CDP Optimove adds ability to test campaign strategies

As customer data platforms (CDPs) add more capabilities beyond storing a brand’s golden master of customer info, Optimove has added what might be called an incrementality engine.

The New York City-based CDP already offers an orchestration layer that triggers campaign implementation, interacting with email service providers, ad platforms and other tools that generate campaigns. It also offers methods for testing and fine-tuning a campaign against micro-segments.

Now, the company has launched Streams, which tests entire strategic approaches across channels.

Competitive strategies. Instead of A/B testing one email against another or one campaign against another, CEO and founder Pini Yakuel told me, Streams allows marketers to readily set up a series of campaigns — essentially, an entire marketing strategy — against another series of campaigns. In both cases, the campaigns are directed at known, existing customers.

He acknowledged that these kinds of competing campaign streams can be set up in other platforms, including other CDPs with orchestration layers, but said they require manual efforts.

By contrast, he said, Optimove can readily set up these competitive strategies, and its self-optimizing orchestration layer implements and automatically improves them. An objective is established or Optimove suggests a KPI for improvement; the sequences of actions in each campaign are specified; and the platform will then assign customers to one of the two streams.

Typical questions. In a blog post announcing the new capability, Optimove suggested that Streams can answer such questions as:

• What are the best series of communications for a new target market?
• Which customer journeys [using different campaign strategies] lead to the highest conversion rate?
• How much impact (in total) are all campaigns having on business?

Why you should care. Although single- , last- and multi-touch attribution varieties are used across many companies to determine which components of marketing spend are the most effective in delivering a sale or desired action, an incremental approach — which looks at the lift from one campaign in comparison with another — provides an alternative method of attribution.

Optimove’s Streams provides another level of functionality to the CDP category by letting marketers employ incrementality testing across entire strategies and then automatically optimizing them.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.