Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Blueshift CEO Manyam Mallela (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The personalized content and offers, that stuff I got quite easily. I’m trying to understand more about multi-channel marketing optimization and personalization. Let me try to frame this in the context of the world that’s maybe familiar to our audience.

Let’s take the One Million by One Million website. When somebody arrives at the website, reads the blog, and looks around, applying your technology can probably increase the level of engagement and keeps that visitor on the website for a lot more time without that technology.

Let’s say they read one entrepreneur’s journey story, you can feed them a bunch of other stories that they would be interested in. That’s a fairly easy concept to grasp. If you get off the website to a multi-channel situation, that’s where things get more complicated.

Let’s take email marketing. Another one is social media marketing. In the case of email marketing, we send out newsletters once a week. It gets a relatively small percentage of opens and even a smaller percentage of clicks. That is the nature of email marketing. Not everybody who receives the email will ever open.

What happens in that process, though, is you’re circulating excellent content that a good percentage of your target audience is missing. Some percentage of that email may be time-sensitive. Maybe I’m providing an analysis of a particular acquisition.

If I’m circulating a story which has more shelf life and if 95% of my target audience misses that, there are opportunities of resending that or putting that in front of those same people at some other point. Is that what you’re saying you do? In your multi-channel personalization, is that something you’re covering?

Manyam Mallela: That and more. I’ll elaborate a little bit on the problems that you touched upon. You are essentially able to say, “Here is my audience.” That list gets content through both the site and email.

If you take it to a larger brand, you would have maybe tens of thousands of people on your site on a daily basis. There are an equal number of people that you touch on email, apps, direct mail, and Facebook. 

Sramana Mitra: On social media, we’re touching a huge number of people.

Manyam Mallela: Each of these touch points allows you to understand a little bit more about that user and not only think about the engagement at that moment in time.

Think beyond that. What would that look like three months from now? If you were tasked with engaging a customer who has not been on the site for the last 30 days, it’s a different problem. What happens the day after the first engagement? What happens 30 days after? What happens a year after?

Marketers need to have a platform that allows them to understand the intent of each of these segments separately. Those users who have not been active for six months need a different kind of content than the one who visited you five seconds ago. That’s the main crux of the problem.

The daily active users is X. Maybe monthly active users might be 2x or 3x of that. Your audience size is much bigger and you keep expanding that. There is a portion of them who, with the right message at the right time, can actually come back to you. There are certain audiences for Walmart who only come for Black Friday. That’s the only window.

In that one-year period, that intent they’ve shown is quite important. There is that longitudinal view that we miss when we talk about marketing. Advertising is all about now. On the growth side, it’s about understanding the short term as well as long term.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Blueshift CEO Manyam Mallela
1 2 3 4 5 6 7