Profusion: Improving Performance in Marketing Campaigns

Tell us more about the company’s capabilities?

We operate more broadly than just enhancing marketing campaigns. We support CIOs to develop and implement their data strategy, including planning, technology, data architecture, data engineering, data science and data visualisation. Many of the outcomes directly support better customer communications and marketing, but what’s important is that we help their teams to be able to take those strategies and deliver them brilliantly. A lot of our support therefore focusses on people: training, consultancy and recruitment. This gives clients the short term and long term expertise to make the best use of the technology and deliver the strategy.

This is especially important in marketing because of the ability to develop one-to-one relationships with customers. A common trap for businesses is to see existing customers as “already won” and focus on new customer acquisition, but retaining and selling to existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new customers, because so much more data about them is available. So we advise our clients on that experience for their customers and how to turn them into retained business, from front end UX to the modelling that lets them know exactly which product to show to which customer at which time. We use machine learning and neural networks to identify which customers are at risk of churning. We predict their lifetime value after their first purchase to ensure potential VIPs are known from day one. We analyse what times of day or days of the week customers are most likely to read emails, to be able to drop a message into their inbox when it will be most effective.

We build these models and more bespoke for our clients, but we have also developed a tool called AiM that plugs directly into Adobe Campaign. This makes sophisticated analysis, segmentation and prediction available to more businesses than ever before, and puts the results directly into the customer profiles to mean swift action can be taken.

We were able to use analysis like this to help a luxury automotive company predict when customers were ready to make their next purchase, and generate £10m of incremental revenue in the first four months in just a small handful of trial dealerships, as their dealers knew who to contact and when. By using personality profiles instead of purchase history we were even able to create a product recommendation engine for a perfume manufacturer, using deep learning algorithms to get feedback and learn over time, effectively digitising the “try before you buy” experience for a truly personal product.

The skills to be able to conduct these analyses and implement them into successful data strategies and marketing campaigns are in short supply, and many of our clients already have related skills or desperately want them in house. As such, we launched the Profusion Data Academy to support CIOs to recruit and train new data specialists and even to re-skill people already in their organisations. This way data expertise isn’t locked into one team, but distributed across the business, even at C-suite level, and we help clients to continue to evolve their teams’ skills as the business strategy and needs change.

What is the future roadmap for your organization?

We are working to further extend the capabilities of Adobe Campaign by productizing more tools that were previously out of reach of most marketers. Adobe’s excellent API means that independent developers like us can make software to enhance what the platform can do. We have an exciting roadmap of predictive modelling and other AI and automation tools on the way to complement AiM.

We are also launching a data ethics advisory board to give clients viewpoints from a wide-ranging group of experts in their fields, to help clients evaluate their use of data in a customer-friendly way. Finally we are expanding our Data Academy which supports organisations of all sizes to improve data literacy – organisation wide knowledge of and confidence in data is critical for getting the real ROI out of your technology tools.