Overstock Goes Live With Next-Gen E-Mail Personalization
Overstock.com has launching a new dynamic, real-time e-mail experience. The personalized customer experience leverages Overstock’s proprietary technology built to create a real-time streaming platform. This initiative will deliver a more engaging experience in one of Overstock’s most important loyalty channels.
Contrary to traditional personalization efforts that give a group of users with similar attributes a cohort customized experience, or simple template changes such as adding a user’s first name to the e-mail, Overstock has built a real-time streaming platform that feeds individual user events and attributes through Overstock’s customer data platform (CDP) partner, mParticle. This strategy avoids a “batch and blast” approach and shifts to an individual, unique experience for every customer.
“Over the past several years we have stripped out our previous marketing tech stack and put in a new stack that allows us to build industry-leading personalized experiences,” said JP Knab, chief marketing officer, Overstock Retail. “I’m proud to say that our team has realized and successfully deployed a fully dynamic e-mail experience through our proprietary technology LiveRex and OADP. These two integral innovations driven by our cutting-edge machine learning algorithms determine and deliver the optimal layout, offer, content, and much more for each customer’s e-mail in real-time. Though this just launched in full, early results are very promising.”
These personalization efforts speak to Overstock’s customer focus and desire to build a secure and streamlined customer experience by delivering what the customer wants at every touchpoint.
“This allows us to personalize each individual user's actions to provide them a unique experience,” said Ramsey Kail, marketing group product manager, Overstock Retail. “Then at time of send and at time of open we’re calling out to our services for each customer to pull the latest content relevant to that user. This puts us on the cutting edge of dynamically changing content pre- and post-send to provide users with an experience that is uniquely their own.”
Overstock customers receive a 1:1 curated experience. Every aspect is customized, from the subject line to landing pages on Overstock.com. The ideal imagery is pulled from Overstock’s asset data platform (OADP), utilizing the optimal image for each customer; subsequently, building and delivering newly minted personalized and composite assets for each customer, within milliseconds.
“Promotional e-mails are notoriously cumbersome, rigid, and at best deliver a rewarding experience to 20% of customers,” said Julie DeForest, director of e-mail, Overstock Retail. “This technology creates an all-inclusive and scalable customer experience that leverages our OADP, real-time image and overlay compiler and a proprietary personalization algorithm that creates an individualized experience for every customer.”