Data firm Retention Science unveils its vision of the smartest email marketing

Retention Science wants to make marketers’ lives easier by adding more intelligence to email marketing.

Today, the Santa Monica, California-based company is announcing the Adaptive Lifecycle email marketing platform, its first offering of an operational tool.

Previously, Retention Science made its living by helping companies better consolidate and target their existing customer data to deliver the best offers and promotions, but that delivery was handled by the customer’s existing marketing tools.

The new marketing platform employs artificial intelligence and machine learning to make many of the decisions that burden marketers. Of course, many companies tout their AI and machine learning these days, but the key test is whether it helps marketers.

In its launch materials, Retention Science points out that email marketing platforms often require marketers to manually segment customers, set up multiple campaigns, create workflows, and establish rules, triggers, send times, and frequencies. When a customer leaves an item unpurchased in a shopping cart, the marketer needs to decide what she will instruct the platform to do, at what frequency, and in what order.

By contrast, Adaptive Lifecycle is designed to automatically segment, react in real time to customer responses to emails, provide the offer that is the most relevant for making a sale or keeping a customer, and predict what each customer will do next. In short, Adaptive Lifecycle takes care of the rules and the triggers, although a marketer can override the choices.

It does this, CEO Jerry Jao told me, by analyzing each customer’s behavior and by drawing up behavioral patterns found in the anonymous aggregate of all of the campaigns running through Retention Science. To implement the cloud-based platform, a customer company only has to upload its HTML email templates, enter its discounts, and put a JavaScript tag on its site.

“We want to remove the guesswork,” Jao said. “Our difference is you don’t have to think about it.”

This intelligent platform claims a 66 percent increase in open rates, a 57 percent increase in click rates inside emails, and a 45 percent increase in purchases.

Jao compared his platform’s autonomous setting up of rules and triggers to Bluecore‘s, where marketers have to set up the conditions, the rules, and the triggers.