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.
In this article
- What is Smart Insight?
- How does it work?
- Why should I be using Smart Insight?
- What can Smart Insight do for my business?
- The Smart Insight screens
- Supported Functionality
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 Preparing your sales data file.
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:
- Retention revenue impact - Compares your revenue across your different customer lifecycle stages.
- Channel revenue impact - Compares your revenue between email and other channels.
Data Quality
Here you can see the settings specific to your Smart Insight setup and the parameters of your lifecycle stages.
The Data Quality page provides 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.
Settings
You can check your Smart Insight configuration on the Settings page.
The following tabs are available on the Settings page:
- eRFM Parameters - Your eRFM parameter settings that are used by Smart Insight for customer lifecycle categorization are listed on this tab.
- Contact Fields - Your contact field settings are listed on this tab.
- Product Fields - Your product field settings are listed on this tab.
- Purchase Fields - Your purchase field settings are listed on this tab.
- FTP Account - Your Server address and Username that are used to log into our secure FTP server and upload your data files are listed on this tab.
- Advanced - Your Automatic Daily Load and Primary Category Level settings are listed on this tab.
Supported functionality
- Lifecycle Snapshots: See a snapshot of your customer distribution by lifecycle and spend.
- The Next Best Actions: Let data mining and machine learning predict the next best action.
- Product Affinities: Discover similarities between people that share affinity with specific products.
- Smart Metrics: Combine conversion rates, revenue predictions, purchase patterns, and engagement statistics to comprehend personas.
- Drill-Down Analysis: A set of rich reports enable you to view personas from different angles, with the ability to drill down and further analyze data at the most granular level.
- Success Attribution: Understand the contribution of your engagement efforts to the business' overall revenue generation.
- New Lead Conversion: Boost the efficiency of your lead-conversion funnel.
- Cross- and Up-sell Campaigns: Remind customers to restock just as their products begin to run out, or suggest specific products based on past purchases or predicted product affinity.
- Execute automated lifecycle campaigns: Identify revenue distribution according to purchase behavior, or to compare one-off purchase volume with recurring purchase volume.
- Conversion Rate Performance: Measure how well the business is converting customers by lifecycle group.
- True Added Value: Apply scientific control group split testing to verify campaign performance and identify where campaigns are adding true value.