Miso.ai and Speedway Motors: Driving Personalization in Motorsports

Speedway Motors, a manufacturer, retailer and distributor of high-quality automotive parts and racing products, has been a driving force in the motorsports industry for over 70 years. With a commitment to innovation and providing the best products and services to their customers, the company has become a cornerstone of the performance community. In their quest to take their business to the next level, they turned to Miso.ai to upgrade their search, recommendations, and performance marketing strategy.

Challenge 

Speedway Motors needed a foundation for advanced features like 1:1 product recommendations, demand forecasting, and high-ROI performance marketing

With the Covid pandemic keeping some customers at home, away from traditional catalog order and in-store pickups, Speedway Motors realized they needed a more flexible experience that maintained the personalized, 1:1 in-person approach they were known for. At the time, they were also in the process of developing a deeper product strategy, which included updating their entire technology stack with a common trunk for their code base, more rigorous AB test feature flagging capabilities, and a centralized customer data platform (CDP). 

Speedway Motors’ current homegrown recommendation engines lacked the ability to deliver personalized, relevant recommendations with average order value (AOV) optimization—something critical to improving customer satisfaction and driving revenue growth. And their product team saw long-term strategic potential in Miso’s granular, real-time user insights as a complement to their CDP, for down the line gains on their performance marketing and even demand forecasting, as a nationwide retailer. 

Solution 

Speedway Motors brought their existing data and ran it through Miso.ai’s personalization and recommendation engines for real-time personalization of the site UX

Miso.ai worked hands-on with Speedway Motors to ensure they had a smooth product catalog and clickstream integration into Miso.ai’s personalized semantic search and product recommendation engines. With 24/7 access to the Miso.ai team over Slack, and bi-weekly check-ins, both teams were able to collaborate on a full product roadmap every quarter. 

To enable the personalization roadmap, Miso.ai and Speedway Motors collaborated to achieve several milestones. First, Miso.ai fine-tuned the recommendation engines to intuit a user’s preferences for make, model, fit, price sensitivity, and brand. This update enabled recommendations to be tailored to specific users in real-time on Speedway Motors’ product detail page (PDP). Second, Miso.ai integrated directly with Speedway Motors’ internal zero-party data quiz interface for visitors to define the make and model of their vehicle to accurately select parts and optimize them on manufacturer fitments. Third, in pursuit of true linear commerce personalization, Speedway Motors integrated their products and Toolbox blog content. This enabled content-to-content and product-to-content, as well as content-to-product recommendations. 

Speedway Motors also has been improving their search with Miso.ai’s zero-shot and instant search capabilities. Zero-shot enables the site to suggest results that may be of high interest to users, even anonymous and users who are not logged-in. Instant search allows users to see suggested search queries based on what they have started typing in. Both of these contribute to a more familiar and seamless search experience that customers of the modern web have come to expect.  

Results 

More user insights, efficient performance marketing, and revenue

Making good on Miso.ai’s revenue-lift guarantee, Speedway Motors has seen increased revenue and growth for every touchpoint they’ve turned on with Miso.ai’s engines. In addition, Speedway Motors is driving valuable insights into their customers and sales for more informed business decisions and efficient performance marketing. And throughout all of this, Miso.ai has ensured the merchandising team has a clear input into the personalization and algorithmic merchandising of Speedwaymotors.com, via Miso.ai’s Dojo admin dashboards. 

Through close collaboration with the Miso.ai team and smooth integration with Miso.ai’s API, Speedway Motors has been able to create a product experience that’s in tune with the motorsports community and speeding past the competition.