Paris-Based Startup Reelevant Offers Simplified Email Personalization

The company’s “live intelligence” solution can change a product photo in an email to an image that is more rain-appropriate if the recipient’s weather changes.

Chat with MarTechBot
From Reelevant

From Reelevant

It’s getting difficult to remember a time when “personalized” didn’t regularly accompany the phrase “email campaigns.”

But personalization can also be complicated.

Today, a Paris-based startup named Reelevant is releasing a public beta of a new cloud-based service that claims to simplify the dynamic delivery of an email at the right time and with the right content for each person’s conditions.

Targeted at small and medium-sized ecommerce companies, Reelevant allows the user to chose from several demographic, device or behavioral attributes covering different aspects of the email’s delivery and content, when setting up the campaign and email template.

A drop-down menu, for instance, allows the product photo in an email to be updated based on the local weather of the recipient.

So, for example, an email from a fashion ecommerce site would automatically substitute a product shot of snow boots for a previous image of casual shoes, if that email recipient’s local weather changes. Communications manager Delphine Moulu told me that the platform accesses worldwide weather data.

Similarly, the delivery of an email can be selected for a given day, and it will initially be delivered at a random time. After several deliveries on selected days and at random times, the platform learns which time more frequently leads to an email open by this recipient, so it can target future emails at that time for that person.

The idea of a highly simplified, in-context employment of user conditions to personalize email content and delivery is an attractive one, especially since other personalized email solutions are growing increasingly complex. KickDynamic, for instance, also attempts to address this need.

But Reelevant feels fairly thin in its current features, since there are only a handful of conditional parameters one can select, such as device or weather. And the platform can only use device or user data that it captures directly. There is no capability, for instance, to load user attributes that might have been previously acquired, although the platform does allow data export to another platform.

Vincent Martinet, Reelevant’s founder and CEO, previously ran an email marketing agency and led the creation of another email marketing platform, SimpleMail.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Barry Levine
Contributor
Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

Get the must-read newsletter for marketers.