News conglomerate Thomson Reuters has implemented AI to help combat email and marketing fatigue.
The multinational conglomerate implemented Oracle Eloqua AI tools to assist with operational and campaign processes to create better marketing decisions, improved campaign engagement, and ROI.
Last year, Thomson Reuters announced a strategic initiative to add an additional US$100 million investment in AI across current products and also invest in improving the AI literacy of internal employees through internal digital learning platforms and development.
Speaking at a recent Oracle CloudWorld event in Las Vegas, Amanda Chatkin, head of marketing operations at Thomson Reuters told the audience that the company has since seen a direct increase in open and engagement rates following the implementation of fatigue analyses.
As for fatigue levels, his contacts “went from oversaturation to ‘saturation’,” ‘just right’ or “undersaturated”.
A key learning for the team through its fatigue analysis work, it was that “fatigue does not send volume”.
“A contact might receive 10 emails per month and actively interact with the majority.
“Conversely, a contact might receive three emails per month for several months and not engage with any of them. This unengaged person is more likely to be oversaturated.”
Chatkin also explained that a contact who engages semi-regularly or regularly with emails will range from “saturated to just right to undersaturated.”
“My first approach to fatigue analysis, we started broadly and then became more targeted,
“We were extremely specific about which newsletters to include and which email groups to use.
“We educated internal teams on things they needed to be aware of, like the decline in listings. We also created a plan for sharing the results so the entire marketing team was aware,” Chatkin said.
During his speech, Chatkin said that while it is a “digitally mature marketing organization,” it still faces “persistent challenges in our current work” leading to AI solutions.
“The first challenge was sending international emails. As a global company, we send campaigns across multiple time zones, even just in the U.S.,” Chatkin said.
Instead of creating multiple campaigns to activate in different time zones or other processes, “we wanted to simplify the campaign creation process.”
Chatkin said the challenge of over-emailing and marketing fatigue stems from a “lack of engagement with truly relevant marketing emails.”
“This was because our customers and prospects’ inboxes were cluttered with irrelevant messages.
“Alongside that, we also saw bloated mailing lists as an organization,” Chatkin explained.
“We worked with the entire marketing department to reduce over-sending of emails in a fully automated way. Our goal was to exclude over-saturated contexts in order to increase deliverability.”
According to Chatkin, the company wanted to send the right message, the right amount and the right time to its customers.
However, it has proven difficult to know which “contacts are ready for further engagement and which are already fatigued by too many emails.”
“Fatigue levels matter because repeatedly sending emails to contacts who aren’t interested in your content impacts your email deliverability.
“This can harm your email reputation and decrease inbox delivery rates.
“Fatigue levels are calculated based on the number of emails opened and the number of emails sent to them in the last 180 days. It also takes into account the recency and frequency of emails sent to those opened.
Chatkin, although the fatigue model is updated weekly, sending volume and engagement numbers may not change fatigue levels between model updates.
“There are nine possible levels of fatigue. The first is inactivity, and there are several different definitions of inactive contact.”
This could mean that a customer hasn’t received an email in the last 45 days, has no established engagement history, or has been defaulted.
“The next one is undersaturated, meaning that emails have been sent to this contact but there is not enough activity to classify them at a different fatigue level.
“The next level of fatigue is ‘just right’ and that is the optimal level of engagement.
“In a perfect idealistic world, a pure and more compact database would be classified as perfect. And then we enter a saturated database, divided into low, medium and high categories.”
“Finally, we have oversaturation, which is low, medium and high. That means engagement is low and it could lead to eventual disengagement,” Chatkin said.
From there, the fatigue model is applied to subscribed contacts overall or those without email who are assigned a fatigue level.
“Fatigue levels are contact fields. They can be used in dynamic content segments, campaigns, decision stages, program stages, and “leave scores,” as well as information for custom reports,
“We created shared filters to add it to segments and also used decision steps on the campaign campus.”
Chatkin added that before assigning fatigue levels, “frequency filters” were used, but these only allowed nine submissions per month.
“In the early days of AI, we continued to send nine times a month, but excluded all oversaturated contacts.
“We used to rely on email counts, but now we only use fatigue levels to determine what our customers should receive via email.
“Currently, we use fatigue level to determine how often we email a contact.”
With the updated approach implemented in late 2022, the company can better pinpoint how tired its contacts were of receiving emails, according to Chatkin.
“With nearly two years of data for this specific segment…we are able to successfully reduce the amount of oversaturated active context,” Chatkin said.
Kate Weber attended OracleWorld and NetSuite SuiteWorld in Las Vegas as a guest of Oracle.