We’re far enough into 2018 to know that conversations are all revolving around personalization in email marketing and how to achieve it.
In fact, Kerry Reilly, the Director of Product Marketing for Adobe Campaign, recently summarized the main problem, which is that people are ”paying dearly for expensive services and siloed technology that doesn’t allow them to automate an entire email campaign with multiple touch points.”
Mike Sands, the CEO of Signal, agreed, sharing that “brands have been addressing the technology stack dilemma via a single-sourcing strategy or by shopping for independent, best-in-breed toolsets.” It seems that knowing what you want and actually having access to it are two separate things.
We pursued our third-generation technology, AVARI, because we wanted to bridge this gap. Throughout the process of designing and building the AVARI solution, our main focus was always on delivering a high level of personalization that’s easy to get up and running. In other words, the technology might be heavy, but the integration is not. And that’s where the biggest difference between AVARI and other product recommendation systems lies.
How Product Recommendations Work
For the most part, when you’re browsing online and receive product recommendations, they’re based on what you’ve bought or what others with taste similar to yours have purchased. While these are good starting points, we don’t feel this kind of recommendation system is complex, accurate, or personalized enough — which is why we rely not only on past purchase history, but also all of the data leading up to it, such as items you’ve clicked on, looked at, or added to your cart, to form a more comprehensive picture of what you’ll be most interested in buying.
Naturally, there are a lot of variables involved in making product recommendations a personalized experience, and generally speaking, the more pieces you add, the clunkier it tends to get for users. But AVARI is different, because we do all of this with a simple frontend integration.
What Sets Us Apart
Personalization is extremely important for email marketers, with implications across all industries. Unfortunately, B2B solutions were built in the Web 2.0 age. While this model of user-generated content and cross-pollination is valuable in its own right, it’s not particularly intelligent.
AVARI, however, is built to scale with Web 3.0 technology companies, making use of the latest tools available. We’ve integrated with the latest e-commerce platforms and leverage the best of open source scalable technology to bring businesses into the new era of personalization.
Technology vs. Integration
We begin with the AVARI Mapper, a lightweight javascript solution placed on the frontend code of a website. Using the aforementioned pieces of information from a customer journey, we are able to produce rich insights that generate powerful recommendations.
The resulting information is sent over to AVARI Foresight, or the brains of our entire operation. In fact, we like to call it the secret sauce of our product, as it is the data model and predictive recommendation engine that contains all the mathematical specifics and algorithms behind generating and displaying what the end customer sees. These calculations are all done behind the scenes, which means the user doesn’t have to do anything for it to work.
Then, right as customers open their emails, they're going to see the most relevant products shown to them, based on the above. The image shown, and the speed at which its done, is what we call AVARI Forge, and the dynamic content block itself — which integrates within an email to provide recommended content at open time — is AVARI Syncro.
The best part? This entire model is machine learning. For example, as we start to see more and more customers click on some of these products in the email, it’s automatically updating the model with the latest information.
Bringing It All Together: The AVARI App
While there are many pieces of the puzzle that fit together to power AVARI, the main takeaway is this: as a user, you don’t have to think about how it works. It just does.
In an age when social networks are an everyday part of people’s lives, email continues to outperform Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest. Not only are there more email accounts worldwide, but according to Campaign Monitor, “email [drives] more conversions than other marketing channels, including search and social.”
We know just how important it is to focus on email as a channel for delivering personalized content to customers. ESPs know this too, but the personalization on offer tends to entail a lot of manual work, including segmentation, content curation, and email creation. For marketers, this costs both time and money.
For us, the delivery is where we make the difference. Our app allows you to install the AVARI Mapper in two steps, which immediately kickstarts the technology. Right away, you can begin building your dynamic content block(s) that will go in the email, allowing you to shift your focus away from the data and toward the customer. We provide you with an editor that allows you to easily configure or change the design and layout of content pieces, in order to meet your branding needs. It generates a code, which you cut/copy and paste into your email, and you’re done.
A Seamless User Experience
In short, AVARI is built on complex algorithms, yet it’s still incredibly simple and easy to use. You add the javascript snippet, make minor tweaks to your dynamic content blocks, and we do the rest. It’s a solution that allows customers to get on board quickly and start generating results right away.
And that is true one-to-one marketing. The difference is: the technology is complicated, but the customer experience is not. Instead of segmenting lists, the value our product brings to the table is the ability to send a single email that shows almost infinite types of varieties or personalized content to the end customer.
Moving forward, that’s how email marketers should be thinking about their problems. They shouldn’t have to go through and set up lots of different challenging things. Instead, there should be a single email that ultimately does what it needs to do, which is delivering the right content to the right customer in a really unique way. Our goal as a company, as a technology provider, as a platform, is to provide that product to the space. And we think we’ve done a good job to get there.
