BloomReach Launches Digital Merchandising Tech that Prioritizes Content Opportunities and Predicts Revenue Impact

MOUNTIAN VIEW, Calif., Aug. 9, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading personalization platform provider BloomReach today announced major innovations to its Compass application for digital merchandisers – highlighted by algorithmic intelligence that uncovers opportunities and estimates their monthly revenue impact. Digital merchandisers face hundreds of content and product decisions daily to improve business performance. Compass not only suggests what digital merchandisers should do with their products, categories, navigation, and site-search queries, but now ranks the opportunities by their potential monthly revenue impact. The prioritization feature also allows users to see opportunities ranked on additional performance metrics including revenue per visit, exit rate and visits.

This unique capability represents a significant advancement for internet retailers and their site-experience teams – which historically have relied on disparate data sources and intuition. By analyzing consumer behavior and prioritizing potential actions in real time, users can reduce the time spent analyzing and acting on data by as much as 50 percent, instead of waiting days for reports from IT or analysts.

A recently released Forrester report found that 63 percent of digital merchandisers don't strongly agree that their merchandising team had access to customer insights to drive merchandising, assortment, and product-placement decisions. Less than half strongly believed that their current technology is sufficient to generate actionable insights. With more than two-thirds of digital merchandisers planning to invest in technology in the near future, BloomReach Compass is packaging the new prioritization feature with other key upgrades, including:

Reimagined Action Tracking – Digital merchandisers make many site changes every day, but often struggle to track each decision and measure the action's impact. BloomReach Compass now provides a tracking mechanism with a customizable impact calculator plus the ability to track merchandisers' work against site-wide performance.

Enhanced One-Step Workflow – With guidance from digital merchandisers at Internet Retailer Top 100 companies, BloomReach Compass now identifies opportunities and diagnoses site issues in one step, including site-search results with high bounce rates, poorly performing category pages, etc.

Lamps Plus, which uses BloomReach Compass, wanted to improve user experiences to drive more engagement and better business performance. The company sought to understand why certain products were either performing well or underperforming, and found that Compass provided direct access to data and insights that ordinarily would require some intuitive guesswork. Lamps Plus recently noted that it expanded its team in part because Compass continues to uncover many new opportunities for the brand to improve experiences.

"With rising marketing costs and increasingly competitive large e-commerce players, we at Lamps Plus realized that improving the user experience from A to Z could significantly increase our profits. Historically decisions have been made on basic metrics such as conversion or overall profit," said Dalin Brinkman, Lamps Plus manager for site optimization and mobile. "We quickly adopted BloomReach Compass, which allowed us to better understand what the user was looking for at each step of the process. As a result, our conversion rates have risen dramatically as we have benefited from understanding better not only what our users are looking for, but the methods that they are using to find and purchase each and every product."

"Compass represents a market shift toward role-based analytics that are immediately actionable. All too commonly, analytics platforms crunch a bunch of data and then spit out pages and pages of reports, making the user determine what they should do. We redesigned Compass to bring together data from every consumer interaction to one place, and give digital merchandisers and site-experience managers a prioritized list of opportunities to accomplish their goals," said Raj De Datta, co-founder and CEO of BloomReach. "When it comes to perfecting digital experiences and driving engagement, people still have a place, and you shouldn't automate everything. But, at the speed of e-commerce, acting in real time requires workflow and prioritization software that is specific to your job and doesn't cause paralysis from too much data."

BloomReach Compass has seen significant growth since launching in September 2014 and is now being used across dozens of sites from the most innovative retailers including Wayfair, PacSun and Neiman Marcus. Compass has reduced time spent on digital merchandisers' top job of diagnosing and acting on site opportunities to minutes and is yielding an average $8,000 in monthly revenue per action.

About Compass for Merchandising
Compass is an action-oriented analytics tool that helps site merchandisers intuitively understand their customers' on-site behavior. Using a simple user interface, it helps them make smarter, faster decisions that they can track – ultimately driving revenue. Compass Merchandising provides an intuitive, visual tool that tells them why customers are behaving certain ways throughout their customer journeys and what to do to remove the friction in discovering and purchasing your products. Compass has empowered merchandising teams as small as two and as large as 50 to drive smarter, more efficient decision-making that results in substantial revenue improvements on site.

About BloomReach
BloomReach is a machine-learning, big-data technology company that delivers a more relevant digital experience for more than 170 customers using the data from more than 75 million monthly unique consumers and the applications built on its Personalization Platform. BloomReach's core technology – the Web Relevance Engine (WRE) – algorithmically understands content and users, matching this understanding with demand and intent data from across the Web. BloomReach's Commerce Suite has solutions that adapt your content to make it personal and relevant for individual users. The BloomReach Compass suite surfaces actionable product performance and recommendations that maximize revenue.

BloomReach's portfolio of customers include: Neiman Marcus, Sears Outlet, Staples and Williams-Sonoma. Created in 2009, BloomReach is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices in New York City, London and Bangalore. BloomReach is backed by investment firms Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, NEA, Salesforce Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures. Visit BloomReach.com for more information.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130514/SF13130LOGO

SOURCE BloomReach

Related Links

http://www.bloomreach.com