As the hype machine behind AI roars on, one hospitality company that integrated Jetlore‘s AI-powered service with Salesforce CRM software is seeing higher email open rates and increased conversions, plus they can derive near real-time insights into what customers buy – and what they don’t.
London-based SecretEscapes counts 32 million members across 23 countries, according to Ollie Miles, global head of CRM for the boutique luxury travel site. The six-year old company derives 70% of its revenue from email marketing and pushes out email offers at least once a day, often twice. “Email is how we turn our databases into revenue,” Miles told me. “We have high email volumes so any solution needs to be able to learn quickly when we’re pumping 30 or so deals per day,” he added. “Most eCommerce engines aren’t built for that.”
Which is where Jetlore comes in. By creating and tapping into anonymized, encrypted “passive data” gathered from users’ Website browsing, an eCommerce company – a retailer, financial services provider, media company, or online call center, for example — can learn more about customer likes and dislikes; Jetlore assigns “ranking” to the content based on what it learns about a customer. That evolving profile is then used to serve up more relevant (and profitable) content, or at least that’s the Jetlore pitch. Its software-as-a-service can also be applied to email promos filled with links to drive customers and potential customers to ever more relevant content. Current Jetlore clients include eBay, LG, Nordstrom Rack and Uniqlo.
More recently, Jetlore is casting itself as pioneering a new sector it calls B2C CRM. Unlike B2B where there’s a finite number of accounts, B2C leaves millions of accounts up for grabs, company executives noted. And Jetlore’s belief is that their technology — and use of artificial intelligence — allows their clients to achieve scale with consumers and put that data to use. “We aggregate data and map it to holistic profiles,” said Stephanie Kaul, senior director of marketing for Jetlore. “Not only do we have point products, we are also creating B2C CRM.”
When SecretEscapes began working with Jetlore 18 months ago, its membership was growing quickly – along with its databases. Its marketing team would manually pick the best deals and curate offers for users in specific markets. “That wasn’t going to work with such a large database, plus we needed more personalization and recommendation,” Miles explained. To handle that kind of volume – and continue to grow its business — SecretEscapes needed more data about site activity, browsing and email behavior to customize its offers more intelligently and to boost conversions.
Miles and his team tested Jetlore with their UK members for a couple months in early 2016. “We saw an immediate impact on response rates and tweaked the algorithms to see revenue impact,” he said.
From there, the boutique travel company deployed Jetlore as a Web-based dashboard app where SecretEscapes inputs their deals or does filtering with the Jetlore’s AI. Jetlore then generates html code that gets built into SecretEscapes emails that grab customer info from Salesforce. “Sometimes we’ll do [email] hybrids with Jetlore recommendations and then five deals we want to hard-code into the email,” Miles said. “We plug in those five SKUs, hit save and it gets sent out the next day.”
Through the dashboard, SecretEscapes can see which deals are a customer’s favorites; they can also see where a customer opened but didn’t click and thus know not to re-send. That clicks-per-impression (CPI) data gets fed back to SecretEscapes trading teams, helping them see how attractive or inspirational an email is, Miles said. “Jetlore recording all that info makes it super easy.”
Monthly pricing for Jetlore’s service ranges from $2,000 to $50,000; service tiers are determined by the volume of API calls or impressions a customer generates. SecretEscapes monthly bill runs around $30,000 for 60 million impressions, Miles told DMN. That amount includes support for a certain number of geographical territories so that ScretEscapes ins’t paying for each feed.
Since deploying Jetlore, click-through rates have increased to around 10%; some markets, like Poland, do much better – closer to 20%.
While Jetlore likes to tout sales increases for customers deploying their product, that’s not the main driver for SecretEscapes. “We used to require multiple stakeholders to put together html and CSS in the background — now it’s a lot more efficient and helps us keep our team super lean,” said Miles. “So even if the revenue uplift isn’t massive, [using Jetlore] has given us team efficiency wins as well.”
