| | April 20178CIOReviewReal-Time Personalization: Everything All the TimeBy Mike Berry, Senior Director, CRM Technology, ShutterflyAs the stream of marketing messages in all channels becomes a flood, the messages which are the most arresting, most interesting, most relevant to the recipient are the ones that are going to stand out. The ability to determine what these messages should contain has begun to exceed the capacity of humans to identify. We are now turning towards the algorithms of machine learning to best evaluate what to show to whom. By utilizing this approach we are able to maximize the return on each and every touch of the customer.1,000,000 offers? Maybe. It depends on how you define an offer. For example, in the world of credit card insert-statement marketing an offer can have many different definitions: How much was the discount? How much is the line of credit? How big was the font of the offer? Did you use red or blue? What shade of red? Once all of these combinations are added up, you could create hundreds or thousands or millions of offers. These many different possible combinations used to be hard to generate and display. In the world of the Internet and Machine learning that is no longer the case.You must have a platform that allows you to display an offer to a person. If you are lacking this fundamental plumbing then no other step makes sense. Usually this is found within and the capabilities of an ecommerce platform, be it web or mobile. It can span the spectrum of marketing channels or can be as simple as a banner in a purchase confirmation email. But you need to have a platform into which you can place your offer.Today it requires a database to keep track of all of your offers. Each offer will have its own unique metadata. Some offers will be live while others have been removed and new ones are being added. You need to store them in a container that can hold millions of them, can be quickly accessed, and is always available. An offer management database is needed. Marketing Strategy and Machine Learning: Living side-by-sideYou've got your one million offers running in your marketing publishing channels and your machine learning solution is identifying the ones that are doing the best and predicting which ones that will do even better...so, a marketing technologist might ask, do you still need humans to generate marketing material? ABSOLUTELY! There is no machine out there that is going to tell you what to try next: should it be a black square with golden lining highlighting your biggest seller? Should it be a full multichannel IN MY OPINION
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