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Adobe® Marketing Cloud Success Story
Build.com
Building a complete picture
Build.com uses Adobe Marketing Cloud to better identify customer
segments, run sophisticated tests, and boost conversion
Build.com
Chico, California
www.build.com
Results
• Measured long-term customer
behavioral data
• Accurately identified individual
visitors and customer segments for
more targeted testing
• Boosted email newsletter conversion,
improving customer engagement
• Helped raise sales conversion from
2.3% to 3.9% for highly engaged
visitor segments
• Increased test relevancy, while
reducing risk to business
• Enhanced social and mobile
strategies
Build.com has positioned itself as the second-largest and fastest-growing online
home improvement retailer by delivering more than 700,000 products from top
brands, backed by a 110% low-price guarantee and top-rated customer support.
To provide valuable innovation for its customers while competing with big-box or
other online home improvement stores, Build.com continually refines the way it
interacts with them—making itself even more helpful, delivering more relevant
offers and experiences, and enhancing engagement strategies for audiences
across channels and devices.
The retailer uses Adobe Marketing Cloud as the cornerstone of its digital marketing strategies,
diving deeper into visitor data to better understand what they are looking for, how they navigate
online, where they are coming from, and what drives purchase decisions. “Our mantra has been
that our marketing strategies should be a blend of 70% science and 30% creative,” says Justin
Bergson, director of media and optimization at Build.com. “Adobe Marketing Cloud delivers the
critical data behind the science that makes our process work.”
When digital marketers at Build.com wanted to develop more granular visitor segments and target
tests to those demographics, the company turned to the Adobe Marketing Cloud. Build.com also
wanted to see how individual customers and entire audiences behaved throughout their transactional
lifecycles—a process that typically lasts between two to four months—to introduce new interactions
with the potential to drive conversion faster.
“We tried to use cookies to identify customers and measure their interactions, engagement, and
conversion,” says Bergson. “We have been able to leverage the robust real-time profile of visitors,
such as in-session behaviors, but until now weren’t able to take advantage of this historical data on
visit and purchase behavior.”
Foundation for testing
Using new, universal visitor identification capabilities across the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Build.com
can now readily identify and track unique customers as they enter the website, view where they are
coming from, and set up tests to identify how specific segments of customers like to shop. With this
greater ability to identify and segment customer activities, Build.com can develop longer-term,
more holistic views of customer behaviors and preferences. This allows them to build more highly
customized segments and individual customer profiles, delivering more relevant content to new
visitors, while improving engagement and brand loyalty among existing customers.
“Adobe Marketing Cloud enables us to align how we collect and analyze data with the way our
customers do business,” says Bergson. “Equally important, universal customer identification
capabilities empower us to use customer profile and related data across Adobe solutions to get
faster answers about how we can continually improve the customer experience.”
By flowing rich, segmented data within the Adobe Analytics solution in Adobe Marketing Cloud into
the Adobe Target solution, Build.com can greatly accelerate test development and implementation—
achieving improved returns overall.
Build.com uses Adobe Marketing Cloud to better understand exactly who its customers
are so it can deliver relevant offers and content and raise customer engagement.
Challenge
• Gaining insights into long-term
customer behaviors
• Developing reliable customer
segments
• Integrating customer data into
testing strategies
• Increasing conversion
Solution
• Use Adobe Marketing Cloud to
quickly and easily identify individual
customers and visitor segments for
advanced testing and targeting
strategies across channels
Systems at a glance
Adobe Marketing Cloud including
Adobe Analytics and Testing solutions.
Components used include: • Adobe SiteCatalyst
• Adobe Test&Target
• Adobe Genesis™
Building more sophisticated campaigns
One of the initial tests that Build.com ran focused on getting site visitors to sign up for the company’s
email newsletter—leveraging the customer insight that users who signed up for the newsletter tended
to purchase more and have higher average order values (AOV). To determine the best strategy to get
the most customers to sign up for the email newsletter, the Build.com team tested several prominently
positioned pop-up calls-to-action to engage visitors.
In the past, the team wouldn’t have tried such a test as it could introduce a barrier between the
customer and conversion, particularly because there was no way to determine if the customer seeing
the pop-up had already signed up to receive the newsletter. With advances in the Adobe Marketing
Cloud, Build.com marketers can better integrate audience segments created with Adobe SiteCatalyst®
into Adobe Test&Target™ to remove existing email subscribers from the testing pool. In the end, only
select, appropriate audience subsets are offered the alternative experiences.
Using the more targeted test, Build.com increased sign ups for its email newsletter by approximately .5%.
An additional insight was that marketers saw that inserting the pop-up window had no negative impact
on sales conversion. “Adobe Marketing Cloud enables us to run tests that we previously wouldn’t have
attempted to do,” says Ian Graham, manager of website optimization and testing at Build.com. “We can
focus more granularly on driving conversion and be more calculated in the tests we run.”
With the enhanced capabilities of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Build.com marketers are applying testing
scenarios to audiences globally across the website to see how different segments respond to marketing
campaigns. For example, audiences in another test were segmented into several categories—people
who visited the website from more than one channel, ones who visited more than three times, visitors
who did not make a purchase, people who signed up for email, and visitors who arrived more than
three times and did not make a purchase—and then offered various experiences.
Build.com marketers measured that average sales conversion was 2.3% overall across all traffic.
However, for visitors that had come to the website three or more times and were served a new
banner ad, conversion rose to 3.3%. And when the same group was offered a coupon, conversion
then rose to 3.9%.
“It was obvious to us that if a visitor came back to the website three or more times, they were already
engaged, satisfied with the website, and more likely to make a purchase,” says Graham. “Testing with
Adobe Marketing Cloud revealed what value we need to add to help shoppers become buyers on our
website. Now that we have the capability to leverage this historical data on our visitors, we can more
accurately define these types of segments and capture these results.”
Build.com is creating more meaningful customer interactions with
Adobe Marketing Cloud to improve add-to-cart rates and conversion.
“Our mantra has been that our marketing
strategies should be a blend of 70% science
and 30% creative. Adobe Marketing Cloud
delivers the critical data behind the science
that makes our process work.”
Justin Bergson, director of media and optimization, Build.com
Looking back to go forward
The company’s ability to analyze historical visitor data, combined with deeper audience segmentation
and advanced testing capabilities, is enabling Build.com marketers to better understand the company’s
customers and evolve digital strategies. For instance, Build.com is refining its program for construction
professionals by better identifying who these customers are, how frequently they visit the site, and what
they purchase.
“We used to only be able to identify these customers if they signed up for our Professional Membership
Program,” says Bergson. “Now, we can see behaviors common among professionals, proactively engage
them, and deliver more relevant content and experiences that we can further refine through testing.”
Build.com is also using Adobe Marketing Cloud to extend its reach into social communities. With
more than a million Facebook fans, the company can identify when social community members
come to the website and provide more personalized, targeted experiences. The company can also
enhance content and offers on its fan page to keep customers engaged.
At the same time, the company is looking to Adobe Marketing Cloud to better understand and
engage its mobile users, who currently represent just a small portion of the site’s overall traffic. “We
need solutions that can evolve with the changing needs of our marketing team and our customers,”
says Bergson. “With Adobe Marketing Cloud, we have the solutions in place to support our success
today and in the future.”
For more information
www.adobe.com/solutions/
digital-marketing.html
Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA 95110-2704
USA
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© 2013 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.
Adobe, the Adobe logo, Adobe Genesis, SiteCatalyst, and Test&Target are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the
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