What makes Saks’ personalization engine a game-changer?

What if a luxury retailer’s homepage could act more like a concierge than a catalog — anticipating what each visitor wants and adapting in real time? That was the vision Saks Fifth Avenue (Saks) set out to realize through its collaboration with Mastercard, using the personalization tool Dynamic Yield to launch a new customer engagement strategy on their homepage. As part of Saks Global’s portfolio of luxury retail brands, Saks is working to deliver luxury perfectly curated to each customer. As the largest multi‑brand luxury retailer in the world, Saks Global’s vision centers on redefining luxury shopping through highly personalized experiences.

For a multi‑brand luxury retailer such as Saks, personalization is a delicate balancing act. From the beginning, the team knew that tailoring the homepage could meaningfully boost engagement and conversion — but it came with challenges the team had to work through. They needed to deliver experiences that felt relevant to each customer’s purchase intent and shopping behavior, while ensuring that products were still displayed in the best way. Behind the scenes, Saks had a measured approach to piloting new personalization features with select audiences while protecting brand integrity. They relied on objective decision making via data and experimentation to expertly mitigate operational complexities. The team launched an alternate homepage for testing, which required managing two distinct experiences, each with its own set of creative assets. They also had to track performance across key performance indicators (KPIs), coordinate the rollout across channels and deliver a cohesive customer journey. It was a coordinated effort across creative, technical and strategic domains — designed to deliver measurable impact.

The execution was in collaboration with Mastercard Dynamic Yield, a personalization engine built to deliver relevant experiences at scale, powered by real-time data and adaptive algorithms. Combined with Saks’ proprietary Customer DNA — its own first-party customer data enriched with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) — and supported by Mastercard’s strategic partnership, the groundwork was laid for advanced digital experimentation.

For even greater precision, Saks implemented AdaptML — Dynamic Yield’s AI-powered recommendation algorithms — to refine recommendations in real time based on predicted affinity and purchase intent, as inferred from previous customer interactions with Saks. Recommendations continuously adjusted as customer behavior shifted.

The rollout began deliberately small: just 5% of traffic. Every interaction became input, and insights shaped the team’s next decisions.

One of the first major tests? Homepage segmentation. Saks questioned whether the original men’s and women’s homepage layouts were still effective and used this model as a control in testing. In its place, customers were grouped by purchase intent — low, medium, or high — with the flexibility to move between intent tiers in a single session.

These intent segments, defined and delivered through Dynamic Yield, powered everything from layout and algorithms to campaigns and copy — adapting instantly to meet customers where they were.

Saks internally developed product and content attributes and metadata structure laid a strong foundation for highly personalized product and editorial content tailored to user affinities. This allowed the team to constantly learn and optimize.

The impact was transformative. During the test period, Saks saw major lifts across key metrics for all traffic: bounce rate fell by 18.4%, revenue per visitor increased by 7% and conversion rate improved by 9.5%.

Testing quickly confirmed Saks’ hypothesis: intent‑based personalization outperformed the previous segmentation model in a homepage experience. Through this approach, they reimagined the Saks.com homepage experience, providing all customers with a highly personalized homepage based on their predicted purchase intent, past behavior and real‑time session status. Within a few months, the 5% test scaled to 100% of homepage traffic — spanning desktop, mobile and app. Gains held at every stage, reinforcing belief in the model and accelerating adoption.

But performance wasn’t the only win. By starting small and demonstrating measurable impact, Saks earned cross‑functional support — proving that thoughtful testing can drive meaningful change while upholding the elevated luxury experience.

Today, Mastercard Dynamic Yield supports Saks’ homepage personalization and a portion of product page recommendations — helping to anchor Saks’ personalization strategy across the user journey. Achieving this required close collaboration between Saks’ technology, marketing and commercial analytics teams — aligning vision, execution and measurement from day one. Saks’ website continues to support both near‑term revenue goals and long‑term innovation in customer connection, while upholding the luxury experience for which Saks is known.

Saks continues to elevate its online experience through a personalization strategy supported by Mastercard Dynamic Yield — blending real‑time data, AI algorithms and brand‑conscious strategy. For retailers balancing brand integrity with performance, Saks’ approach offers a blueprint: start small, test rigorously and scale what works — all built on the flexibility and power of Dynamic Yield.