How Ruggable Increased Its Conversions by 25% with Paid Traffic Personalization

Ruggable

Ruggable is a game-changing interior brand (rooted in e-commerce) that is transforming the way people think about home decor. Their patented 2-Piece Rug System allows for residential rugs to be easily washed in a home washing machine. This cost-effective, stylish, and convenient solution is perfect for young families, pet owners, and busy individuals alike.

Prior to transitioning to a headless tech stack, Ruggable faced a challenge in personalizing their customers' experience with their product – thousands of rug designs with multiple different colors, textures, and sizes available.

Once they completed their headless transformation, they focused on the consumer journey - ensuring that the right product was seen by the right customer, along with the appropriate message when they arrived on the website from a specific marketing campaign or based on previous behavior.

The Challenge

Technical Challenges

Before switching to a headless tech stack (i.e., Contentful and Ninetailed), Ruggable faced technical challenges with their in-house customer segmentation and personalization solution. The solution was hard coded, required developer support, and broke from time to time.

Every update to personalization campaigns or audiences also needed to go through a developer, with even a simple message update taking up to one day and a promo banner requiring two full days of work.

This created an opportunity cost as developers were assigned simple tasks such as copy changes or image updates instead of focusing on more impactful projects for the business.

As this became an increasingly inefficient process, Ruggable sought out a better way to manage the content without having it buried in code – making their transition to Ninetailed an obvious choice after moving to a headless tech stack and Contentful.

Once Ruggable had re-architected their website on top of Contentful, with most content stored in the platform, they were ready for the next steps: how could they use this for personalized user experiences based on behavior?

This drove them to find an efficient solution that would allow them to create personalization rules without having their content buried in code – leading them to Ninetailed as the perfect headless personalization solution.

Before going further to implementation and solution, it’s also crucial to understand the challenges they faced from the business perspective.

Business Challenges

Ruggable faced a difficult challenge: how to make sure users find the rugs they want without bouncing from the home page.

With more than a thousand styles in different sizes and textures, there are a lot of SKUs to work with – every user's preference varies in price point, size, and style, yet only so many rugs can be displayed on the home page.

To address this issue, Ruggable needed a way to surface unique content based on UTM parameters, paid campaigns, or email links that provide specific discounts according to certain customer journeys.

Each customer should know when they've applied a discount code and why – making it necessary to surface unique messaging for each one.

To achieve this goal, Ruggable decided to use Ninetailed as an efficient headless personalization solution, allowing them to create personalization campaigns without having their content buried in code. This approach ensures that every user finds what they're looking for on the website quickly and easily.

The Solution

Ninetailed’s ‘Plug-and-Play’ Solution for Contentful

It was kind of a godsend because it was so easy. Ninetailed plugged right into what we're building within Contentful and removed all the worry in building a custom segmentation solution.

— Dylan Feiner, Product at Ruggable

Ninetailed makes integration with Contentful effortless, allowing digital teams the freedom to create exceptional customer experiences directly in the interface.

According to Dylan Feiner of Ruggable, it was “kind of a godsend” as Ninetailed “plugged right into what Ruggable was building within Contentful” and eliminated concerns about a custom audience segmentation solution.

The breakthrough headless personalization and experimentation offered by Ninetailed speeds up development time, freeing up developers to focus on larger projects. With a library of SDKs and plugins for leading front-end frameworks such as Gatsby, Next, React, and NodeJS, teams can connect Ninetailed to Contentful in as little as an hour.

This simple integration allows companies to rapidly iterate on their customer experience from day one within the Contentful interface – making complex personalization tasks easy and fast.

That’s why it’s no surprise that Dylan Feiner from Ruggable continued his words with, “we didn't find anything that plugged directly within Contentful.”

All in all, it was super easy to integrate Ninetailed into our headless tech stack. Moreover, you guys (Ninetailed) are super helpful, and you're quick to answer our questions, which we very much appreciate.

— Dylan Feiner, Product at Ruggable.

The Seamless Integration Enabled a Seamless Workflow

Let’s quickly remember the challenges Ruggable was facing before using Ninetailed for personalization:

• the solution was hard coded, required developer support, and broke from time to time

• every update to personalization campaigns or audiences also needed to go through a developer

• a simple message update took up to one day, and a promo banner update required two days of work

The old solution was not just slow and required extensive developer support, it was also creating workflow silos.

Ninetailed enabled Ruggable to create campaigns or make changes in under an hour - usually around 30 mins. Here’s how:

With Ninetailed integrated into Contentful, you have everything needed for personalization and experimentation directly within the Contentful workflow. Therefore:

• no need to learn a new tool

• no need to remember another log-in

• no need to switch to another tab

• no need to create a new workflow

• no need to create new data or organizational silos

In addition to the seamless workflow, Ninetailed is also very user-friendly and enables anyone to create personalization campaigns and experiments.

Even without a technical background, from a user’s perspective, Ninetailed is super user-friendly.

— Taejae Ha, Special Projects at Ruggable

The Result

Higher CTRs and Conversions with Ninetailed

By integrating Ninetailed with Contentful, Ruggable has been able to achieve great success in personalization. From quickly creating different audiences to optimizing customer experience without ever leaving the Contentful interface, they were able to develop and deploy campaigns that met their goals rapidly.

Furthermore, by leveraging the Ninetailed, they were able to bring their ideas to life quickly and effectively.

However, the biggest success Ruggable saw was coming from showing different hero banners to different audiences that landed on the website through a particular ad.

7x higher the click-through rate!

Taejae from Special Projects at Ruggable explains this massive uplift as “Let's say an ad about Ruggable being pet friendly, and then you run into a home page banner that has a dog picture in it as opposed to something completely irrelevant. Click-through rates were close to seven or eight times the original.”

However, Ruggable didn’t stop there. Ruggable was also personalizing the customer experiences – products on the homepage and offers – based on email campaigns. The result of this campaign was similar to the other one as well – a remarkable uplift in numbers.

~25% conversion uplift.

Enabling the continuation of automated personalized discount messaging between email campaigns and the website was a big win for Ruggable. 

What’s Next for Ruggable and Ninetailed

Now, with our valued partner Ninetailed, Ruggable has taken it a step further. The latest Contentful-Ninetailed integration, Ninetailed Insights, has opened up a whole new world of data for us. It acts like a magnifying glass on our content, allowing us to delve deeper into personalization and experience performance analysis. We're making smarter decisions and better serving our customers as a result. We couldn't be happier with the impact this partnership has had on our business.

— Daniel Graupensperger, Associate Director, Product Management at Ruggable

Ruggable has already achieved great results with Ninetailed, and now they look forward to leveraging the newest technology offered by Ninetailed in order to create even better experiences for their customers.

As a next step, Ruggable is looking to build on its success with Ninetailed by implementing edge-side rendering. This technology will enable them to cache content and serve it as quickly as possible – 50ms or less round trip, more specifically.

As a result, they’ll be able to not only provide users with personalized experiences at scale but also create the fastest possible experiences.

Moreover, Ruggable's hope is that in the future, they'll be able to leverage Ninetailed specifically for any content-based experimentation as well.

By using both personalization and experimentation powered by Ninetailed, Ruggable plans to take digital customer experience and personalization to a whole new level and make its site experience even more engaging and relevant for its customers.

Final Words from Ruggable…

Ninetailed is one of my favorite partners I have ever worked with. The people at Ninetailed are super helpful. The tech works great with our stack, and even when we have issues, you have been quick in response and accommodating—especially when we've had to dive deep into questions or problems. On top of this, you actually develop our suggestions in a timely manner, which isn't always the case with third-party partners.

— Dylan Feiner, Product at Ruggable