Index
Methodology
The purpose of Sailthru + Liveclicker's Retail Personalization Index is to quantify how leading retailers are personalizing their customer experience, which personalization methods are most effective, and the relationship between a personalized experience, customer satisfaction, and customer retention.
How the Index continues to evolve
- Conducted our first-ever survey to retail marketers
- An additional follow up survey on consumer privacy
- Fully refreshed methodology to account for market changes
- Additional attributes with emphasis on loyalty and privacy policies
The Top 100 in your inbox
Download this year’s guide for insights on loyalty programs, leveraging predictive analytics, and creating a frictionless experience for consumers.
Get the GuideHow 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:
- Whether the attribute relates to personalization
- If the attribute has a matching and/or very similar attribute in the 2021 Retail Personalization Index
- If the attribute has a matching and/or very similar attribute in the 2022 Consumer Survey
Example attribute criteria for scoring research
Does the brand have emails that include dynamic upon-open capabilities? (ex. geo-location, dynamic banners, etc.)
Does the brand send emails that contain personalized product recommendations? Are they based on a customer’s listed preferences or products they’ve viewed or purchased?
Does the brand’s email send volume align with the scale of customer engagement?
Does the brand send more than one welcome email? Is there a series to onboard new customers?
Does the brand send an email or mobile notification/message for abandoned carts?
Mobile
Does the brand send SMS messages?
Are mobile notifications from the brand (SMS or app push) triggered by customer behavior (either onsite or email)?
Does the brand send personalized product recommendations in push notifications/messaging?
Does the brand send SMS messages that contain personalized recommendations?
Is the customer’s shopping cart shared across the site and mobile app?
Website
Does the brand offer the option for the customer to be notified when an item is back in stock?
Does the brand have a “Wishlist” of products or a “Save for Later” option in the checkout experience?
Does the brand’s preferences manager allow the customer to set preferences for which channels they’d like to receive messaging through besides email? (i.e., SMS, direct mail, push, etc.)
Does the brand personalize on the homepage after the customer is logged in, including content and/or product recommendations based on previous behavior?
Does the brand’s website have a chat feature (either to speak with a human or a bot?)
Privacy
Does the site have clear messaging when the customer first arrives explaining that it uses cookies to track customer information?
Is opting out easy for the customer to do?
The brand does not have newsletter/email subscription boxes pre-checked when the customer is signing-up or checking out.
Offline
Do the brand’s emails contain loyalty program membership information such as total lifetime points and a link to how to use them?
Does the brand have a referral program?
Does the brand use loyalty as a trigger (i.e., emails specifically highlighting points and/or membership tier etc.)?
Does the brand site allow the customer to view an item’s in-store availability from the website or app?
Does the brand send any promotions in conjunction with curbside/BOPIS/ROPIS?