Unboxing: Fresh Relevance

This week, we are looking under the hood of Fresh Relevance, who provides real-time personalization and automation across email and web to optimize revenue for e-commerce companies. Based in the UK with US offices in Boston, they enable marketers to track all behavior in real-time and use this data to personalize the shoppers journey on all channels and devices. They boast about 550 websites using their technology.

I’ve looked at a number of companies recently including Movable Ink and One Spot, and each has it’s own unique take on what it means to “individualize” an email or website experience. The thing that struck me most about Fresh Relevance was its powerful Segmentation engine. It is really in segmentation that Fresh Relevance shines.

How It Works:

The on boarding process starts with deploying one line of Javascript on the client’s website which scrapes their website for any product metadata creating a “product database”. A secondary “customer database" is also created which records any actions by visitors to the site: what they read, what products they look at, abandoned cart data, etc. which enables Fresh Relevance to deliver custom content both in emails and on the website based on past behavior.

The data collected by Fresh Relevance can be appended to any engagement data coming from the ESP or your marketing database. In addition, Fresh Relevance has an integration with product review companies such as Bazaarvoice and Reevoo to display customer ratings and reviews in emails and on the website.

Triggers and Personalization

Fresh Relevance has built in trigger tools and front end personalization features. Triggers include Cart and Browse Abandonment, Back in Stock, Price Drop, Post Purchase Replenishment and other advanced targeting tools.

Personalization tools include Product Recommendations, Weather Feeds, Social Feeds, Countdown timers and real time image personalization.

The Interface:

As you can see in the screen shot, the interface has a number of tabs including a Dashboard, Triggers, Content, Data, Reports, etc.

Content

Content is served in what Fresh Relevance calls “SmartBlocks”. Across the top of the screen you can see the different types of SmartBlocks including real-time Recommendations, Reviews, Countdown timers, Instagram feeds, and so on. Using the Instagram SmartBlog for instance will show the client's latest Instagram content in the email at the time of opening.

For example: You can set up an email to display recommendations based on the subscriber's most viewed categories when they visited the website or any number of filters including wish lists.

You can also exclude certain categories from being viewed. Example: block all products that are below a certain stock level. Combing both Data Sources and Filters allows for endless varieties of custom content. Example: you can choose the Data Source of Most Viewed Product, and then filter that Source by content type, such as “mountain bikes”.

In fact, this ability to combine sources of data (products) and then filtering on top of that is for me what creates Fresh Relevances key differentiator from other similar products. For instance you could set up a rule that shows custom content based on: If it is snowing where the subscriber is AND the temperature is below a certain point, THEN serve a specific piece of content. Rules can be stacked and combined.

Data

Fresh Relevance makes the data it collects easily exportable. The Firehose tab under the Data Section incorporates all known information on every subscriber into a single feed that can be exported into an FTP server or ESP.

Segments

Using Fresh Relevance’s Analytics engine, it is easy to create robust segments based on purchase and browsing behavior. In this example, we are creating a segment that includes everyone who has browsed the “shoe” category in the last 20 days. That segment can then be refreshed every day.

The ability to really fine tune segments is amazing. Segments that include everyone who has viewed products where the price has dropped by a specified percentage during a specified time from is easily achievable.

Costs:

Cost to get started with Fresh Relevance include a Core module which includes the customer script to scrape and fill the product and customer databases and a monthly fee based on the types of modules you want to use and number of page views.

To Learn More or to schedule a demo, visit the Fresh Relevance website.