How Frasers Group Scales Personalisation Across its Family of Brands

Here’s how Frasers Group and its collection of iconic brands further cements its global powerhouse position, using personalisation as a multi-million cash driver for the business
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Introduction

UK-based Frasers Group started as a small sports shop in 1982. Over the last four decades, the company has established an impressive portfolio of iconic sports, lifestyle, and luxury brands, including Sports Direct, FLANNELS, GAME, Jack Wills, and Everlast.

After cementing its position as a global powerhouse, the retail group sought to further future-proof the business by ensuring the best possible customer experience with each brand through personalisation. Still a relatively nascent practice, this would require the company to adopt an entirely new way of working to support the effort across its nine sub-brands. But after partnering with Dynamic Yield, Frasers Group has been able to establish a scalable program yielding powerful business results.

Establishing a solid foundation for personalisation

To reap the full benefits of a robust personalisation solution, the team at Frasers Group knew they would need significant cross-department buy-in and collaboration. This meant spending the first six months investing in three key areas: aligning stakeholders, establishing core processes for the organisation’s personalisation program across brands, and educating the wider business on the importance and value of CRO and testing.

Once Frasers Group had established a solid foundation and was ready to start experimenting, the team started small, focusing on simple tests that could prove the value of personalisation and generate excitement about its potential. Over time, the team shifted its focus toward more sophisticated optimisations, evolving its program to consistently iterate on tests and institutionalise learnings, unlocking bigger opportunities along the way.

Determining different needs for different sites

In one of its tests, Frasers Group designed an experience to showcase how many products a shopper viewed on product listing pages (PLPs) for luxury brand, FLANNELS, hoping to increase filter usage for those who continued to scroll in search of relevant items and optimise click-throughs.

The outcome of the experiment was successful, with more users interacting with at least one filter, driving a multi-thousand Euro uplift from the number of subsequent transactions that took place. However, when replicating this experience on both the Sports Direct and House of Fraser sites, the output varied. For example, Sports Direct saw greater filter usage but fewer conversions, and House of Fraser saw mixed results, with many consumers finding the experience to be confusing.

As a result, each brand needed to tinker with the test to better cater to its own audiences, optimising the experience across devices, redesigning the look and feel of the call-to-action, and more. This uncovered a key learning for the organisation’s personalisation program: what worked on one website wouldn’t necessarily work
on another.

From Left to Right: the PLP Product View Counter Experiment on the FLANNELS, Sports Direct, and House of Fraser Sites

Uncovering new opportunities, even at dead ends

As Frasers Group’s efforts continued to mature, it began scaling the creation of new tests across its slew of websites. This included identifying less obvious opportunities for personalisation, or what the team refers to as “dead ends.”

Sports Direct began running recommendations on pages that yielded no search results, generating a 6% decrease in average bounce rate, a 13% boost in CTR, and revenue uplifts in the millions. Jack Wills conducted a similar test for empty cart pages, serving personalised products to keep users engaged for longer, resulting in 18% more revenue per user (RPU), +13% in purchases, and a 4% increase in average order value (AOV).

Recommendations on “Dead End” Pages for Both Sports Direct and Jack Wills
The team then uncovered additional ways to optimise the performance of these experiments, including testing different recommendation strategies per audience. This was a practice extended across every campaign as part of its program. For example, after using a countdown clock to create urgency about next day delivery on FLANNELS’ product pages, the countdown timer was not only iterated on but the test was also expanded across additional site pages, yielding even better results.
PDP Countdown Timers on the FLANNELS site
Meanwhile, the team at House of Frasers observed many of its users who left the site after adding an item to their cart would eventually return. To recover potentially lost sales, a popup homepage widget was designed and launched, nudging users to finish checking out and complete their transactions. A multi-million cash driver for Frasers Group, the team is now looking at additional areas of the site where it can implement this campaign, new widget designs, and ways to more deeply personalise these experiences to various audiences.
Homepage Slider Widget Reminding Users of
Items in Their Cart Upon Site Re-Entry

Combining the right methodology and technology

Companies don’t just plug in personalisation and instantly witness results – only through a willingness to establish a shared vision across the company, supported by the right processes and methodologies, can technology be activated to achieve true incrementality. Frasers Group is an example of how when done properly, the impact is clear, for both the business and consumer.

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