Email Marketing & Automation

Autotarget: A Behavioral Marketing Engine for Email

Database marketing is all about indexing behaviors, demographics and doing predictive analytics on your prospects in order to market to them more intelligently. I actually wrote a product plan a few years ago to statistically score email subscribers based on their behavior. This would allow the marketer to segment their subscriber population based on who was the most active.

By indexing on behavior, marketers could reduce messaging, or test different messaging, to those subscribers who did not open, click-through, or make a purchase (conversion) from an email. It would also allow marketers to also reward and better target their most active subscribers. The feature was never approved to make it into the product with that company, but another company has risen to this level of database marketing and segmentation sophistication, iPost.

iPost has launched a very robust behavioral targeting engine to its line-up, called AutoTargetTM (click to enlarge the image):

autotarget

Craig Kerr, iPost’s VP of Marketing, has supplied the following information regarding the product:

AutotargetTM

iPost’s Autotarget allows marketers to dramatically improve email marketing campaign results using predictive analytics. Use of Autotarget has been shown to increase the profitability of email campaigns by at least 20 percent and to significantly decrease price discounts and increase open rates.

One company, for example, has increased email marketing profitability by 28%, decreased discounts, even in this tough market, by 40% and increased open rates by 90% after only a few months of using Autotarget. Autotarget eliminates guesswork and replaces it with proven, automated methodology that ensures that the right email is sent to the right person at the right time.

Many email marketers pride themselves on how much they have grown their email list. And they have, traditionally, simply blasted as often as they could to as many people on the email list as possible. This approach is a waste of resources and a sure way to lose customers: While some customers want to receive frequent commercial emails, others quickly come to regard the emails as spam and the sender as a spammer.

Autotarget’s unique predictive analytic technology does the hard work for marketers by automatically leveraging information they already collect about customers? behavior in all of their channels. And, new with their latest version, Autotarget works with any email service provider (ESP).

How Autotarget works

Autotarget is driven by two data streams: first, email click through and click view behavior and, second, cross-channel purchasing behavior. Autotarget automatically and continuously obtains email click and view behavior data directly from a company’s current email service provider.

Historical customer behavior data automatically becomes actionable data

Autotarget accesses daily email response data and visually displays up to 125 customer personas along with 12 months? trailing data on their email campaign behavior. Once these personas are established, Autotarget can quickly send targeted email messages to subscribers based on their particular persona, improving the likelihood of a positive response.

Utilizes proven methodologies including RFM analysis

A key component of the persona grouping is RFM analysis (Recency of last interaction, Frequency of interaction, and Monetary value of the customer). Autotarget is the first email solution to automate and update RFM analysis for online email marketing campaigns.

RFM analysis is widely used in the offline world for segmenting customers into groups based on their behavioral responses to specific messages. The value of RFM analysis is that it has been proven for decades to accurately predict the future behavior of customers based on their own past behaviors in multiple channels and on the behavior of other customers with similar profiles.

What RFM cells tell you about marketing and discounts

Intuitively, customers with the highest RFM cell values are far more engaged with the brand, and more likely to respond to an offer and require lower, fewer or, possibly, no discounts. iPost’s Autotarget RFM graph shows exactly how many customers per RFM cell actually responded (that is clicked, viewed, and purchased) to any set of selected mailings. Armed with this data, marketers can quickly and easily create segments of customers based on their RFM cell response for effective follow-on marketing.

Autotarget takes 5 minutes to use

No surveys or forms are needed, yet 100% of the subscriber base is profiled with Autotarget. Customers generate data every time they interact with an email message or make a purchase at any point of contact (website, POS, or call center). In summary, Autotarget is a powerful, yet quick and easy to use, solution.

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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