Evergage Decisions

Company: Evergage, Somerville, MA
Entry Submitted By: Three Rings
Company Description: Evergage, the real-time personalization and customer data platform (CDP) company, empowers B2B and B2C marketers to increase customer engagement, conversions and revenue. Its cloud-based platform delivers true 1:1 personalization, based on deep behavioral analytics, customer data and machine learning – so every site visitor, app user or email recipient gets a relevant, individualized experience.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Business Technology
Nomination Sub Category: Marketing/Public Relations Solution

Nomination Title: Evergage Decisions

Marketing leaders say artificial intelligence (AI) will be the top transformative technology in marketing over the next five years, according to a Gartner survey. The research calls AI a “foundational necessity” for personalization and other marketing innovations to function at scale.

Leading the charge at applying AI – and its subcategory, machine learning – to customer experience optimization is Evergage, a personalization and customer data platform (CDP) provider. Named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines, Evergage powers individualized digital experiences for billions of people worldwide. B2B and B2C marketers – from Carhartt, Citrix, Lenovo, Publishers Clearing House, Texas Instruments, Walmart and many more – use Evergage to deliver personalization in real time (less than 20 milliseconds) across websites, email campaigns, web and mobile apps, and onsite search.

Evergage Decisions

Evergage significantly enhanced its award-winning platform last October with the introduction of “Evergage Decisions.” The new module enables companies to apply industry-leading AI to automatically deliver the most relevant content, offer or complete experience to each website visitor, application user or email recipient. And with the module’s flagship algorithm, Contextual Bandit, companies can blend what’s best for the customer with what’s best for their business. E.g.:

Let’s say you have 10 different promotional offers you could highlight on your homepage to visitors (common for retailers, banks, etc.). Ordinarily, marketers would need to pick a single promotion to show everyone or set rules to govern which promotion to show which audience segment. The ultimate goal, though, is to show each individual the promotion that’s both right for him/her and best for the company.

With the Contextual Bandit algorithm, Evergage Decisions does just that. Factoring in deep behavioral data about an individual – including that person’s digital engagement, preferences, intent and the context of his/her session – along with other situational and attribute criteria (referral source, browser, device type, lifetime value, geolocation, etc.), Contextual Bandit:

● Estimates the probability of each person interacting with each available offer or experience on a given channel (website, web app, mobile app, email).
● Applies sophisticated machine learning to predict the content for each visitor with the highest-value return – weighing the probability of someone accepting a particular offer/promotion, with the business value of that offer to the company.
● Presents each visitor with the optimal experience – taking into account promotional offer value, along with the visitor’s likelihood to engage. All this – culling first- and third-party data to recognize a visitor, detecting his/her intent, and assessing and showing promotions – happens instantaneously, in less time than the blink of an eye!

Unlike A/B testing methodologies, which can only determine the best choice for all visitors, Evergage Decisions automatically determines the best experience for each individual.

The functionality has benefits across industries. E.g., if an e-commerce marketer is heralding the launch of a new line from a designer brand and also featuring a clearance sale, Evergage Decisions will natively understand the dollar value associated with each promotion. If a shopper has interest in both areas – even slightly more interest in the clearance – the algorithm may still feature the new line, given the higher order value for the company.

In B2B marketing, where assets typically don’t have an associated dollar value (e.g., whitepapers, webinars, free trial offers, etc.), marketers can assign a “synthetic value” to them, so the algorithm can work its magic.

Results

Evergage’s advanced machine learning has driven measurable results for companies across industries. E.g.:

● Workwear brand Carhartt increased conversion rates by 598% using Evergage to trigger 1-to-1 personalized emails – mapping target promotions with recipients’ behaviors.

● Software company Nuxeo saw a 34% lift in blog engagement through algorithmic content recommendations with Evergage.