Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Help us understand the how. I’m going to give you some scenarios and you tell me how your technology will take that scenario and optimize it. The first one is email marketing. Email marketing is one of the things that you optimize.

We run email marketing campaigns on a regular basis. The platform we use is Zoho. We use Zoho’s campaigns functionality. What would you do to our email marketing campaign that would vastly improve on its effectiveness?

Or Shani: Let’s start by asking a question. What day and what time are you sending out emails?

Sramana Mitra: It varies. We have a global audience. We send out emails at different times of the day and we also have a lot of auto-responders. When leads come into our system, they start receiving auto-responders. That tends to be when people sign-in.

Or Shani: Let’s say we have this interview and you’re going to send the content out. When will that be, let’s say, for the East Coast?

Sramana Mitra: We tend to use a Monday morning time slot for sending out the campaigns.

Or Shani: Have you ever wondered why you’re sending it on Monday mornings?

Sramana Mitra: It gives us a maximum overlap across the different geographies because we don’t have the ability to send it in the timezone of the recipient. If we did, I’m aware that Monday afternoon has proven to be a more effective time slot. If we do it Monday afternoon in one time zone, it misses a lot of our other time zones.

Or Shani: What’s really funny is you’re the 50th, plus minus, person I’ve asked this question. Everybody gave me the same answer on the timing. It’s very obvious that this is an inefficient way of doing it. You mentioned the timezone but think about the different people. My office is at a walking distance to my house. Most of my employees come in the subway. They have time to read on the subway.

Our CRO and CMO come in trains. They have time to read the emails. Some people like to read these type of emails when they have time. Some people like to do it when they come in the morning. Doing everything in a bulk just because this is the best guess is a very bad thing. What our system can do for you, just to take this very simple example, is to essentially send the email to the statistic recipient in the best possible time for this person to receive this message.

Sramana Mitra: Let me probe that one. How do you do that because we can’t provide you with the information on which time zone they’re in?

Or Shani: The way that our system works is that we do a lot of trial and error. Think about it differently. If I was a very hardworking person, I would run a test. I would have 10,000 contacts. I would send a specific contact one email for a few weeks or a few days. I would then run a report stating when he opened the email. When was it more effective? What was the content type and what was the time and best combination?

If you’re a very hardworking human and you have a lot of time, you’d probably do that. That’s what our system does on our behalf. It does a very small trial and error to try to understand what’s going to be the best possible timing. Then it tries to assess if you have a behaviour of a group of users, what’s going to be the behaviour of a group that you haven’t tested.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani
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