Leroy Merlin Italy

• RETAIL SEGMENT: DIY and Home Improvement
• PRODUCT: Personalized Recommendations and Advanced Merchandising
• CHALLENGE: To showcase the full range of products and sell more complete solutions
• RESULTS: 65% increase in items per order and 28% increase in spend from those interacting with recommendations

Leroy Merlin is a home improvement and gardening retailer with 400 retail stores across the world. A major player in the global DIY market, Leroy Merlin offers products and solutions for DIY, decoration, construction and gardening. Each country operates as independent business units.

In 2017, Leroy Merlin Italy wanted to create a more personalized experience for customers on their website www.leroymerlin.it by incorporating personalization and machine learning to accelerate product discovery and ensure it was easy for their customers to locate all the items needed for a project. Leroy Merlin Italy aimed to increase items per order and customer satisfaction by helping guide their customers with intelligent and comprehensive project- based recommendations.

With so many product SKUs across a wide range of categories, Leroy Merlin Italy sought a solution that would enable them to easily optimize and reduce manual merchandising, while also allowing them to maintain control of their brand when appropriate. After analysing and testing several solutions and tools, Leroy Merlin Italy selected the best performing provider, RichRelevance, to be their strategic personalization partner based on their sophisticated AI that offers the right mix of automation and control.

Lionel Devidal, Digital and Ecommerce Director at Leroy Merlin Italy, explained “Through the RichRelevance solutions we were able to automate the recommendations based on two desired outcomes; showcasing compatible items based on what the shopper was purchasing as well as surfacing similar products the shopper may not find otherwise.”

Leroy Merlin Italy displays 2 placements on the product page; one designed to cross sell related products and the other displays similar products the customer might also like. To ensure customers receive guidance across their entire shopping journey, Leroy Merlin Italy has instrumented recommendations at every interaction point, on the add to cart and wishlist pages as well as within remarketing and abandoned cart emails to shoppers.

“We are very happy with the RichRelevance solution, it’s been very easy to set up strategies and customize rules, which is good seeing as we have a lot of advanced merchandising rules to ensure the compatibility of all our products! We also have the flexibility to strategically boost specific products when we want to.” Commented Lionel.

Leroy Merlin Italy has utilized RichRelevance’s best in class Personalization Services to garner best practices, guidance and insights in addition to leveraging tests to optimize the placements and strategies on the website. They have been delighted with the results as Lionel explained:

“There is no doubt in my mind that the RichRelevance personalization consultant has had a very positive impact on the success of our personalization efforts. Their ability to fine tune the engine and continually optimize means our results continue to improve.”

After just 6 months of going live with RichRelevance solutions in December 2017, Leroy Merlin Italy can attribute 9.5% of revenue to personalization. Leroy Merlin customers who interact with recommendations spend 28% more with 65% more items per order. Furthermore, the cross sell placement on the add to cart page, which recommends items related to those in the cart has a staggering 8% click through rate. Out of those items viewed over 20% go on to be purchased.

“RichRelevance personalization has allowed us to propose more complete solutions to our customers based on their specific needs and interests. We have a high engagement with recommendations on the site, and it is clear from the results that customers are valuing the recommendations being made. We are excited by the prospect of adding more placements to other pages on our website as well as the homepage, and the results this will bring for Leroy Merlin Italy.” Concluded Lionel.