Jonathan Adler, Murad, Shazaam, and Ideeli are just some of the brands that have reached out to AgilOne to build customer loyalty. The cloud-based predictive marketing company aims to help both large and small businesses use advanced data sciences to create personalized, targeted customer experiences across channels.
AgilOne, based in Mountain View, CA, wants to be a brand’s “data scientist” so marketers can focus on doing what they do best – creating creative, engaging strategies that energize and delight customers to keep them coming back.
Founded almost a decade ago by Dr. Omer Artun – himself a Nobel Laureate-trained data scientist with a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience and physics from Brown University, AgilOne has grown from a small business working with one large brand at a time to a full-service international company with more than 150 customers worldwide.
Loyalty360 caught up with AgilOne’s CMO, Dominique Levin, to discuss some of the challenges brands face when building brand and customer loyalty and the rewards of using predictive marketing to thrive in today’s competitive retail and ecommerce environment.
Levin believes retailers especially can’t afford not to use some form of predictive marketing to grow their business. The stakes are simply too high.
“The average retention rate for retailers is less than 30 percent,” explained Levin. “When 70 percent of your customers aren’t coming back, that’s a huge problem.
AgilOne is about helping brands use better targeting to improve long-term customer experience and loyalty.
Before working with AgilOne, Jonathan Adler had not used their databases to improve customer engagement and loyalty. What is it like working with brands that are beginning to incorporate your tools? How do you help marketers get familiar with the process that can be intimidating?
Well, the good thing is that they can become familiar with our tools. AgilOne is really about democratization - taking things that are inherently complex and out of the realm and make it accessible for loyalty marketers. Ultimately, marketers are good at creating customer experience and, given the customer persona, can create delight, a great customer experience and the branding that goes along with it. But they aren’t necessarily good at data and integration.
What AgilOne has done, and why we can help relatively small companies like Jonathan Adler, is come in and do all the heavy lifting. We start by using data integration and wrangling to help them know who their best customers are and automatically recognize personas that they may not have known they had.
Previously to accomplish this, you’d have to have a big data warehouse, engineers, and scientists.
We help marketers shift from a more calendar or merchandising driven marketing program to one that is more customer triggered, hyper-segmented type of marketing. This isn’t always easy for marketers - they’re used to sending out newsletters and emails on a set schedule. But what they are learning is that it is more important to reach out to customers when they buy something or when they haven’t bought – or engaged with a company - for a while.
For example, every marketer knows it’s important to reach out to shoppers who have an abandoned cart; who didn’t complete their purchase. But we were shocked to find that many marketers aren’t able to pull this off – about 60 percent of them aren’t running abandon cart campaigns.
To help them, AgilOne has created a playbook and turnkey templates to help our customers build loyalty. Using these templates marketers can create more customized email messaging to engage customers and get them to act on a more personalized basis.
AgilOne works with a diverse clientele – from major ecommerce and retail brands to publishing companies. What are some of the common challenges all of your clients share?
There are a lot of common challenges. I’d say most struggle with turning browsers into buyers and effectively using email retargeting. That’s the number one commonality I’d say- how to get a buyer to become a repeat buyer. If you can convince a one-time buyer to come back then that 70/30 percent retention equation changes entirely. And there is a really fascinating honeymoon period to do this. You can’t wait a year. If brands can turn customers into repeat buyers within 60 days the reward is huge.
Also, I’d say most do not know who their best customers are. We’ve worked with companies who don’t know the name of a person who has spent $2,000 with them on a single purchase. How can they do this? How can they not reach out to them? So definitely, companies struggle with showing customer appreciation in an effective way that establishes a loyalty base.
The good news is that they are actively working on it. I think the one and done mentality is a thing of the past. I don’t know a single marketer that isn’t trying to engage customers in a more personalized way.
AgilOne is on the cutting edge of predictive marketing. What trends are you seeing? What does 2015 look like?
Well, ultimately where we are going is a one-on-one approach. A good example of a leader in this is one of our clients, Mavi. The international jeans and apparel brand is much further along in its implementation and can give us a great glimpse of the future. 80 percent of their revenue comes from their loyalty program - so it’s clearly very successful.
Mavi truly rethinks customer loyalty - everything is done on a one-on-one level. For example, if I buy $100 in a single transaction, they may send me an incentive to earn double points if I buy $120 in my next transaction. The more points I get, the more I’ll spend. The program works because it is very specific to me. If my friend spent $200 at Mavi, they wouldn’t send her the same incentive.
Other than that, we are seeing online/offline integration. People have been talking about omni-channel for the longest time, but we are really seeing a lot of exciting programs that are using online programs to drive their customers to their stores and vice versa.
On a more personal level, what are you most excited about when it comes to your job as CMO at AgilOne?
I think that in the predictive data arena, there’s a lot of noise. There are a lot of data science companies and people making claims about data driven marketing. I worry about all the claims – but what concerns me even more is that marketers will get paralyzed and chose to do nothing because everybody is kind of saying the same thing.
The worse thing would be for marketers to not do anything. When I look at my customers it is incredible to think that many of them have seen 8 times an increase in revenue by taking a predictive marketing approach. It’s not unusual that we help brands double their business. I’ve never seen a trend with a more a profound impact (than predictive marketing).
So my advice would be to marketers that you don’t have to buy AgilOne services but do something. Use data to create loyalty and a better brand experience. It’s good for your customers, it’s good for your business and it’s probably good for your personal career as well.