For years, email marketers have followed a tried-and-tested playbook: target the segment of customers most likely to engage with the email and make a purchase.

Today, there is a better way: only target the segment of customers likely to purchase because of the email they receive.

We had to figure this out the hard way at Automattic. In 2020, we completely switched off millions of dollars of marketing spend across many channels. Guess what? Nothing changed. Revenue kept growing.

The problem was that our marketing spending did not result in new, incremental revenue. We were merely reaching the people who would’ve purchased from us irrespective of whether they had seen an ad or received our email. The worst part was that we often gave a discount to someone who would’ve happily paid the full price.

We’ve since turned those hard-fought lessons into a powerful tool that has more than doubled the incremental revenue from our email marketing campaigns and prevents hundreds of thousands of unsubscribes every year.

The best part is that we’ve achieved these results by only targeting about 20% of our audience, thus avoiding the fatigue and eventual unsubscribes from repeated spamming.

And now, we’d like to share this with you.

Meet Aleia

Aleia is our AI agent who does all of the heavy lifting and hard-hitting in the background to determine who we should target and how to personalise an offer that gets the highest ROI.

Aleia has some superpowers that she can practice at great scale, speed and precision:

This is what a typical email campaign workflow with Aleia looks like:

  1. You draft an email to your customers and loop in Aleia.
  2. Aleia determines the best segment of customers to target.
  3. She goes to your “offer store” (a set of offers you have defined, which respects your unit economics) and selects the best offers to share with this segment.
  4. She drafts a personalised version of the original email to different cohorts (adjusting the copy for their pain points and desires) within the original segment.
  5. You can review her work or just trust her to click send already.

About Aleia

Origin

Aleia is derived from the Latin term “alea,” which means "dice" or "chance." In some languages, it can represent risk or fortune.

In English, the word “aleatory” can be used to describe certain forms of music: “relating to or denoting music or other forms of art involving elements of random choice (sometimes using statistical or computer techniques) during their composition, production, or performance.”

Composers like John Cage (famous for his piece "4'33", which is entirely silent) explore how removing sound can make listeners more aware of their surroundings. Cage’s philosophy was that silence can be as impactful as sound. In composing Music of Changes (1951), for example, Cage selected duration, tempo, and dynamics by using the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book which prescribes methods for arriving at random numbers.

Because this work is absolutely fixed from performance to performance, Cage regarded it as an entirely determinate work made using chance procedures. In a similar vein, Iannis Xenakis composed Pithoprakta, which is Greek for “action by means of probability”.

Inspiration

Marketing today is both a science and an art. Machine learning and AI can beautifully blend both disciplines to craft truly unique offerings based on a defined set of parameters.

With Aleia, the philosophy is partly that “less is more”. With Aleia, any marketer can target only an optimal sub-set of their audience and get better results. With Aleia, there is less noise in your marketing, which means your audience can clearly receive your best communication.