Publisher Spotlight: Increasingly
In our most recent interview, we invited Sri Sharma from Increasingly to tell us about his background in the performance marketing, about the company, their unique technology, how it works, benefits for advertisers working with them, his thoughts on AI in the affiliate and performance marketing industry and what’s coming in the next 12 months.
Can you tell us about yourself and your background in performance marketing?
Yes, I have been in performance marketing since 2002 and have founded, built and sold 2 companies including NMPi. I love the cross section of performance and technology innovation.
Can you introduce Increasingly? What’s the story behind Increasingly?
Of course! Increasingly helps retailers increase incremental basket revenue. The platform intelligently serves AI bundles and cross-sell/up-sells using the latest in machine learning algorithms. Driving 15% revenue uplift, Increasingly has won awards including E-commerce Product of the Year and Breakthrough Retail Innovation of 2018.
It’s been an incredible journey over 2 years and we now work with brands including Samsung, Evans Cycles, Canon, Dunelm and Reiss growing both basket revenue and lifetime value.
I’m excited about Increasingly because we are solving a significant problem in retail: how retailers can grow their cross-sell revenue. Gartner reports that this is at minimum a 10% missed revenue opportunity. When we were considering the business, that’s what we kept thinking about. It shouldn’t be like!
How is Increasingly different than a traditional affiliate partner? Can you elaborate on your unique technology?
Sure. We are an on-site technology so different to a website publisher. That’s not so unusual these days. What is different is that we use AI to generate companies more money.
Our core proposition is artificial intelligence-driven product bundling. This is something that Amazon does, generating $14B per year from it. However, 98% of retailers don’t because of poor solutions in the market.
We then expanded our technology platform to be able to offer AI driven intelligent cross-sell recommendations based on any trigger. For example, high-value customers are shown the best alternatives where products are out of stock along with an incentive to buy.
Ultimately it’s all about offering the customer massive convenience and economic value. These are two principles that Amazon swear by. The results speak for themselves for Amazon and for the clients we are working with, 5% to 15% extra revenue per month across all channels.
Increasingly’s automated product building combine the best of intent and transactional data. Can you explain how it works?
The field we work in is called neural networking. Customer behaviour data, such as purchased, abandoned and viewed data, is processed anonymously. The algorithms have key influencers such as the recency of purchase, impulse behaviour and affordability exposure. In real-time this surfaces the best pairings of products for cross-sell.
Do advertisers need anything specific to work with Increasingly? What are the benefits for advertisers working with Increasingly?
We need 3 things to work together 1. their best quality feed eg Google shopping feed 2. put our tags on-site 3. provide a one-off report of transaction history that we use to train the algorithms and hit the ground running!
Ultimately the benefits for the advertiser is more revenue per customer. We see a growth of 5-15% extra revenue each month. Alongside this their customer’s are helped to find what they need quickly. Providing the customer a richer experience and convenience is crucial to encourage loyalty and repeat custom in a busy marketplace.
What are your current thoughts on AI in the affiliate and performance marketing industry?
AI had existed in the performance space for a number of years, for example, Google AdWords is driven by AI. We also have vendors providing email optimisation and content generation by AI. Within affiliate, I’d be excited to see networks analyse data using machine learning models and start using these models to optimise creative selection.
Any exciting plans coming up in the next 12 months that you’d like to share?
We are working hard to enable full self service for our clients and rolling out new products for marketing and in-store. Watch this space!
Do you have any upcoming promotions, new launches, or exciting news you would like to share?
Two weeks ago we won Retail Recharged Breakthrough Innovation of 2018. Pitching to and being judged by massive global brands, it felt so great to win!
The Interviewer:
Fatme is a Partnership Development Manager at Tradeboubler UK since September 2018. Being part of the Publisher Team she looks after key publishers and performance. With over 3 years of experience in marketing, Fatme has been exposed to the entire marketing mix and is now applying her knowledge, expertise and strategic approach into developing and optimising Tradedoubler’s top publisher’s portfolio.
Interested in working with Increasingly? To find out more please contact our Partnership Development team.
Do you have your own publisher story? We want to hear about it! Please contact our Marketing team.
