How eBay Delivered Optimized Content with AI | Sponsored Content

This article was contributed and sponsored by Phrasee.

Consumers have thrown down the gauntlet to all brands, large and small. They no longer hope to receive an awesome content experience nowadays, they expect it, according to Salesforce's State of the Connected Customer report. Even die-hard consumers don’t want to be bombarded with emails, texts or coupons that have no bearing on their lives, but they do want to be informed about special offers, updates and new developments that meet their needs.

The challenge for today’s brands is to consistently deliver tailored, meaningful and relevant communications to customers and prospects alike. This communication should not only be engaging, but also generate revenue. Of course the challenge is magnified when a brand has more than 174 million active buyers worldwide.

Enter eBay. With over 101 million email subscribers in the US, UK and Germany alone, the ecommerce giant’s marketing team has its work cut out—painstakingly having to create hundreds of click-worthy subject lines for its email marketing campaigns, week in and week out.

“We needed a creative technology solution that offered scalability, but also reflected the brand’s voice and adapted to the constantly changing behaviors and preferences of our audience,” said Justine Del Greco, marketing manager, global CRM at eBay.

In 2016, along came a fledgling software company called Phrasee–the pioneer of AI-powered copywriting. Phrasee’s computational linguists constructed eBay’s bespoke language models which, in just five minutes, produced human-sounding copy at scale that was tailored to eBay’s plans, promotions and brand voice.

“Phrasee-generated language is based on scientific insight yet is human-sounding and tailored to eBay’s brand voice…we’ve seen significant engagement and ROI uplift ever since,” added Del Greco.

In the US, eBay has enjoyed a 15.8% average open rate uplift and a 31.2% average click rate uplift, providing a consistent ROI on all campaigns. Consistently engaging communication with every existing and prospective customer is the future of marketing and creating impact to drive revenue is the ‘Holy Grail’ for marketers everywhere.

Brands like eBay are tasked with designing and delivering engaging, optimized content to millions of customers on multiple platforms. How do you boost digital marketing engagement and deliver a quantifiable, sustainable increase in opens, clicks, conversions, while ensuring the tone of your marketing language is right? How do you deliver high-quality, on-brand copy at scale across multiple channels in a cost- and time-effective way? This is where AI-powered copywriting technology comes in.

Done correctly, optimized and relevant marketing language increases brand engagement and brand loyalty by delivering content that is attuned to customers’ needs. It’s clear from the extensive research across the industry that the way brands communicate with consumers, and the language they use, translates into commercial impact.

Communicating effectively with millions of customers isn’t an easy feat, but is made a whole lot easier through AI-powered copywriting technology. Brands should stress to their marketing teams that the technology is simply a tool to enhance their work, not a tool to eradicate it. It isn’t about to take their jobs, it's actually here to help them do their jobs better. AI-powered copywriting really is a marketer's (new) best friend.

Interested in finding out more about the eBay/Phrasee success story? Download your complimentary copy of the eBay case study today.

—Parry Malm, CEO and co-founder, Phrasee

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