Digital-first retail.

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 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.”

Over the years, M&S has expanded the scale of the personalisation program 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 cart 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 program.

Today, the company delivers 500 million personalised interactions with customers annually, up from 20 million towards the start of the program. 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.”

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 program. The personalised copy was a big success, leading to 4x improvement in click-throughs and 2x improvement in sign-ups.

“When working with physical stores, 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.”