Email personalization is common these days, especially where rules are set for which kinds of emails — or even which parts of an email — are sent to specific segments of users.
Boomtrain specializes in going beyond rule-making, with machine learning-driven personalization for email and mobile notifications. Today, it is hoping to make the process easier for marketers with the launch of its Editor.
CEO Nick Edwards told me that although this is essentially the same machine learning system as before, the Editor’s simplicity is the difference here.
Previously, the company’s integration was designed for a developer to insert JavaScript into an email template, as in the company’s recently announced integration with Oracle’s Responsys marketing automation platform.
Now, he said, a marketer only needs to upload a template and click a few buttons in the new WYSIWYG tool. The template is then ready to be personalized according to discovered patterns in the web content the user is visiting, and other data.
For instance, a user’s visits to several areas on a travel site may hide a preference for tropical spots, which Boomtrain will surface and then will employ to customize emailed trip offers from that site so that they emphasize cruise trips to warm locations.
Edwards also noted that his company’s system can discern the nature of different pages’ content that a user has visited, even though they might have similar tags, such as a page on travel to Cuba compared to a page about that island nation’s political history.
Partnership With Iterable
The dynamic email templates are optimized for each individual email recipient, based on that person’s visits to the client web site, and supplemented by a customer relationship management (CRM) profile.
Boomtrain said that the Editor allows the marketer to choose or modify which specific spots should receive dynamic content, as opposed to the previous version where a template, once built, had to be rebuilt to change the dynamic areas.
The Editor is available as a standalone product, and is designed to work with most email service providers. The San Francisco-based company is also announcing today a partnership with email service provider Iterable, to provide an already-integrated service.
Edwards acknowledged that there are “a lot of companies” applying personalization and machine learning to email marketing.
Retention Science, for instance, also says it applies machine learning to email marketing, although it’s more oriented to campaigns and segmented users than to marketer-controlled dynamic sections in templates. Persado uses machine learning to actually write the emails that will get the best responses.
Boomtrain, he said, was unique because of its application of advanced machine learning to B2C email marketing for the creation of dynamic templates and now, because of its ease of use.
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