How we choose, evaluate, and rank the Top 100 brands

500 brands were selected based on varying criteria: brand prominence, retailer type, customer experience design, track record of innovation, and known approaches to personalization. Sailthru’s team of personalization specialists rely on backgrounds in retail, commerce, digital marketing, UX design, business intelligence, and more to develop a strong rubric of attributes.

From there, the Index is the result of two research projects beginning in May 2021 and running through January 2022:

• A scoring of 500 retailers. Sailthru identified a list of 80 different attributes that define how a brand could personalize the consumer experience for a customer across channels including web, mobile, email, other digital (which includes in-store, social, and traditional mail), privacy, and offline. A team of Sailthru researchers then experienced each brand’s shopping and purchase experience, documenting their findings. The end result was a scorecard for each retailer of their brand’s experience highlighting what that retailer did and did not do to personalize the experience.

• A survey of 5,000 consumers on their brand experiences. Sailthru worked with Coresight Research and Qualtrics to recruit and survey 4,000 US and 1,000 UK consumers ages 18 and older about their most recent experience with a randomly chosen selection of 10 retailers from the 2022 Retail Personalization Index list. Customers were asked to rate their most recent purchase, their satisfaction with the experience, their likelihood to make another purchase in the next six months, and their likelihood to recommend the brand to a friend or colleague (used to generate a Net Promoter Score). 

Once this data was collected, we ran a series of stepwise regressions on a training data subset of the study’s brands, with NPS, satisfaction, and likelihood to make a future purchase as the dependent variables. The resulting findings were then used to assign a points value to each trait that better reflected that trait’s impact on measurable business outcomes. In this case, NPS, customer satisfaction, and the likelihood of making a future purchase.

• A survey of 260 retailers on their personalization efforts. In order to provide a new perspective and compare retailers’ perceptions with consumers’, our teams decided that an additional survey would be critical to explore gaps in areas surrounding personalization. We also wanted to understand personalization efforts outside of what could be confirmed based on experience of the brand research alone.

The fifth annual edition’s scoring rubric

Our survey results inform the scoring rubric and weights on the 2022 Retail Personalization attributes. There were four steps applied in determining the assigned weights. Weighted points are assigned based on which features have positive coefficients in the final resulting models from our stepwise regressions. An attribute could be worth up to 3 points based on what consumers in the survey considered ‘extremely important’ or a percent rating of ‘5’ for each question. We assigned weights to each of the 80 attributes in 2022 per the below criteria:

1. Whether the attribute relates to personalization
2. If the attribute has a matching and/or very similar attribute in the 2021 Retail Personalization Index
3. If the attribute has a matching and/or very similar attribute in the 2022 Consumer Survey