edrone Marketing Machine

How it all began, or the creation of the marketing machine

In the beginning there was darkness… Well, this is not entirely true – but from the perspective of today’s technology, all the marketing tools from the last decade or two seem like ancient history. Then two entities emerged from the darkness: Amazon, with its algorithm matching offers based on past customer behavior, and a few years later, Zalando, with its marketing machine. This was an absolute novelty in online marketing. The principle was simple – we remember what you like and we only offer you such things – if you are a woman who only wears flat shoes, then your aren’t necessarily interested in seven inch heels (or in male sports footwear). Notice the inherent convenience and time savings. Besides, the way in which we personalize content, affects the perception of our store in the eyes of our customers.

This was a breakthrough moment for Zalando – the decision to reduce the budgets for classic advertising in favor of even better marketing automation and increasingly accurate offer personalization. The marketing machine was therefore in a way the result of their approach to their own brand – they knew that being a strictly commercial company is not enough to survive in a dynamic market. Nowadays you have to think of yourself as a technology company.

Is that the secret of their success? Well, there are probably many reasons, but the key is that they are not afraid to implement new solutions, which are often risky and are of pioneering nature in the market.

Zalando is a perfect example of the philosophy of techno-marketing – the belief that IT can make marketing better and more efficient. Together with Amazon they currently employ thousands of programmers, network engineers and data analysts. Is that a coincidence?

New technologies in e-commerce

We’ve already written on this blog that artificial intelligence has entered our lives with great force, and this also includes the world of e-commerce. And rightly so. Marketing automation, machine learning, rapid analysis of large amounts of data – all of this makes it easier for us to work and to achieve much better sales results in e-commerce.

And although we accept that we will – sooner or later – have to become more closely acquainted with artificial intelligence, we still treat it as something merely existing in the imagination of lofty scientific minds. Yes, it is out there somewhere – they’re developing it in the West, but for the time being it doesn’t affect us. Nothing could be further from the truth. Online recommendations like the ones used by Amazon and Netflix? It’s an example of the use of machine learning in everyday life. A conversation with a virtual assistant on the website of a store, a bank or a mobile operator – this is nothing else than intelligent bots programmed in order to behave exactly like a human being.

Due to the pace with which the technology is developing, today’s machine learning is obviously something different than it used to be in the past. Since then, the machines have been constantly learning – after all they are constantly provided with new data that they are able to process in real time. They utilize previous calculations, in order to obtain reliable, repeatable decisions and results.

New! The edrone Marketing Machine is coming!

And now let’s get to the main point of this article. At edrone we are not afraid of challenges and boldly aim for more – in order to make our tool even more suited to the needs of the customers. That’s why we created the edrone Marketing Machine – a completely new approach to dynamic recommendations on websites.

We often emphasize that we personalize content for customers of the stores using edrone – we send their customers dynamic newsletters, we customize their product recommendations and we create content that is adapted to their needs. So what is new in our tool, that hasn’t been available thus far? Well, the edrone Marketing Machine is more than just a recommendation frame. Above all, we personalize the entire site so that each visitor gets a unique version of the store website, tailored to their needs. Based on customer behavior, we create recommendations of the best matched products. If a customer visits the store for the first time, we will build an offer in such a way that each click on a product on the site builds a unique customer segment. Thanks to segment of one your website will have as many versions as many clients you have. With each move on the site, the customer leaves a trail, which will then make it easier for us to build a personalized version and to create their individual profile – the more information we are able to gather about the customer the more complementary their profile.

The store website changes each time the customer visits it – and even each time it is refreshed. Thanks to machine learning, your store will change along with the visiting customers. With each visit, the offer of your store will be better suited to the expectations and shopping preferences of the customers. Such advanced personalization is supposed to better match the offer to the returning visitors, and as a result, increase the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).

Thanks to an interactive frame that you place on your website, you will find out what product is your prospective or returning customer looking for – which can significantly affect their purchasing decision. That’s not all – the system will automatically recognize your customer’s gender and the size of their wallet. The edrone Marketing Machine are product recommendations on a more advanced level. We can recommend products matched to the visitor’s behavior on the home page, and related products on the shopping cart page.

What is automatic customer profiling?

During the first visit, the site will display the products most frequently purchased by women and by men. A click on a given product will automatically assign your customer to a given gender – this of course does not prevent them from viewing products assigned to the other gender – the customer data are automatically updated.

During the next visit or immediately after the page is reloaded we will display the most popular products from the individual categories or brands. At this level we will be able to determine what are the customer’s interests, and their favorite brands. In the next step your customer will receive several products that will be recommended specifically for them. We will find out who your customer is and what are their expectations. We will display a personalized offer on the home page of your store.

Usually it takes a decade or two for pioneering solutions to also be deployed by smaller companies, and not only the giants in the given industry (such as Amazon, Netflix, or Zalando). Now even a small online store can make use of the advanced marketing automation techniques. It’s a sign of our times.

edrone Marketing machine is the essence of thinking about commerce as a technological challenge.