Gumtree boosts customer engagement by a third with Phrasee AI

Since its inception in 2000, Gumtree has successfully brought classified ads to the masses, and along the way helped grow the world’s thriving online retail market. Joining the eBay Classifieds Group in 2005, its growing user base delivers over 16 million unique visits a month – making it the UK’s #1 classified ads site.

Yet as inboxes get more crowded by the day, even Gumtree needs to do more than keep a finger on the pulse of its CRM strategy, to ensure continued customer engagement. As the fight for the world’s digital attention span grows fiercer with each email campaign, declining open rates are a common problem and ultimately effect business results.

Subject line effectiveness decay had led to Gumtree’s marketing copy gradually losing its ability to garner the opens, clicks and ROI required. Despite making a concerted effort to manage the problem in-house, plummeting email marketing engagement numbers continued to restrict Gumtree’s growth ambitions.

Head of CRM and Social, Matt Button knew the problem centered particularly on open rates. “Despite the fact Gumtree is used by 33% of the UK digital population, email marketing open rates had been steadily declining. We needed to reverse the trend – and fast. We identified that we needed to revitalise our CRM strategy and bring in something to get our customers’ attention in order to actually make them want to open our emails.”

London-based Phrasee offered a practical solution. Integration of Phrasee’s AI language generation and optimization technology was simple and easy to integrate, aligning with Gumtree’s existing marketing technology, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The Phrasee Salesforce AppExchange app provides a straight-through integration with the Salesforce marketing cloud for creating and sending split tests, using Phrasee generated subject lines.

Alongside a team of computational linguists, Phrasee has developed a fully automated solution for producing marketing copy that is human sounding and brand compliant, ultimately increasing revenue from digital marketing campaigns. Phrasee’s integration of a Natural Language Generation system with an advanced end-to-end Deep Learning engine that learns what works for a brand and its audience ensures the best engagement results possible. Phrasee’s AI uses end-to-end Deep Learning looking at thousands of data parameters to predict the performance of marketing language. Using multinodal neural networks as part of this process optimises results on a longitudinal basis.

Button says that the results speak for themselves, “To date, we’ve had a 35% increase in opens, sometimes even going up to 50%.”

Phrasee CEO, Parry Malm, commented “Phrasee uses Natural Language Generation and Deep Learning to write, test and predict marketing copy that generates more click-throughs and more revenue for our clients like Gumtree. It’s fast, simple and the more you use it, the better the results get. Our integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud gives ambitious marketers access to actual AI without complicated IT overheads. The end result? More effective digital marketing than can be achieved by humans alone.”

Source: Phrasee

  Advertising, AI, Artificial Intelligence, CRM, Customer Engagement, Deep Learning, Digital, email, Gumtree, language generation, Marketing, Phrasee, Technology, UK