Robert Dyas uncovers valuable insights into brand affinities and the home page experience

About Robert Dyas

Legendary hardware retailer Robert Dyas has an impressive history that stems back over 140 years. From the innovative to the everyday, the retailer offers a wide variety of home and garden needs: from cleaning solutions and kitchen essentials to the latest DIY gadgets and gardening must-haves. Their extensive selection of products ranges from some of the world’s most famous brands to exciting new start-ups, accessible to consumers via their 90+ retail locations as well as their robust online store.

Robert Dyas began using Nosto in 2019 and has since deployed a variety of commerce experience strategies across their online store: spanning from Product Recommendations to Segmentation & Insights and Content Personalization.

The Challenge

Most merchants are familiar with or are using some form of multivariate testing to optimize their ecommerce experiences, but many don’t always get the most out of their test results. Results are often taken at face value without digging deeper to see if there are valuable insights that can be derived by reading between the lines.

In the case of Robert Dyas, they wanted to optimize both their product detail page experiences and their home page experience by testing a different product recommendation filtering strategy and different content personalization strategy respectively.

By uncovering these insights, the retailer would be able to optimize their onsite experience to attract and convert more customers in some of the most consequential moments of their shopping journey.

The Solutions

The first test, aimed to discover how brand affinity impacts the effectiveness of product recommendations on PDPs. Variation A was set up to show products that matched the brand of the product whose page the shopper was currently on and variation B showed recommendations that varied in brand but focused on similar products. The purpose of the brand affinity test was to determine if brand affinity is a strong indicator of how effective product recommendations will be on a PDP as a multi-brand homeware retailer. To yield the highest test engagement, the test was conducted on the YMAL block on the product description page—a high-traffic area of the retailer’s website.

For the second test, Robert Dyas tested how personalized homepage experiences affect shopper engagement compared to their standard homepage experience. To form the test, Robert Dyas created different variations of their homepage content with messaging and visuals directed toward specific categories based on customers’ previous onsite behavior. Robert Dyas wanted to make informed decisions on which homepage experiences increased engagement with different segments.

Variation A showcased a general ‘Sales’ banner and variation B included specific verticals in the copy such as “Kitchen Electrical”.

The ability for us to target customer segments and provide a more personalized experience, coupled with the Nosto testing functionality has really enabled us to take huge steps forward in providing a better online experience for our customers.

Simon Spencelayh, Ecommerce Director at Robert Dyas

The Results

Robert Dyas based on the first test, Robert Dyas found that their customer segment was 28% more likely to convert when exposed to a recommendation block containing products of the same brand as the product whose detail page the shopper was currently on. The prospect segment had an exceptional 30% increase in conversion compared to the standard variation. Incidentally, the retailer did not expect these outcomes—which is a critical example of the impact testing can have on a retailer’s performance expectations.

Personalized messaging won out for the category ‘Kitchen Electricals’ by a margin of 88%, whereas the shoppers in the ‘Kitchenware’ segment were 78% more likely to convert to the default content. This shows a successful testing strategy involves more than simply setting up and running a test.

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