to cycle through experiments even faster. Teams are also starting to use customer growth journeys that target groups of customers, delivering connected content and experiences across all channels.
Personalisation also continues to grow and mature at incredible pace. The next phase will focus on scaling personalisation even further, extending across digital touchpoints to deliver five billion interactions annually to customer. To achieve this goal, M&S is building a decisioning and orchestration platform called “Bullseye” that combines in-house, off-the-shelf and partner capabilities.
“With the power of Adobe Experience Cloud, we have been able to accelerate our digital transformation, changing perceptions and performance of personalisation at M&S,” says Williams.
Recommended for you
https://main--bacom--adobecom.hlx.page/fragments/customer-success-stories/contact-footer
