Herding cats. A wild goose chase. Leading a horse to water (or, more specifically, trying to make it drink).
Pick your animal-related idiom of choice, because no matter what, the point is the same: Sometimes, you try your best, and things still feel out of your control.
That’s what it can feel like for marketers trying to craft timely and personalized messaging for millions of people, but without losing their larger brand voice.
PetSmart, for example, has a ton of first-party data – its loyalty program has roughly 75 million members. But using it to reach its customers with customized communications is still a monumental challenge.
In 2023, PetSmart started working with Hightouch, a customer data platform that launched an AI decisioning tool last year to help brands reach their customers on a one-to-one basis through nuanced insights into campaign results.
The tool analyzes every detail of a campaign, from content to timing, so marketers no longer have to decipher the “secret combination” of which message should go to which customer, said Tejas Manohar, co-CEO of Hightouch, which announced a $12 million extension to its Series C funding in July from Snowflake and Capital One.
Decisions, decisions
Hightouch plans to use the funding to further expand its suite of AI agents to help businesses personalize the customer experience.
When using the AI decisioning tool, brands tell the AI their goals and desired outcomes and share their customer data. Hightouch connects to marketing platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Braze where a brand’s content already lives and implements its reinforcement learning technology, which analyzes historical data and how customers are responding to campaigns.
The tool can run hundreds or even thousands of what Manohar described as “mini A/B tests” at once to determine the best messaging, timing and channel for a given ad.
Got that dog in ’em
PetSmart was drawn to Hightouch’s CDP offering and also adopted its AI decisioning product because the tech comes to the data, rather than the brand having to move its data around.
“Instead of shipping [our data] somewhere else,” said Bradley Breuer, PetSmart’s VP of marketing, “we really wanted a solution that would allow us to install it within our environment.”
PetSmart’s loyalty program members are responsible for well over 90% of its sales, which is why the brand needs an effective way to target preexisting customers with ads for new products and services, like its pet salon business. Millions of PetSmart’s customers are dog owners, said Breuer, but many don’t make use of the salon offering.
In the past, said Breuer, his team of mere humans would try to optimize everything about a campaign from the content of the offer down to the day of the week it was sent. But there’s only so much detail the human eye can absorb, and performance would eventually “flatline.”
To better promote its salon, PetSmart used Hightouch’s AI to analyze a variety of offers, ad creative, customer attributes (like having a dog) and copy.
“What we learned,” said Breuer, is that “talking about dog hair and its impact on your house is more impactful than just talking about dog hair in general.”
PetSmart then devised multiple different creative options that discussed the impact of pet hair in a customer’s home and fed the ads back into the models to continue revising and improving the copy.
When PetSmart uploads a new piece of content to Hightouch’s platform, it’s sent out to a subset of the brand’s overall audience to see what’s resonating and with whom. From there, the AI can figure out who that messaging should be “scaled out” to, Manohar explained.
The marketing team can use these insights to directly inform their strategy, he said, “versus a world where you have to guess.”
