NETTING IT OUT

Peerius has been serving recommendations to retailers since 2007. Currently, there are 86 retailers with a total of 148 sites using the solution. Peerius is deployed in five languages over three continents, with a majority of customers in Europe. Eighty-five percent of its clients are multi-site and multi-currency. Its offerings are highly modular and include personalized recommendations, segmentation, adaptive pages, and mobile recommendations.

The strengths of the Peerius solutions are the revenue impact that recommendations have on its clients, its international and multi-country clientele, its extensive use of social data in personalizing recommendations, the direct control merchandisers have over recommendation appearance and placement, and clients’ access to its behavioral segmentation data.

Peerius should be on the short list of any retailer who seeks to personalize any aspect of the customer experience using behavioral, profile, and social data to predict which content will be the most valuable.

Peerius at Footasylum.com

(Click on image to enlarge.)

© 2012 Patricia Seybold Group Inc. and Footasylum.com

1. Peerius is used to select the banner, brands, and shipping to display on the Footasylum home page. Peerius determines the optimum brands based on the propensity to purchase, identifies the visitor’s country, and checks eligibility for offers based on customer profile.

OVERVIEW OF PEERIUS

Peerius

London-based Peerius was founded in 2007 by Roger Brown, who had been CEO of Kay Media Technologies LTD, a media industry consultancy. He was nominated by Vogue magazine as one of the Top 100 most influential people in the online fashion world. The company’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Bruce D’Ambrosio, holds an emeritus faculty position in computer science at Oregon State University, where he focused on probabilistic methods in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and real-time behavior modeling. He was also the founder of CleverSet, an early technology leader in the rapidly growing field of automated personalization engines, used to optimize e-commerce experiences by presenting visitors with relevant recommendations and information. CleverSet was acquired by ATG, now Oracle, in early 2008. Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, is an advisor to Peerius. Other members of the Peerius team have extensive experience in ecommerce design and development, customer experience design, and ecommerce consultancy. The firm has roughly three dozen employees and is currently recruiting Java development experts, data analysts, merchandising experts, and sales people with an ecommerce/technology background. Peerius’s SaaS offerings support 86 clients with 148 sites.

Peerius Offerings

Peerius provides personalization and recommendation solutions for retailers, with a strong client base in the apparel and accessories category. Three-quarters of its deployments are in Europe, one fifth in North America, and the remainder in Australia. Its European clients are in the U.K., Germany, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands. The Peerius Merchandising system is deployed in British and American English, German, Dutch, Danish and French.

Peerius offers personalization, recommendations, and related products which personalize product recommendations and content for visitors based on behavior and/or customer segment. Its chief products are as follows:

• SMART-recs. Personalized recommendations for clients and sites based on customer behavior and product attributes. SMART-recs can be deployed in any retail or communications channel, such as mobile or in-store POS.

• SMART-mail. E-mail personalization of email content and/or email recommendations based on customer behavior. Editing and testing functions for the emails are included in the Peerius Merchandising System client interfaces.

• SMART-content. Dynamically adapts content in line with individual visitor behavior

• SMART-ranking. Dynamically organizes and optimizes listing pages, like search and category, based on customer behavior. These listings are controlled using rules and strategies and managed through the Peerius Merchandising System client interfaces.

• SMART-target. Gives access to behavioral and recency, frequency, monetization (RFM) segmentation on the fly. It is designed to track movements of segments over time in response to targeted campaigns. RFM data enables retailers to identify customers who have changed their purchasing patterns, and to design campaigns using this data.

• SMART-landing. Dynamically generates PPC landing pages to provide a landing page specific to each keyword on the fly.

All Peerius clients currently use SMART-recs which includes access to the merchandising and intelligence portal. Currently, 20 percent of clients use SMART-target which helps marketers deploy campaigns more consistently across channels and, more importantly, allows them to track the effectiveness of those campaigns by monitoring segment movements. Segmentation is a familiar concept to marketers, which is just what makes it so comfortable for them to use. For this reason, I expect to see a higher percentage of adopters of SMART-target in the coming year. Peerius’s adaptive solutions for landing pages, listing pages, and content have more modest adoption rates as these products have only been recently launched. An increasing proportion of their current customers, as well as new customers, are implementing these products as personalization solutions are more widely adopted.

EXAMPLE: FOOTASYLUM.COM

Footasylum is a fashion retailer with brand-conscious customers. Footasylum uses the SMART-content product from Peerius to personalize many aspects of the customer experience... See Illustration 1 (above)...