Situation:
Before Allyy.io, DR as many others were sending the same email to all of their newsletter subscribers. Now, you might think – why didn’t they just apply rules to “personalize” the newsletters?
Well, that is exactly what they tried. However, this led to a range of difficulties, challenges, or conundrums, if you will.
Applying rules to a content base (concerts) with a very big contrast from one end to the other i.e. from kids’ concerts to rock to Classical concerts is a VERY complicated and time-consuming project.
Complication:
Rules were built with logic similar to; “if you went to a Jazz concert, you’ll most likely go to another Jazz concert”. But on the contrary – their research shows that this isn’t necessarily true. We all have different tastes and we are rarely locked into one specific genre.
Jesper (one of the Allyys) as an example, would go to a Rammstein concert, but also a musical or Steve Aioki.
The example shows that rules will never provide customers with a fully individualized experience and at the same time, there is research showing that the majority of people (>70%) want more relevance in the communication from companies.
This left DR struggling to find the right solution. Not doing anything would result in less revenue, fewer people experiencing their amazing live events, and over time a lot of their newsletter subscribers would most likely mark them as spam or unsubscribe.
Not doing anything also presented another riddle for you; who do you target for the niche concerts that weren’t necessarily top sellers?
Do you push these to everyone to try and sell more tickets, or would the mail get thrown directly to spam/trash by doing so? On the flip side, if you don’t promote the niche concerts, they would end up costing the venue money as they have a public service responsibility.
What would you do?
Opportunity (storytelling):
One option would be to continue down the labyrinthic rule-building route. An option that many today still choose.
Doing so, while it might seem logical to do so, we have to remember there is a backside to the coin.
With huge contrast in genres, this would’ve been a very time-consuming and resource-heavy project. It would end up being a segmented approach, where people are placed in boxes (nobody likes being put in a box).
Another perspective is that rules would’ve been built with human bias’ and while we are amazing at so many things, we are still mere mortals and there is simply no way that we can comprehend and find accurate tendencies in the amounts of data available.
This also puts the company at risk, rules need maintenance, and if the implementing person leaves there is a whole new set of problems to address.
They chose a smarter option that would provide them with fully automated individualization, without the need for maintenance. This also meant leaping ahead of the competition while fully dodging a heavy IT project.
Allyy.io provides DR with full individualization for all their newsletter subscribers with a much faster time to market and even for a fraction of the cost, compared to building and maintaining a rule-based setup.
No more boxes – everyone is treated as the unique beings they are and gets content based on their individual preferences.
Resolution:
To give a non-biased result of what individualization meant for DR Concert Hall, we have to look at numbers.
Individualized content in their resulted in a jaw-dropping +147% in Click Through Rate and a staggering +300% in conversion!
It is safe to say that the investment and trust put in becoming an Allyy had a very positive return.
