Revionics Acquires SkuLoop to add Social to Optimization Engine

Revionics, Inc., a provider of end-to-end merchandise optimization solutions, has acquired the SkuLoop provider of social commerce driven promotions for retailers and consumer brands, from GIIV, Inc.

This acquisition extends Revionics’ solutions with the addition of Revionics Social Commerce, a social marketing platform for delivering optimized, one-to-one incentives and rewards to targeted loyal advocates and fans, expanding loyalty and driving measurable ROI across an Omni-channel shopping episode – online, in-store, social and mobile.

By infusing pre- and post-transactional social demand signals into Revionics’ science, the vendor said optimization models will now have a more complete, robust and granular view of shopper behavior, driving more accurate recommendations across the merchandise continuum – product, price, promotion and place.

"While many firms will assess the value of the social Web through a brand-building lens, some will exploit its chatter to mine insights, incorporating them into differentiating tactics to gain or hold market position,” said Kevin Sterneckert, VP at Gartner Research. “Social network sentiment data provides significant insight into consumer behaviors and expectations relative to pricing practices. Multichannel retailers should diligently pursue an ongoing practice of listening to their consumers (sensing) to understand preferences and trends."

Revionics Social Commerce enables a deeper, more profitable dialog between the retailer and the shopper. It empowers retailers to go beyond Omni-channel and become “Omni-now”, extending brand consistency during the shopping episode wherever and whenever the shopper wants to engage all the way to checkout whether online, mobile, or in-store. This solution enables retailers to target and motivate their most loyal, influential shoppers, turning them into vocal advocates amongst their social networks, resulting in the acquisition of new, loyal shoppers.

Revionics Social Commerce is also designed to monitor key metrics and measuring the ROI of social simultaneously between online and in-store transactions across multiple touch points to help retailers understand not only the last action that converted the sale, but how much each activity in the funnel contributed to the conversion. These analytics, combined with revenue attribution, provide insights into what shoppers have purchased over time, how much each touch point contributed, and its influence on their peers within their social-graph.

Harnessing loyalty data and vocal advocates, retailers can execute targeted one-to-one programs with a variety of incentives, which can be used separately or in combination based on strategic objectives. These programs can be leveraged through the retailer’s brand across all touch points including web, mobile, Facebook, Twitter, email and paid media sources. Retailer branded programs include:

• Social Rewards: Identify, target and engage the most valuable and loyal shoppers with optimized incentives and convert them into vocal brand advocates within their social network to start driving new customer acquisition.
• Insider Events: Excite and reward loyal advocates with both special events and activities that affirm their sense of belonging and targeted promotions designed to be shared with, and consumed by friends and fans.
• Wish Lists: Increase awareness, virality and sales, while staying relevant with demographic and geographic information. Allow fans and loyal shoppers to create, share and send product wish lists to their extended networks.
• Flash Sales: Drive excitement, conversion and social amplification by providing deals of the day and multi-item flash sales optimized by shopper-segment.
• Sweepstakes: Turn passive behavior into active engagement with special offers and contests designed to generate additional interest, and increase traffic and engagement, while securing loyalty, new customer acquisition and a better understanding of where customers are engaging and what they are interested in.

“With Revionics we are now able to extend the capabilities of our platform and take social's impact to a new level,” said Michelle Crames, founder and CEO of SkuLoop. “By leveraging Revionics’ predictive analytics and demand-based science, we can now extend our promotional incentives through optimized offers that extend our best-in-class platform to drive cross-channel, profitable customer relationships with the ability to integrate this into broader retail technologies and analytics. The promise and power of social can now be truly realized.”

With the acquisition of the SkuLoop business, Revionics will incorporate social interactions into its merchandise demand models making them more complete and extending science and insights into the price, promotion, markdown, assortment and space recommendations for each channel – online, in-store, social and mobile. Retailers can now strategically plan and execute promotions and markdowns by optimizing across all channels and to the channel of choice, according to Revionics.

“A lot of companies claim they can promote social engagement, but SkuLoop was the only one that could work within a retailer’s system and go beyond ‘likes’ to driving key retailer metrics including revenue and margin,” stated Marc Hafner, Revionics’ president and CEO. “The SkuLoop team has a tremendous amount of social, mobile and retail expertise. We are very excited to have them join Revionics.”