Z Gallerie Gets Personal with Style
There are a lot of options in decorating a home, and Los Angeles-based Z Gallerie wants to match its offerings to customer tastes.
“We’ve been known for one particular style, which our customers love and that we’ve done quite well with,” said Chris Nicklo, VP customer and chief marketing officer of Z Gallerie. “But to grow, we knew we would need to appeal to a broader spectrum of customers.”
The 60-store home furnishings retailer decided to create “Style Personalities” that would tailor product assortments to different customer aesthetics. The retailer determined it could support five different aesthetics, ranging from “glamorous regency (its original aesthetic) to “calmly collected” to “urban modernist.” The different styles are promoted across digital ads, email, Web, store and social channels.
“Since we don’t have sophisticated personal recommendation tools, we developed an online quiz,” said Nicklo. “We engage the customer like you would on social media. They tell us their style preferences, and we match them to one of the five style personalities — one primary and two flanking.”
Once a customer’s style profile has been determined, they receive a series of three emails. The first explains what a style personality is, the second shows select products from their assigned aesthetics, and the third encourages them to follow and participate in Z Gallerie’s pages on social sites, such as Pinterest and Instagram.
“Social is a huge part of our success,” explained Loren Mattia, content marketing manager of Z Gallerie. “We showcase different personalities with user-generated content.”
Image Is Everything: Z Gallerie also integrates social media into its five in-house-developed custom landing pages that support each one of the style personalities. The pages include social content from Pinterest and Houzz, as well as shoppable user-generated images from Instagram.
Leveraging the Fanreel user-generated content solution from visual marketing technology provider Curalate, Z Gallerie allows customers to make purchases directly from Instagram photos uploaded by other customers.
“User-generated content is huge in the marketplace right now,” commented Mattia. “We get a ton of submissions from customers using our products in their homes.”
Of the 100,000 consumers who have signed up for the program so far, about 44,000 have been new customers. At the highest points, customer engagement with digital display ads featuring personalized product images has run five times higher than normal, and personalized texts have doubled normal engagement rates.
Overall, personalized digital display ads have 1.5 times normal engagement. Average order value (AOV) for customers who engage with the Style Personalities program is 1.4 times higher than normal AOV.
Looking ahead, Z Gallerie plans to refine its personalized merchandising process. The retailer also plans to improve the Style Personalities user experience as it switches to a new Aptos e-commerce platform later this year.
“Style Personalities will be more oriented to the top of the page,” said Mattia.