• by Dianna Dilworth , December 12, 2019

Lyst, a site that lets consumers shop more than 2000 stores on one site, relies heavily on customer acquisition, as the site normally gets visits from new customers coming in from search.

The site tries to encourage site visitors to opt-in or sign up for alerts from the get-go, and relies on predictive analysis to start the conversation from there. Predictive marketing and AI are at the center of what the company does. Chris Pook, VP Customer Retention at Lyst, spoke at a recent Email Insider Summit in Europe and explained that while modeling and statistical analysis have been around for years, AI is allowing marketers to improve the speed of decision making and compute much more data. 

“We as marketers get exited about new trends to get behind but at the deep core of all of it, it is still a problem we’ve been doing for many many years of trying to use data to be able to predict situations better,” he said at the show. “Technology has become much more of an enabler into helping do the modeling, there is much more of a real-time element to it now.” 

Everything Lyst does involves a predictive technique or element. One of their key goals is to get customers to sign up for price alerts, a value the site offers to consumers. If the item goes on sale at any of the retailers that carry it, Lyst will alert the customer. The key is to do so in a reasonable timeframe, so that the customer is still actually interested in purchasing the product.

The company tries to connect with the customer without always knowing much about them, so they rely on predictive tactics to create a conversation. “From a single data point, we have to extrapolate a lot and make a lot of decisions based on that,” said Pook.

This data point, say a pair of shoes that a customer searched for that brought them to Lyst, allows the brand to assume attributes such as gender and style, and then create a model based on other customers’ behavior in order to deliver relevant messaging.

Hear from more leading brands about how they are using AI and predictive techniques at our next Brand Insider Summit Europe 3-6 February in Kitzbuhl, Austria.