Segmentify: Personalising Shopping Experiences with Machine Learning – Unlock New Levels of Ecommerce Growth (Murat Soysal, Co-Founder)

Staying informed on the latest ecommerce trends has arguably never been more important than it is today, particularly since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the ecommerce industry and consumer behaviour as a whole.

Each week, on the Storesome podcast “Storesome: Powering the Marketplace Platform Revolution”, Graham Broughton, co-founder and Managing Director of Storesome (a turnkey marketplace solution and part of the We Are Pentagon Group) has insightful conversations with thought leaders in the ecommerce industry to shed light on the latest developments.  In this second episode, Graham interviewed Murat Soysal, co-founder of Segmentify.

Segmentify is an ecommerce personalisation platform that helps online retailers optimise their conversion rates by enabling them to provide each visitor with a unique shopping experience. Offering personalised product recommendation, search recommendation, and push notifications, Segmentify’s solution helps to unlock new levels of ecommerce growth.

In this exclusive episode, Graham and Murat dived deeper into Segmentify’s solution – how does it solve the issue of increasing the conversion rate? How do retailers work with Segmentify as an application? What can a retailer who wants to work with Segmentify expect in terms of the conversion rates and typical uplift? 

This is a summary of a live podcast episode on June 28, 2021. You can listen to the full 33-minute episode here: https://bit.ly/3zL3Zq9.

What does Segmentify do?

In his own words, simply put, Murat describes Segmentify’s vision as “providing personalisation solutions for ecommerce companies, helping them to understand their individual visitors and customers by using machine learning technologies.” These days, online retailers often struggle to convert website visitors into paying customers – the average global ecommerce conversion rate is approximately 3%. Segmentify’s goal kills two birds with one stone: create a better online shopping experience for consumers whilst increasing the conversion rate for online retailers. This is done through machine learning, a journey that began 6 years ago during Murat’s PhD. Together with the other co-founder, Murat’s algorithms were made into a personalisation platform, which is now used to help ecommerce platforms understand their customers. This involves a three-pronged approach: highlighting the right products, discounts and campaigns to the right audience through the right medium (such as the website, emails, push notifications, or indeed “any other communication channel they use to communicate with their visitors”). 

How does Segmentify solve the issue of increasing the conversion rate?

As previously mentioned, it is well known that the global ecommerce conversion rate is fairly low at a mere 3%. As Murat points out, this means that “97 out of 100 visitors leave the website without making a purchase”. According to the co-founder of Segmentify, “if you only rely on the outside acquisition channels like Google and Facebook, the loyalty level of your customers will be very low”. Therefore, this will cause the acquisition cost to be much higher at every point, which will become a problem. Segmentify addresses this issue by positioning itself as the on-site recommendation tool. For example, if you find out (through the machine learning) that a customer is not convinced about the quality of a product, Segmentify can highlight the ingredients or materials of that product. If a customer is not satisfied when it comes to pricing, Segmentify can suggest cheaper alternatives, which could be a particularly valuable solution toward marketplace businesses offering a wide assortment of a particular product at different price points.

Ultimately, Segmentify seeks to identify the unique reason for a customer not to complete their purchase and will then use their “strongest, most powerful ‘weapon’” to address this.

Another important point that Murat makes, is that beyond initially improving the conversion rate, it’s also crucial to increase lifetime value by encouraging visitors to make repeat purchases. After a customer buys a product, the machine learning technology can help to find the consumer complementary products, increasing the average order value. At each step in the customer journey, Segmentify conducts a “deep conversion analysis of the ecommerce product” in order to identify where the friction is. They then use one of their many algorithms to overcome that friction, making the purchase much easier if the customer is willing to buy.

Results and Typical Uplift

Clearly, Segmentify and the technology behind it are very impressive. Providing a unique and personalised shopping experience would no doubt make our lives easier as consumers. However, what about the other side of the coin? What kind of results may an online retailer expect if they were to work with Segmentify?

According to Murat, their first commitment revolves around what they call ‘Segmentify Contribution’. Once they implement their own product recommendations and their search personalisation solution, they find that “15% of the revenue of the ecommerce website starts to flow through Segmentify” – this is what they define as Segmentify contribution. The commitment that Murat makes is that you can expect to see this 15% contribution within a week of implementation. All in all, it’s evident that the technology behind Segmentify has a lot to offer, both in terms of improving customer experience as well as improving conversion rates for retailers.

Ultimately, it’s extremely interesting to see more and more solutions emerging that are able to learn about customers and then use that information to provide them with a tailored on-site experience. Additionally, this is also fundamental for anyone who owns an online business in order to help encourage site visitors to make a purchase – boosting that low conversion rate that we are currently seeing globally.

If you’d like to learn more about Segmentify, visit their website www.segmentify.com or get in touch with Murat at murat.soysal@segmentify.com.

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