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Smart Insight - Overview

Smart Insight is the Emarsys customer intelligence module, designed to maximize the revenue from your customers by automating your retention marketing.

Smart Insight is a paid feature. If you are interested in adding this to your Emarsys account, please click here to learn more and request a demo.

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Product documentation:

What is Smart Insight?

Smart Insight collects data from all your touch points in a Big Data model and converts this into intelligent information using advanced scoring models and predictive algorithms. This data can be uploaded from external sources as well as collected by the Web Extend data collection scripts directly from your website.

Using the collective browse and purchase history of your web shop, as well as the individual contact response data from all your marketing channels, Smart Insight helps you categorize your contact database into smart segments based on predictions of their future behavior.

It then helps you to monitor how you are engaging with each of these segments, using cutting-edge data visualizations and in-depth analysis that give real-time values to each contact in each lifecycle stage.

Smart Insight is an integrated solution for marketers that utilizes customer data from various touch points in order to provide actionable intelligence focused on customer engagement. Smart Insight addresses the following primary requirements of data-driven marketing:

  • The need to collect, physically store and analyze continuously-rising data volumes.
  • The need to convert data into actionable intelligence.
  • The need to use this intelligence to engage with contacts according to where they are in the customer lifecycle.

How does it work?

First steps

First of all, we will need regular sales data from you. For more information on how to format and upload you sales data, see Before You Start - Sales Data.

Smart Insight profiler

Emarsys collects your historical purchase data (default is last 2 years of data) and runs it through clustering algorithms, and makes eRFM parameter recommendations for you. These parameters will in turn be used to segment contacts automatically on the Customer Lifecycle screen.

Data collection scripts

Online behavior data collection scripts capture valuable information from your website and use this for engagement scoring (contact behavior) and affinity scoring (product clustering).

Data retention

Every three months, the Smart Insight database is purged of all e-commerce data older than two years. If you want to access data over a longer period than this, you can specify a different timeframe during the setup process – but please note that additional costs may be incurred.

Note: The age of the data is defined by the value in the order date field rather than import date. This is a mandatory field for all e-commerce data imports.

Why should I be using Smart Insight?

With Smart Insight you can set your own eRFM scoring parameters and create just the right lifecycle segments for your business model.

Fully integrated into the Emarsys Marketing Platform, it encourages you to automate your marketing and experiment with innovative strategies for each segment.

Real-time reporting puts current and predicted future revenue on screen per segment, letting you decide where to spend your marketing budget for the best returns.

What can Smart Insight do for my business?

Smart Insight enables the storing of large volumes of data in a Big Data model, which provides real-time, clear, transparent and actionable intelligence. Smart Insight is delivered with built-in analysis algorithms focused on customer lifecycle marketing, which display their results on pre-configured screens. To populate these screens, Smart Insight uses data from external transactional databases in combination with automatically tracked website behavior and campaign response data from Emarsys.

Smart Insight is built in a user-friendly and focused way to make sure you actually use it, and not drown in an ocean of data and possibilities. It recommends clearly what you should concentrate on and what you should do today, allowing you to drill down and analyze where necessary.

You can use your own data to understand your customers better and target them individually, using their own behavior to dictate your strategy.

With built in, turn-key use cases per vertical and out-of-the-box measurement screens, Smart Insight gives you both the intelligence and the tools to target each customer with the right products at the right time, automatically.

The Smart Insight screens

The Smart Insight menu has four options, leading to the different reporting screens.

Customer Lifecycle

These pages give you an oversight of the status of the contacts in your database according to the lifecycle stages you defined during setup. These are based on eRFM scoring parameters, and categorize your contacts as one of:

Leads / First-time Buyers / Active Customers / Defecting Customers / Inactive Customers

The Customer Lifecycle tabs provide the following reports:

  • The Dashboard - Provides a real-time summary of the success of your conversion strategies for each lifecycle stage, as well as drill-downs to the exact figures over the last 30 days.
  • The Customer Lifecycle screen - Provides a side-by-side comparison of the different customer lifecycle stages and the buyer statuses, by total numbers of contacts, total spend and average spend.
  • The Lead Lifecycle screen - Provides a similar side-by-side comparison, but this time of leads only, by lead status and by source.
  • The Average Order screen - Shows the average size of orders over time, broken down by lifecycle stage, and also lists the most commonly bought categories when contacts converted from one stage to another.

Product Affinity

These pages list your products and categories according to the number of contacts who have bought them, or who are likely to buy them in the future.

The Product Affinity tabs provide the following reports:

  • The Predictive Affinity screen  -Emarsys uses scoring algorithms and machine learning to predict which categories a contact is most likely to buy from next. The top 30 categories are listed here by popularity.
  • The Past Purchase screen - This simply lists the most popular products and categories according to the number of contacts who bought them (not the number of items or total revenue).
  • The Top Products screen - This plots the most popular products and categories on scatter graphs, so you can compare their distribution according to how much revenue the generated, or how many contacts they converted from one lifecycle stage to another.

Impact

This page has two tabs where you can see your total revenue broken down over time according to various criteria:

Settings

Here you can see the settings specific to your Smart Insight setup and the parameters of your lifecycle stages.

The Account Settings tabs provide the following reports:

  • The Overview tab - This lists your lifecycle stages and their parameters, and shows you have many customers and leads you have in your database.
  • Data Load History - This lists the daily updates of Contact, Purchase and Product data, and highlights any unsuccessful uploads.