Caesars Entertainment, the owner of casinos, hotels and golf courses, was experiencing the challenge faced by many companies. Its marketing programme, albeit successful, needed a boost.
“We were achieving open rates on par with industry averages, but knew we could do even better. It was a matter of figuring out how,” says Chris Jenner, vice president of e-mail marketing, in a recent webinar on customer experience. To get help, he approached Persado, a fast-growing, cutting-edge cognitive content platform for marketers.
“Marketers, especially ones like Chris, who are charged with addressing millions of consumers at a time, are all looking for ways to provide personally relevant content that drives engagement, at scale,” says Lawrence Whittle, Persado’s chief revenue officer.
Persado works on the basis that emotion is key to inspiring engagement in marketing. It has the world’s largest database of more than one million tagged emotional and motivational words, phrases and images, collected over several years and scored against response data from over 40 billion impressions.
Its sophisticated software, what it calls “cognitive content generation”, uses machine learning and natural language processing, along with a vast database of marketing performance metrics, to predict which message permutations will have the highest potential for success, unique to each touchpoint, including e-mails, landing pages, social media, mobile and display advertising.
Persado’s database has a huge array of options in which to express emotions coupled with hundreds of thousands of offer and discount descriptions. The results are analysed and the system generates the best messages. It then creates a visual representation of the message performance and the most powerful content.
After working with Persado, Caesars Entertainment’s Mr Jenner saw his e-mail open rate jump by 24 per cent and his click-through rate increase by a significant 46 per cent.
“We produced a 19 per cent open rate, but Persado came in with a 30 per cent open rate. I became a believer. Besides improved e-mail open rates, our click-through rate grew as well. That’s because, as soon as we identified the right emotional language to use for each audience, recipients began to recognise our content as valuable,” says Mr Jenner.
Powered by cognitive computing technologies, the platform eliminates the random processes behind traditional message creation, while also taking brand voice into account.
Persado, whose clients include more than 80 global brands, such as American Express, Citi, eBay and Microsoft, has earned its clients a combined $1 billion in incremental revenue in 2015. Its unique technology is helping more and more companies scale their ability to engage with their customers better with relevance and speed, expand this expertise across marketing teams and have an immediate impact on their top lines.
“There are an increasing number of solutions in the marketplace that claim some kind of smart or cognitive technology”, says Mr Whittle. “When assessing the right partner, corporations should ask: how credible are these vendors in terms of proof points? How easy is the technology to implement? Are the results they deliver marginal or are uplifts significant and sustainable?
“Solutions that can help companies generate fast and substantial return on investment, but have minimal impact on resources or IT will advance the adoption of cognitive computing technology”.
For Caesars Entertainment, Persado’s cognitive content was a bet that has paid off handsomely.
For more information please visit persado.com
