Learn how you can Unlock Limitless Customer Lifetime Value with CleverTap’s All-in-One Customer Engagement Platform.
Martech (marketing technology) is defined broadly as software used by marketing teams to plan, execute, and measure marketing campaigns. Martech solutions focus on the collection and analysis of user data, segmentation, content and customer experience, and provide various means of reaching and engaging with your customer across multiple channels.
For every interaction to be timely and relevant to the user’s context, behavioral data plays a critical role. The more data you have on your users and their behaviors, the more relevant your user engagement campaigns become.
Having actionable user behavior data makes it easier for marketers to plan out the type of campaigns that turn new users into loyal superfans.
More importantly, it brings your campaigns away from generic spam territory (one size fits all!) into an area where your brand can build a meaningful digital relationship that’s win-win for both your company (increased CLTV!) and your customer (experiences tailored for me!).
Our Chief Strategy Officer, Momchil Kyurkchiev, has the perfect story that encapsulates how we want personalized marketing to play out for all our customers. Listen to his childhood experience of hyper-personalization in his mother’s dress shop:
To be effective in your user engagement and retention strategies, there are two dimensions to consider while recording and using this kind of first party user behavior data:
Simply put, the more granular data you store and can access for your campaigns, the more relevant and effective your marketing campaigns will be. Also, the greater your data lookback period (e.g., being able to access five years’ worth of user behavior data for my users versus only three months), the more relevant and effective your marketing campaigns will be.
If I know that Noah purchases the latest basketball and soccer games released that year on my app and that he’s done this for the past two years on Black Friday, then I know how I can create an excellent experience for Noah for this upcoming Black Friday promotion.
The advent of martech can be traced back to the 1980s with the concept of database marketing over direct (snail) mail catalogs. As the internet, email, and mobile became more popular during the 80s and 90s, more and more channels were made available for reaching out to customers. The image shows the evolution of martech over the past four decades covering channels, user volume, and technologies used.
It’s abundantly clear looking at the image above that martech has been using pretty generic, multi-purpose technologies for the data layer. Using generic database technologies through the massive growth of users across email, web, and mobile has resulted in three severe limitations today across both data lookback period and data granularity.
Most tools in martech only allow for 90 days of data lookback. Imagine treating all your users as if they’ve only been with you for the past 90 days. You’re essentially forgetting about everything they bought from you in the past three years. Even worse, you’re treating your most loyal users as if they were new to your app. That‘s a massive disservice to your loyal customers.
Most martech tools also have significant limitations in how much granular data you can ingest and store per user per month. Typical limits are around 200 or 250 data points per user per month. Even if these storage limits are increased, access to the granular data points stored is restricted when sending out an email, a push notification, or personalizing some piece of content on the homepage of your mobile app. Once again: you’re limited.
Even more critical is due to these data limitations there is almost zero use of AI/ML models and algorithms across martech today. AI/ML models allow you to hyper-personalize the customer experience so your customers get offers or notifications that are relevant to their tastes. Except, AI and ML technologies are data hungry and the accuracy of automated content recommendations per user, or even deciding on the best time or channel to send a message to Noah will work much better with increased data granularity and a longer data lookback period.
These underlying limitations are never portrayed as technology limitations but get exposed as costs and/or overage charges every month for marketing teams. The bottom line is that due to lack of access to real-time granular data for campaigns and personalization, plus platform costs and overages, growth teams simply cannot unlock the full potential of user behavior data for personalization, user engagement, and retention.
Making granular user behavior data available and affordable is the key to achieving the transition from spam and transactional communication to a world of meaningful digital relationships.
Which is why we built TesseractDB — the world’s first database built specifically for engagement and retention. It was created to overcome the limitations of ordinary martech and to bring the full power of AI/ML to marketers.
What makes it different is the way it’s built.
The image shows the high-level architecture of TesseractDB. More technical details about the platform are available here.
Today, TesseractDB powers more than 10,000 mobile apps across three billion devices. It processes more than 36 billion data points every day, serves more than six million queries daily for user insights, and it segments over 50 petabytes of data.
The platform has 11 product/technology patents pending and is based on the invention of Network Columnar Storage (NCF) which is, in turn, based on RCFile (Record Columnar Format). NCF meets the following four key requirements for use within martech:
In addition, TesseractDB also enables running AI/ML models within the database, giving you the power to create and send product recommendations instantly. This means marketers can hyper-personalize campaigns for every user based on their individual behavior data.
Multiple algorithms for automated segmentation (RFM, for example) as well as predictive segmentation are available native to the platform to significantly improve user engagement and retention.
TesseractDB is now in its third generation and offers the following benefits out of the box:
In reality, user engagement and retention is a deep technology and science problem. The problem starts on day one, when a user launches an app for the first time. From there tracking user behavior at every session and every stage enables you to understand them much better, guide them along the ideal lifecycle, increase adoption, upsell features and increase monetization and lifetime value. First party behavior is critical to this and technology that makes unlimited amounts of data available and affordable is the only way to make this effective for digital brands today.
One of our customers, ZEE5, the world’s largest streaming platform for South Asian content, used CleverTap to simplify their operations and yet still deliver personalized content to over 190 markets and 18 languages.
Tapping into the power of TesseractDB, they were able to automatically segment their massive audience and send streaming recommendations based on a viewer’s language and viewing preferences.
Furthermore, they simplified their operations so they could launch one global campaign and not have to worry about sending it at the best time for the user on a manual basis.
“With CleverTap coming on board, we don’t have to create multiple campaigns to connect with users across the entire globe. Reaching out to a user based out of Canada or Bangladesh or the UK can now be done through building a single campaign and adding the best send time option” says Jasmeet Bedi, Assistant Manager – User Engagement and Retention at ZEE5.
The overall result? Using the best time feature has given ZEE5 a 60% boost in CTRs when compared to not using the feature. Additionally, their team has seen a 20% increase in its in-app conversion rate. When compared with the control group, their recurring campaigns have seen a lift in CTRs of 8%.
If you’re ready to go beyond generic spam messaging and into hyper-personalized real-time messaging that builds meaningful relationships, then try it out yourself. Schedule a personalized demo of CleverTap and experience the power of TesseractDB today.
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