How Schwans.com makes it personal with every site visitor
The Schwan Food Co.’s Schwans.com, the online b2c division of the premium frozen food and meal manufacturer, finds that increasing site personalization is a key factor in increased online sales, up about 30%, since it re-launched in April, according to a preliminary test. Where an earlier version of the Schwan’s site wouldn’t even allow visitors to enter without providing a name and password, Schwans.com has dispensed with that policy and now manages to provide a degree of personalization even to new site visitors with which the site has no history, says Glenn Bader, director of Internet and advanced technology marketing.
“Anybody now can come to the site, look at whatever they want, and give us their zip code when they’re ready,” says Bader. “That created challenges in personalization. If you don’t know anything about the visitor, how are you going to make the site relevant?” The site handles that by giving new visitors a home page that is dynamic in that it features whatever are the currently most popular of several lifestyle product categories Schwans.com has created; for instance, balanced nutritional choices, ideas for entertaining, or regional cuisine. “At the level where the site knows nothing about you, it presents you first with the most popular categories,” Bader says.
Visitors who go as far as entering a ZIP code when asked see something different. “The site ‘sees` that your ZIP code is in Minnesota, for instance, so it offers you an old-fashioned apple pie, which is a big mover in that area,” he says. The site also serves up the lifestyle categories most popular in the visitor`s home region.
Known, registered visitors with customer profiles get yet another layer of personalization refinement, which changes the specials offered and populates a "What`s new" feature based on individual history and preferences. “What the site does is determine of all the new products out there, which ones are relevant to this category, and within those products, which is the most likely to be responded to based on the customer’s profile,” says Bader. “The further you click down into the categories, the more specific the offers are contextually. The site is always taking into account what it knows about you.”
To achieve the degree of personalization, Schwans.com uses some proprietary technology and the customer data it’s collected on its own, plus collaborative filtering technology, as well as data mining tools from provider E.piphany Inc. Since Schwan’s actively began promoting its web site in 2000, the web has come to represent about 14% of its home delivery segment, the largest of three business units that also do grocery store distribution under various brands, as well as institutional sales.
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