People are smart, but machines can do so much more. And they’re here to help, when we let them.
That’s where the services of Dynamic Yield come into play. They use personalization technology to help marketers increase revenue by automatically customizing their customers’ online experiences.
Mike Mallazzo, Dynamic Yield’s senior manager of brand, communication and content, spoke with RewardExpert about how the world of eCommerce is turning to one platform to alter and advance marketing techniques.
Fueled by Frustration
Dynamic Yield possesses an advanced customer segmentation engine that uses machine learning to build actionable customer segments in real time. That enables marketers to take instant action via personalization, recommendations, automatic optimization and real-time messaging — all through one platform.
The company was founded in 2012 by serial entrepreneur Liad Agmon. He sold his second company, Delver, to Sears before becoming an executive in residence at Bessemer Venture Partners.
When Agmon was the vice president of New Services at Sears, frustration set in. The lack of technology available to produce an engaging and personalized experience for Sears customers was evident. It led him to start Dynamic Yield and create a technology platform to fill those needs.
Since then, Dynamic Yield has raised approximately $45 million from elite investors and has served over 150 companies worldwide, including IKEA, Urban Outfitters, Sephora Digital SEA and Stitch Fix.
“It’s important to note that we operate in the subset of online marketing companies that are primarily concerned with a user’s experience after she arrives at your website,” Mallazzo said. “This is a rapidly growing field, but still a heavily underinvested area of marketing technology.”
In other terms, for every $92 spent on an online acquisition, only $1 is spent on conversion.
The company’s focus on the user’s experience causes it to stand out in different ways. It operates from one unified dataset, with all of a customer’s data available in one place so it can recommend and provide the most relevant user experience. It combines personalization, recommendations, A/B testing behavioral messaging and predictive targeting in one platform, instead of employing several vendors for such capabilities.
Dynamic Yield is also the only vendor working in this field to be named to CB Insights’ “AI 100” — which the company calls a testament to its machine-learning algorithms that give visitors the best experiences.
Engagement and Product Building
Dynamic Yield is not necessarily a rewards vendor per se, though the company can build off of a company’s rewards or loyalty program.
“For example, our system can recognize if a user is ‘X’ dollars away from a certain loyalty threshold and deploy a personalized messaging telling them how much they need to spend to reach a reward and/or provide personalized product recommendations to help reach that threshold,” he said.
“Furthermore, we can help retailers identify customer segments who are likely to be more heavily influenced by rewards and alter the experience to more prominently highlight a loyalty program or rewards that a user is eligible for.”
Mallazzo advises companies to spend less money and attention trying to attract visitors to a website, instead offering a more comprehensive and unique experience to users when they first arrive.
“In a world where marketers often find themselves at the mercy of a Google or Facebook algorithm change, control what you can, which is serving a truly differentiated digital store to go along with a leading product,” he noted.
The company continues to relentlessly focus on providing the best possible product to customers and businesses worldwide, with a mission of becoming the operating system for personalization.