TechBytes with Tal Kedar, Chief Technology Officer, Optimove

Tal Kedar
Chief Technology Officer,  Optimove

In September, relationship marketing hub announced its entry into the financial services space, unveiling its platform to all financial services entities such as banks, insurance companies, trading desks and wealth advisories. We spoke to Tal Kedar, CTO, Optimove, to understand the tech that powers their relationship hub.

MTS: Tell us the about idea behind conceiving Optimove 6.0?
Tal Kedar: In the past, we have focused our energy as a company — and excelled — in applying a scientific, data-driven approach to retention marketing, helping brands build long-lasting, loyal customer relationships from their first purchase by allowing businesses to communicate with those customers in an emotionally intelligent way. However, we know that most customer relationships start long before they press the buy button — they begin the first time that customer browses the website. So we decided to delve into an acquisition and explore the possibilities for our customers if we tied visitor data directly into the rest of the customer lifecycle, asking guiding questions such as, ‘What compels someone to make that first purchase?’ and ‘How can you predict what someone will purchase?’

We were also struck by the fact that 98% of people who visit a website never make a purchase. Marketers are spending valuable dollars not only targeting the wrong consumer but retargeting them with ads for items they will never buy. We knew tackling the blind retargeting epidemic would not only have a positive impact on our customers’ bottom lines but pay dividends in improving the customer experience.

MTS: How is Optimove 6.0 different from other contemporary audience managers and intent data analytic tools?
Tal: There is no other audience management tool that brings two disconnected processes – acquisition and retention – together like Optimove 6.0. Unifying the two allows for better alignment of marketing teams, and importantly, eliminates the data and profit loss that often occurs when moving from one CRM to another. The potential benefits here are significant, as customers are finally able to be treated, holistically, by a single system.

What does this mean? By leveraging predictive pre-purchase data, marketers are able to automate targeted campaigns for new visitors just as precisely as they could for customers who previously purchased – including accurate predictions of conversion probabilities, lifetime value, or category and product preferences, as well as A/B testing and automatic campaign self-optimization capabilities. This breaks down the barriers of what it means to be a “customer”. The world is a marketer’s oyster now if you will.

MTS: What are the key metrics in behavioral marketing campaigns that guarantee better engagement and optimized monetization?
Tal: Whether the marketing team is tasked with driving primarily top line, bottom line, or a mixture of the two, focusing on statistically significant longer-term results is key. This means allocating resources to maximize the acquisition and conversion of customers who are likely to become repeat customers of higher lifetime value, going beyond merely short-term engagement metrics for a specific ad, such as click and conversion rates. Measuring and optimizing those longer-term metrics naturally aligns the marketing team towards more relevant messaging over the appropriate channels for each audience segment, ultimately improving both the overall ROI of the campaigns portfolio, as well as customers’ satisfaction with the brand’s messaging.

Optimove 6.0 links the behavior and attributes of visitors on the website to that of similar users who have been active customers for some time. By doing so, we offer accurate prediction of lifetime value for those users at the very early stages of the conversion funnel, allowing the optimization of expected ROI for any campaign targeting those users, especially over channels with significant CPM/CPC/CPA costs – simply by driving a smarter allocation of the team’s budget and time. Likewise, it allows automatic optimization of offers and creative elements to each audience segment based on intent, demographics and other attributes, to improve relevancy and overall engagement quality.

MTS: Should marketers realign their focus at adopting real-time predictive customer modeling for better personalization?
Tal: I’m a huge proponent of marketers adopting real-time predictive analytics to better cater to the unique needs of their customers. Emotionally intelligent communications are more important than ever, especially in a world where 63% of shoppers don’t feel like retailers truly know who they are. It’s no longer just about sending the right message at the right time, but in the right way through the right channel. You want a message that resonates and doesn’t make the customer feel like a data point.

With predictive analytics, marketers can gain crucial insight into what a customer wants to see from them based on their past behaviors and purchases. The only way to create a customer for life is to treat them as a distinct human being with individual wants and needs, and predictive analytics is the key to creating campaigns that do just that.

MTS: Tell us how Optimove customers benefit from an integrated multi-channel marketing automation and hyper-targeting tools? Where does Optimove 6.0 feature in this powerful automation stack for customer targeting?
Tal: Smarter and more relevant targeting creates happier and more engaged customers. It’s really as simple as that. With happier and more engaged customers, you will see more purchases, more conversions, and more lifetime loyalty rather than loyalty for a day.

With Optimove 6.0, marketers are able to integrate acquisition and retention into a single CRM, removing the clunky and inefficient handover process completely. Not only will marketers suffer no loss of data, but they will be able to leverage the full predictive power of Optimove’s database from the first site visit.

There is no smoother and efficient transition process than a nonexistent one. To this end, we are going in a different direction than other companies in the automation stack. Where some companies are focusing on acquisition and others are focused on retention, we now encompass both, eliminating the need for a crowded stack of disjointed software.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Tal.
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Also Read:  Interview with Pini Yakuel, Founder & CEO at Optimove