Understanding Cortex

Welcome to Retention Science!

The team here at ReSci is excited for a partnership with forward-thinking individuals, businesses, and marketers like yourself. ReSci is here to support you in your migration from traditional email marketing to Artificial Intelligence email marketing.

Traditional Marketing

Segmentation

Marketer’s lives are consumed with the day-to-day task of segmenting their users into groups. What did they buy? Where did we acquire them from? How old are they? Have they Purchased yet? How many purchases do they have? It’s time-consuming to ask all these questions. It also takes valuable time from your day that can be better utilized by focusing on building a brand and an identity that your customers trust. The next step is determining if this segment requires making specific marketing copy. Many times the segment created is not large enough to create an actionable campaign. If the segment is large enough, automation of the campaign is the next task to take away time from building your brand.

Automation

Currently, automation is likely a big part of your email marketing campaigns. Welcome series, drip series, and triggered series. Each one is assigned to the targeted segments that you created, then forgot a parameter, and created again. How many emails does each series have? 2? 5? 10? What’s the right number? Am I over-emailing? How many days between each send? The inner monologue for marketers is one of constant questioning, resulting in more resources taken away from your creative mindset.

Luckily, you’ve come to the right place: the future!

Cortex - AI Marketing

With Cortex, you can release these worries and let Artificial Intelligence make the right decisions for you. It’s important to note that traditional marketing looks at customers as a defined set of attributes that don’t change. Cortex looks at your customers, based on who they are, as constantly changing people. Cortex segments people based on their actions, what they’ve purchased, how often they interact with your content, what they like, when they open their email, and most importantly what they like to buy. Cortex can aggregate each customer's actions and bases its sends, product recs, and content on actual behavior, and results of past behavior.

One Campaign to Rule Them All

Cortex is a single campaign and runs based on the customer's actions, not his/her attributes. The campaign utilizes artificial intelligence to determine optimal send times, frequencies, incentives, and product recommendations. As customers interact with your brand, Cortex continues to learn more about individual customers and groups with similar behavior to improve its predictions. It is composed of a number of stages, each one targeting different actions. For a description of each stage and effective strategies, see the Cortex Stage Strategy Guide.

Below we will dive deeper into the Cortex brain to get a better understanding of its multitude of customer journeys.

After the acquisition of a newly acquired user who is slow in making their first purchase, the first message will be the New To Your Brand email. If the user persists without a purchase, they will be sorted into either a Low Intent or High Intent bucket. Cortex will determine this by looking at the performance of past acquisition channels and user activity. After that, a user can fall into several categories based on their actions.

Abandon Stages

The abandon stages are similar to triggered emails and are sent only when a user has an abandoned action. These stages are usually the highest converting stages.

Time-Dependent Stages

The time-dependent stages are strictly based on time, such as the user’s birthday. It is a great idea to thank a user and celebrate their loyalty with an incentive in this stage.

Item-Dependent Stages

Item-dependent stages are triggered when there is a change to an item in the items feed. If a user has an affinity for this item, based on activity, he/she will receive an item-dependent stage.

Needs Nurturing

If there is little to no activity a user will be placed into the Needs Nurturing Stage. A user will continue to receive these emails until they make a purchase or qualify for one of the above stages. The goal of this stage is to create user activity, and product recommendations are a great way to engage users.

After Conversion

After a user makes a purchase and becomes a customer, he/she can fall back into any one of the stage groups, including the Churned and At-Risk group of Stages. He/She will also receive a Follow Up Stage email 3 days after his/her purchase.

Lifecycle Stages

Now that a user has made a purchase, they are considered a customer and are given a churn score. The Churn score is a Retention Science predicted value, utilizing the data available for the customer, business, items, and other factors to predict their Churn State. Be sure to reach out to these customers with different messaging to engage them further.

When’s the Send?

The final pieces of intelligence are baked into the send models. Cortex determines how often, when and what stages to send to each customer. Cortex makes these decisions by learning about your customers EVERY SINGLE DAY. Cortex is equivalent to having a best friend who knows exactly how you’re feeling and how to make you smile. In combination with your trusted brand, Cortex will help to create an unbreakable bond between your company and your customers.