• by Jess Nelson , October 20, 2015

Sailthru has announced Personalization Engine, a new cross-channel marketing product that coordinates customer experiences cross-platform. The new product adds online and mobile marketing to Sailthru’s email personalization platform.

Sailthru also offers content recommendations, based off historical customer data, so email marketers can now align multichannel data and real-time action into their marketing campaigns. Examples include creating individualized discounts for customers or recommending specific products based on past engagement and/or predicted purchase behaviors.

In the “the age of Amazon you better be ready to deliver a seamless experience," says Stephen Dove, SVP of product and alliances at Sailthru. 

Dove says email personalization is more important than ever before with the introduction of wearable technology. He predicts that unsubscribes and opt-outs will rise in tandem with wearable popularity. The “annoyance factor of pinging a customer repeatedly on their wrist,” says Dove, will impact ROI -- especially when compared to push notifications or the traditional desktop inbox.

The wearable technology market is predicted to grow at a compound annual rate of 35% over the next five years, according to a recent BI Intelligence report. They estimate smartwatch shipments will increase even faster, and predict an annual growth of 41%.

The solution for email marketers may lie in engaging with customers on an individual level, says Dove. The challenge, however, is that many marketers haven’t fully embraced Big Data as the solution.

“To one email marketer, personalization means using a customer name in the subject line and greeting of an email. To another, it means using a fully dynamic email template where all content is populated using algorithmic-decisioning,” says Dove. Modern personalization, he says, should be defined as the ability to coordinate personalized messages across all channels, contiguously, and in real-time.

Dove cites a recent Gartner Research report that says brands that fully invest in modern personalization outsell their competitors by 20%. “Modern personalization is proven to increase response, conversion and customer lifetime value,” says Dove. “You can’t just insert a name into a subject line and expect to get there.”

The company expects initial testing results and metrics from Beta customers in the next three to four weeks.