There are many ways of reaching an online customer. Blueshift thinks they are all good.
The company’s web site showed eight tools to do real-time segmentation and seven ways of doing personalized content. Beyond that point, customers will mix and match tools and techniques to figure out who is buying and what to sell to them.
On the segmentation side, a Blueshift user can parse and aggregate data based on customer behavior, predictive scores, affinity, catalog attributes, lifecycle, demographics, message response and traffic source. Content can be personalized based on filtered recommendations, affinity-based content, re-targeting, trending content, user attributes, event attributes, and content updates.
“You can define segments and contexts in many different ways,” said Vijay Chittoor, co-founder and CEO of Blueshift. Bundling these methods together, a marketer can personalize about 100 percent of their marketing communications, rather than relying on one method to reach a portion of their market by personalized means.
Ultimately, marketers want to establish that elusive one-to-one connection with the customer. But it would be insane to expect that marketer to manage a couple of million segments to make that so. Using Blueshift, “as a marketer, I can create 10 to 50 combinations that make sense to my business,” Chittoor said.
A typical marketer might try to identify their market based on the past activity of web site visitors, using five to eight combinations of Blueshift’s tools to create 20-30 different campaigns to reach those potential customers. And they could be reached by e-mail, SMS or via Facebook, Chittoor explained. Campaigns can be automated, reviewed and updated to suit changing conditions.
There is a lot of “raw material” a marketer can use to build a user profile. “There are 100-200 pieces of data per customer,” Chittoor said. That information can be run through Blueshift’s machine learning capability, where it can be scored and updated. A marketer can then use this information to identify prospects which can be converted into sales.
It also makes no difference what platform the prospect uses to interact with the web site, be it mobile, laptop or desktop. “We are able to combine data from different platforms” to identify an individual among the multiple interactions, Chittoor said. “We help marketers take a unified, customer-centric view” as a result, cutting out redundant ads aimed at the same person, he explained.
Like many companies in MarTech sector, Blueshift is a young company. It began life two years ago, staffed by a mix of people from Groupon and Walmart Labs/Kosmix. The company raised over $10 million in venture capital. It is already reaching about three billion user interactions per month on web sites and mobile apps, trafficking about 100 million messages from some of their customers every month. “We are exactly where we want to be as a company,” Chittoor said.
