David's Bridal Adopts AI To Help Boost Sales
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Partnership with Curalate creates pop-up landing pages from social media.
Artificial intelligence is not new to the retail marketplace, as brands have adopted the technology to help improve the e-commerce and even in-store shopping experience. Yet, it still remains somewhat challenging to implement. David’s Bridal has announced a partnership with visual commerce and marketing solution Curalate to use AI to help close the social commerce loop.
Together, David’s Bridal and Curalate can automatically create pop-up landing pages for images that are shared via Facebook in order to provide consumers with the exact style and type of product they are viewing. This eliminates the need to sift through products manually in order to link them to a particular post.
David’s Bridal senior director of global marketing Callie Canfield told Glossy, “We want the customer to click through from Facebook or another social channel to our site, and get to a landing page that shows exactly what they clicked on. But it’s almost impossible to customize your site that way – it would take a major backend overhaul, and we’re a big, pretty slow-moving company.”
That’s where Curalate comes in, with the beta stage of the Showroom feature, which “lets up turn any image or video into a storefront,” according to description on the webpage. AI creates the pop-up landing pages, which not only show the exact items promoted on the social media feed, but also features a collection of related items populated by Curalate’s algorithms. This allows retailers to use their marketing channels to do more than just drive engagement; they can now introduce customers to their next great find.
“Showroom is a great addition to our digital marketing toolbox," said Canfield. "It's incredibly easy to use and, because of the relevant product recommendations and engaging content Showroom provides, the consumers who click through to our site are much more engaged with higher intent to purchase. We've seen great results so far on Facebook and will be rolling it out across all of our marketing channels."
During the test phase, David’s Bridal says that it has seen 13 times more click-throughs across the test platforms with a 40 percent decrease in bounce rate, so it appears to be making a difference. Banana Republic, Forever 21, and Guess have also tested the feature, and saw an average drop in bounce rate of 53 percent with a 45 percent increase in time spent on site for those shoppers who used social media to enter.
“We’re in the midst of a massive shift from shopping in store to shopping online. While physical stores are great at driving discovery, digital commerce today is optimized for the things people know exist. Curalate Showroom enables brands and retailers to go beyond search and is the closest you can get to walking the aisles of a retail store, online,” said Apu Gupta, CEO/co-founder, Curalate.