I had an interesting discussion on marketing automation and AI with Dominic Lawson, host of the “The Startup Life ” podcast recently.
Listen to the podcast episode here!
Many companies struggle with managing consumer data in an effective way. In fact, they may need to integrate a consumer intelligence platform with their business systems, to find and validate consumer data in real time.
In this blog post, I interview Josefine Malmquist, Group Product Manager for Consumer Intelligence solutions at Bisnode. Read this blog post to learn more about consumer intelligence platforms!
What is your history with Bisnode?
I have been working with B2C marketing business for about 10 years. During that time I have been working with hands on campaign management, IT project management and business development.
What is Bisnode’s Background?
At Bisnode, 2100 experts work daily to interpret, refine and understand the data that forms the basis of our clients’ business decisions. Bisnode helps make day-to-day life easier by delivering thousands of decision-making documents such as analytics and scoring models to predict customer behavior to companies, government agencies, municipalities and organizations.
What Problem Does Bisnode Consumer Intelligence Solve?
Bisnode Consumer Intelligence helps B2C Companies identify their customers in all touchpoints either during its onboarding of a new customer or the handling of their existing database. When using Bisnode Consumer Intelligence our unique ID will also give B2C Companies the opportunity to monitor any changes in the database.
What Does Bisnode Consumer Intelligence do, and why is it Important to Your Customers?
Bisnode Consumer Intelligence is a set of modern Rest API:s:
Onboarding – Integrated into Companies business systems enables customers to find and validate consumer data in real time.
Use our feature Search, Verify and Download to validate the data submitted by a new customer (i.e. an online store) and retrieve a unique ID for the customer. With simple searches and auto-completes we simplify the registration process for the customer, which leads to an improved customer experience in, for example, online purchasing.
Unique ID – A key concept in Bisnode Consumer Intelligence is the Generic Entity Data Identifier (GEDI). It is designed to be a unique, persistent identifier of entities within Bisnode. A quite common scenario we see today among B2C Companies, having data about customers spread out in different systems (e.g. Store, CRM system, Delivery, etc) making it almost impossible to have a complete customer view. This is where Bisnode Consumer Intelligence´s unique ID really can help companies without having to invest into expensive MDM solutions.
Can You Give a Few Examples of How Bisnode Consumer Intelligence is of Benefit?
- One of the largest consumer databases in Europe, with more than 170M+ individuals.
- Unique personal ID:s create a single customer view across all systems and platforms.
- Available in 10 countries – with more to come.
- BCI is GDPR compliant – it will help you to be as well.
How are Integrations and API’s Leveraged in Bisnode Consumer Intelligence?
Bisnode Consumer Intelligence is a set of modern Rest API:s. Find out how it´s intergrated at www.developer.bisnode.com
How does GDPR and ePR Affect the Use of Bisnode Consumer Intelligence?
Bisnode Consumer Intelligence helps you with the handling of personal data according to GDPR.
- Personal data may be requested by customers
- The unique BISNODE ID can be implemented in all business systems to enable linking all data about a customer
- Personal data about customers must be able to be deleted quickly and efficiently “right to be forgotten”
- The unique BISNODE ID can be implemented in all business systems to enable linking all data about a customer
- Companies must be able to show that the personal data is updated and correct
- Bisnode Consumer Intelligence offers updated and correct personal data in real-time
In Your Mind, What is the Future of Digital Marketing and Marketing Technology?
Digital automation and AI are here to stay and will be an important part of the society’s future development – probably faster than we think ourselves.
– Sure, AI is still in its infancy in many areas, but I think we will see a rapid development in just a few years’ time. If you look specifically at marketing, it will benefit both companies and consumers. AI and automation will free up time for us to perhaps work more creatively while consumers will not be troubled by irrelevant marketing.
In this interview, Josefine Malmquist explained how Bisnode’s Consumer Intelligence Platform can be used to improve marketing campaigns. I think that we can conclude that data is the new currency! Are you interested in marketing automation or AI in your business? Contact me!
All website owners work hard to get more website traffic; but why not focus on getting better results from the traffic you already have? This is the aim of conversion ratio optimization (CRO), which is often overlooked.
In this blog post, I interview Philippe Aimé, the founder of Convertize to find out more about their CRO product.
Read the interesting interview here!
What is your background with your company?
In 1998, I created my first website. I was working in management at the time, travelling between Europe, Asia and South America with a series of international firms.
However, having trained in web-design, I became fascinated with the psychology of web marketing. What interested me was how the internet made it possible to engage with consumers.
In 2008 I created Convertize. It aimed to improve the way businesses communicated, optimising email strategies and websites. Ten years on, Convertize continues to apply psychological insights to digital marketing.
What Problem Does Convertize Solve?
Convertize offers tools and services that help online businesses to increase their conversion rates. We help e-commerce businesses to get more sales and Saas businesses to get more sign-ups.
What Does Convertize do, and why is it Important to Your Customers?
The world of e-Commerce is competitive, so brands and businesses are always trying to stay ahead. Most of them do that by generating as much traffic as possible (with paid advertising or content marketing.)
The problem is, that’s expensive and time-consuming. It also reduces the relevance of the traffic. An alternative approach is to make sure that more of the people who arrive on your website end up converting.
Unfortunately, it is not always easy to predict what sort of layout, design or content, is best. Marketing experts struggle to guess which version of a page will persuade a visitor to make a purchase. That’s why testing tools, like Convertize, are useful.
Marketing experts struggle to guess which version of a page will persuade a visitor to make a purchase.
A/B testing provides marketers with a way of comparing ideas statistically. Suppose you think a new product image will get you more sales, A/B testing allows you to prove it.
There is a range of tools available for every kind of business, and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses…
The Google Route
Google provides a way of conducting A/B tests for free. Optimize connects directly to a website’s analytics and requires no separate subscription. However, there are limitations for this solution, principally with usability and customer support.
Small and medium marketing teams, particularly those without technical expertise, might find it difficult to use and the only help is the online documentation provided by Google.
Enterprise Solutions
There are more expensive software packages that give a comprehensive testing platform. They are extremely powerful, scalable and offer features such as Multi-Variate testing (MVT).
VWO, the optimisation solution provided by Wingify, combines all the data-processing and analysis features of an enterprise solution with a visually engaging interface.
Optimizely, the solution produced by the data scientist Dan Siroker, allows companies to optimise both communications and product innovation in one place.
Where Convertize Fits In
The arrival of Google Optimize, a free A/B testing solution, has removed direct competitors from the market. However, Convertize was built with a different kind of customer in mind.
Its design, features and pricing plans have been aimed at digital marketers without extensive technical skills. Because of this, it offers some things that Google Optimize doesn’t.
Firstly, Convertize uses a visual editor similar to the one provided by enterprise solutions. That means the learning curve is far lower than with Google’s solution.
Additionally, the tool uses an inbuilt statistical package that combines Bayesian and Frequentist probability. This allows marketing teams to produce faster, more reliable results, without specialist statistical knowledge.
Finally, Convertize provides something unique. Drawing from our background in consumer behaviour and psychology, our software allows marketers to add persuasive notifications to their website.
Geolocation can be used to target visitors with personalised information (applying principles like Implicit Egotism, Self-Efficacy and Endowment).
At the same time, real-time data can be used to add trust and urgency to a page (using principles like Social Proof or Scarcity.)
Why A/B Testing Makes Sense
Testing allows businesses to make decisions based on evidence rather than guesswork. With this information, any marketing team can increase conversion rates and build customer loyalty.
Testing allows businesses to make decisions based on evidence rather than guesswork. With this information, any marketing team can increase conversion rates and build customer loyalty.
Perhaps most importantly, A/B testing encourages marketers to pay closer attention to their customers.
Can You Give a Few Examples of How Convertize Can Be Used?
We have hundreds of case studies that illustrate how Convertize can improve a website’s performance. There are three examples that come to mind immediately.
The Swimming Pool Scenario
One of our clients, a swimming pool retailer, noticed that its conversion rate had fallen in recent years. One of our CRO experts recommended changing the products displayed on their homepage and testing the results.
Most businesses experience the 80/20 rule (80% of their revenue is generated by 20% of their products). Our recommendation was for the retailer to display their highest-selling items on their homepage and add targeted recommendations as upsells.
After A/B testing the idea over a number of weeks, this strategy was proven to increase both conversion rate and average order value.
Travelling Further
Another client, a luxury travel agent, was struggling to generate leads for some of its destinations. Having explored the website, we identified a possible cause. At the top of the homepage was a large automatic carousel with images of each destination.
The carousel transitioned so slowly that very few visitors saw the later images (coincidentally, the ones that had not been generating interest.)
Although the client was reluctant to introduce a simpler static gallery on their homepage, they agreed to run an A/B test. The results showed that the gallery format produced more conversions and a wider range of customer choices.
An Extreme Case
One of our older clients purchased Convertize to implement tests on a site distributing extreme sports equipment. The website was producing too many abandoned baskets and our client wanted to increase conversions from the basket page.
Having experimented with a range of different personalisation and location-based notifications, the results of the A/B tests identified a simple trust message as the most effective.
This reduced basket abandonment and improved our client’s conversion rate without any real outlay.
In Your Mind, What is the Future of Digital Marketing and Marketing Technology?
Marketing changes every few months (sometimes weeks). Predicting how it will change is impossible, but there are three trends that I am excited to follow.
Artificial Intelligence
One of the simplest and most helpful ways to improve conversion rates is to offer customers personalised recommendations. Artificial Intelligence provides a way of optimising this process.
As AI becomes accessible to retailers of every kind, I expect consumers to become more reliant on recommendations and less tolerant of irrelevant choices.
Voice Recognition
Siri was the first mainstream voice activated technology (launched in 2011). It has since been followed by Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and Echo.
The future of this technology is hard to predict; whilst it cuts down on the effort required from a user, voice activated technology also reduces their feeling of being in control.
Nevertheless, for casual searches, particularly in hands-free situations like driving, voice activated search seems like a growing area.
Augmented reality and virtual Experiences
Augmented reality could allow customers to experience products and services before owning them. This principle is hugely exciting for marketers. Two of the most familiar aspects of consumer psychology are the “Endowment Effect” and “Loss Aversion.”
Augmented reality could allow customers to experience products and services before owning them. This principle is hugely exciting for marketers.
People overvalue things they have experienced owning and feel the pain of losing of something more than the satisfaction of gaining something. Simulating ownership through augmented reality or virtual experiences could provide a way to easily leverage these effects.
Do You Have Any Other Thoughts on Marketing Technology and its use in Marketing onwards?
Investing money in more sophisticated marketing technology is only useful if you also invest time in understanding consumers. Whilst machine learning algorithms become more sophisticated and communications become faster and more complex, the decision-making process will always feature the same psychological processes.
Combining technology, consumer psychology and real value, is the only way to remain competitive.
In this very interesting interview, Philippe explained how the CRO solution from Convertize can be used to improve the business results of your website.
You may also want to read my blog post on CRO with artificial intelligence.
Everyone is talking AI nowadays, which usually means machine learning and predictive analytics. The background is obvious.
With AI, we can develop self-learning and self-optimizing software, which automates data analysis and gives us autonomous decision making. We can, therefore, produce much smarter software.
Everyone is talking AI nowadays, which usually means machine learning and predictive analytics
The AI algorithms that machine learning uses are for predicting the most likely future behavior of someone or something. One can say that we derive, or train, the software’s behavior using old data.
The software thus learns to predict how the future will likely become, and can adjust its behavior by continuous re-training as new data with other data patterns becomes available.
The Data Scientist Shortage
One problem here is that mathematicians, statisticians, and data scientists are required to develop the machine learning models, which are then implemented in different types of software to make them smarter.
With AI, we can develop self-learning and self-optimizing software, which automates data analysis and gives us autonomous decision making.
There is currently a shortage of data scientists. It is simply difficult to get the skills needed to develop self-learning AI systems.
Thus, the development is inhibited – or at least its introduction on a larger scale in wider circles.
Citizen Data Scientists
However, with “Automated Machine Learning” (Auto-ML, or AML), this problem is solved elegantly, at least for some types of machine learning applications.
With automatic machine learning, AI is used to generate AI; that is, we can use AML software to create other machine learning software automatically.
Thus, data scientists with expert mathematical skills are no longer needed – at least not for all purposes. Instead, staff with domain expertise but less mathematical knowledge can use AML software to generate new machine learning systems automatically.
The AI algorithms that machine learning uses are for predicting the most likely future behavior of someone or something.
This type of staff is called “Citizen Data Scientists”, as they certainly do data science tasks, but have mathematical skills that more or less corresponds to any citizen.
I consider myself to be a “citizen data scientist”, although I arguably have higher mathematical education and machine learning knowledge than the average citizen.
However, I am not a mathematician or data scientist; but can nevertheless produce machine learning models using AML systems.
AML: Generate AI with AI
Auto-ML systems can be roughly divided into two groups; first, the AML systems that allow anyone to create a machine learning model with a few mouse clicks, and secondly the systems that allow much more settings and thus mainly facilitate and automate the work of well-trained data scientists.
In principle, historical data is imported into this type of system, which is then automatically trained to make future predictions on unseen data. The systems use AI to select the most accurate AI algorithm, and also to configure it in the most optimal way (algorithm selection, feature engineering, hyperparameters, etc.).
The systems use AI to select the most accurate AI algorithm
Then, a machine learning model is automatically generated, either as an automated cloud solution that can be called from your software, or by generating program code that can be integrated into your software.
Some solutions also have a graphical user interface that allows you to make predictions on new data by simply importing an Excel file or similar, whereby dropping the requirement to develop your software that uses the machine learning model to make predictions.
Some of the Auto-ML tool providers include Compellon, DataRobot, DMWay, H2O, MLJAR, PurePredictive, and Xpanse Analytics.
I am a project manager for an AI project where we use DMWay to generate AI models with AI automatically. If time and opportunity are given, I will write an article on this at a later stage.
Auto-ML Democratizes AI
I predict that automated machine learning with AML will see explosive growth in the business world over the next few years, as many AI solutions can thus be developed with little or no knowledge of the mathematics behind it.
Automated machine learning with AML will see explosive growth in the business world over the next few years
One can, therefore, say that Auto-ML democratizes AI and machine learning and that virtually anyone with enough data can produce their machine learning solutions using AML.
Are you interested in AML? Alternatively, do you need a “citizen data scientist”, an AI consultant or a project manager for an AI project? Contact me, and we can develop new machine learning solutions for you!
If you have more specific needs, you can use our specialized consulting services aimed at the development of AI and machine learning, where we use a network of experienced mathematicians and data scientists for algorithms and model development.
AI-powered marketing automation is coming into almost every part of our industry. Content strategy is no exception, and so in this blog post, I will outline what is already possible to do with commercial tools.
But let’s start with a quick overview of the topic.
Content strategy is about measuring what content provides a meaningful ROI and marketing value, enabling content managers to double-down on producing content that generates leads and customers, and scale back on content that doesn’t provide good results.
Content strategy is about measuring what content provides a meaningful ROI and marketing value, enabling content managers to double-down on producing content that generates leads and customers, and scale back on content that doesn’t provide good results.
Search engines like Google are now focused on providing search results of high quality. Their search algorithms are becoming good at finding high quality content, and it is becoming increasingly hard to trick them (this is called black hat SEO).
To this end, content strategy tools have started to emerge.
For example, HubSpot measures domain and page authority (these are SEO metrics) and use artificial intelligence to recommend topics on which to produce content. They promote the concept of content clusters, where supporting content (often a number of blog posts) links to a piece of long-form pillar content to help push its authority in the eyes of search engines.
AI and machine learning can be used to help improve the quality of the content as well, either for better SEO ranking or to provide readers with exactly the content they are looking for (and are thus more likely to engage with).
Software tools can use AI to model a topic and build content briefs that show exactly how to write to systematically cover a topic in the best way.
For example, what are the relevant concepts to mention in the content? What are the questions to answer? How should content be written to make it rank in search engines?
One company offering a solution for this is MarketMuse. Their tool enables the creation of better articles, increases topic coverage across a website, observes and analyzes the competitive landscape, and discovers content improvement priorities.
I discussed their tool with Aki Balogh, the company’s co-founder and CEO. He describes his product in this way:
“By using the MarketMuse methodology, marketers can build more comprehensive content and establish authority on topics relevant to their business, resulting in enhanced organic website traffic, improved thought leadership and improved rates of customer conversion.”
“By using the MarketMuse methodology, marketers can build more comprehensive content and establish authority on topics relevant to their business, resulting in enhanced organic website traffic, improved thought leadership and improved rates of customer conversion.”
MarketMuse is interesting because it scours massive amounts of web content to look for the coverage around a focus topic. It builds a topic model that helps a marketer write like a subject matter expert. This enables the creation of high-quality content that ranks in search engines.
In effect, the platform helps connect the dots between what the content marketers want to write about and what the users want to know. This helps improve engagement, increases search rankings, and develops thought leadership.
Large corporations with many employees can have different problems, including adhering to a consistent voice or brand guidelines. By now, it may come as no surprise to learn that AI can gather brand and audience goals and help ensure your content complies with those goals. After all, most corporations want to give a consistent message.
Such tools use AI for content scoring and brand compliance checking, enabling all different pieces of content to be coherent across offices or content producers.
Other content strategy tools help with auditing your content, understanding how people behave in relation to your content, benchmarking your competitors’ content, and generating data-driven content ideas.
Some content strategy tools optimize what and how you should write, as well as where and when it should be published for the best return on investment. Several tools on the market address such problems, for example Acrolinx, BrightEdge, Concured, and Atomic Reach.
Many companies turn to a marketing agency or a webdesigner to develop their new website. It often appears that they prioritize a high artistic level over function and business results.
I have often seen large new websites – developed by well-known companies with large budgets – which is a total disaster in terms of generating leads and nurturing them towards the purchase.
Often, websites are passive brochureware, instead of the active marketing machinery they can and should be. The saddest thing of all is that it is so easy to do it right and let the website generate many new leads.
Therefore, I recorded a short video where I give some tips on how a website can deliver business results (eg in the form of more leads) , and not just be a good looking passive digital brochure!
You can watch the movie here: