Monetate launches its machine learning-powered personalization engine

Machine learning and AI are popping up everywhere in marketing right now. If there’s a high-waste, menial task to be done — or something you can’t do more than a few times before it becomes impossible to manage — there’s probably a way to get it done without the need for human involvement.

And today, marketing personalization company Monetate has announced its Intelligent Personalization Engine, a new platform that helps B2C brands provide individualized experiences to every consumer. Powered by machine learning, Monetate’s new technology creates — in real time — personalized interactions that the company claims will improve customer experience and lift conversions.

So how, specifically, is machine learning being used in this context, and what does it offer marketers that they couldn’t do before?

“The Monetate Intelligent Personalization Engine leverages machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to make decisions in real time on which experience to serve each individual customer based on the predictive power of each individual’s data points,” Lucinda Duncalfe, CEO at Monetate, told VentureBeat. “Previously, marketers typically created segments and optimized content to those segments, a method that scales linearly. If you have three segments, you’re doing three times the work, but you can’t get three times the return. Thus, segmentation hits a point of diminishing returns quickly. And designing experiences for each individual is not realistic. Leveraging machine learning to offer the best experience to each individual offers the scale that consumer-facing brands need to move beyond the limits of segmentation.”

The platform has been available to a select number of Monetate clients ahead of today’s launch and has shown some impressive early results. A Monetate client that replaces its homepage content weekly used the new personalization platform to alter that content on a per visitor basis. Although the timescale across which the test was run isn’t clear, the client shared that the Intelligent Personalization Engine created over $260,000 in additional revenue. JD Williams added that the platform reduced its bounce rate by 3.3 percent during testing.

The engine itself is designed to optimize based on specific goals. You can direct it to increase revenue, conversions, or engagement, and to optimize based on specific metrics. Its decisioning capabilities are almost instantaneous — it decides how to personalize the content in less than 20 milliseconds — and it integrates with your entire marketing technology stack, pulling in all customer information and in-session data to help make the right decisions.

Monetate’s new solution isn’t limited to web content, either — it can push personalized actions across channels.

And the future of personalization? What does that look like, especially as we add more non-personal marketing channels, such as connected TVs and cars?

“As the internet of things pushes standardized tech and API interfaces into more and more formerly proprietary and offline places, we’ll see personalization drive experiences that truly work for more people in some surprising places,” Duncalfe said. “From the Tesla that can today guess when to heat or cool its cabin because it predicts it will be driven soon to the evolving TV experience on platforms like Netflix and YouTube that are challenging the ‘channels and timeslots’ model with new interface ideas that work differently for each viewer, we’re seeing the early stages of this future already.”

Machine learning and AI will be at the forefront of making personalized communications work at scale.

“The ability to use AI to make individual decisions for each person at scale will give designers the freedom to embrace the diversity in their audiences,” Duncalfe said.

The Monetate Intelligent Personalization Engine is available from today.