Last year’s wrap up post was all about how Unless became a personalization engine. A lot has happened since then. We received funding, expanded our team and started becoming a serious contender in the personalization space. We were featured in many local publications (including the Dutch Financial Times) as well as international media (Venture Beat and The Next Web to name a few). We hosted events, attended big conferences like the WebSummit, and had several speaker engagements.
We’ve also made great strides in the development of our platform. With the new year around the corner, it’s time to reflect on the milestones we reached. The first one was achieved back in March 2018 when we released full funnel personalization. With this feature, visitors become members of a persistent audience that you can then use to personalize their entire website experience - from landing page to check out. But there are even cooler things you can do with Unless to drive more conversions on your website.
1:1 personalization is here
1:1 marketing has been around since the 90s. Consumers are no longer impressed if you greet them by their first name in an email. But what about customizing your entire website to meet their individual needs and appeal to their specific interests? Unique copy for each visitor is now possible with Unless.
Define your business goal and segment your audience based on conditions, such as session context, visitor background, and visitor achievements. Then, use our platform to fire parallel personalizations - turning your traditional website into a human-like medium that responds differently to each visitor. Customers using this feature report absolute conversion uptakes of over 10%! Now, creating tons of different audience segments sounds like a lot of work. What if our system helped you define them? Enter suggested audiences.
Suggested audiences, powered by machine learning algorithms
A significant part of our team expansion in 2018 involved forming a brilliant data science team. Since then, we have been running experiments like crazy and the first fruit of these experiments is what we call Suggested Audiences.
We released Suggested Audiences to help you make audience segmentation easier. Based on the goals you define in our system, our algorithms will perform a visitors analysis and suggest the best-performing audiences for your website. This allows you to focus on implementing the best tactics to turn even more visitors into customers. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? Well, this is just the beginning! We’re working to bring you even better things in the new year.
An outlook for 2019
Suggested audiences are just a taste of the developments we’re planning to help you leverage more user data. In 2019, we will heavily focus on helping you combine data with machine learning to cook up even better personalizations for your site. Our algorithms will be the secret sauce!
Another thing we’ll be working on is a way to align your communication across marketing channels. We will release API-first integrations for every system that you already love to use: your CRM, DMP, email provider and so on. Through breaking up data silos you’ll be able to align paid campaigns, email marketing, and website messaging with omni-channel personalization.
In 2019, we will keep on releasing more add-ons for our Smart Add-on library. Smart add-ons let you add new elements to your website. Think of popups, overlays, self-segmentation widgets, newsletter sign up forms, and more. These add-ons will help you incentivize signups, demos, purchases, and other conversion actions - and the best thing is you don’t need large budgets, coding or design experience to implement them.
Personalization for everyone
Smart add-ons, suggested audiences, and full funnel personalization are only a handful of the features our platform offers to make personalization accessible for companies of all sizes. Until recently, personalization was a CRO tactic that only big businesses could afford. It simply took a lot of resources to implement.
That is no longer the case with Unless. Our advances in machine learning will take care of much of the manual work that is now needed to implement personalization. We made great strides towards democratizing the technology this year, and we expect to do more in the new year to make personalization more accessible. Stay tuned! You’ll want to hear about our developments first.
