- Phrasee is a company that uses artificial intelligence to power copy for major companies like eBay, Domino's, Groupon, Hilton, and Virgin Holidays.
- The technology creates human-sounding phrases for email subject lines, push notifications, and ads that are proven to be more effective than a human-powered copy.
- "I can confidently say that the vast majority of people in the US have received Phrasee content without knowing it," Phrasee CEO Parry Malm told Business Insider. "Because we work with some of the biggest brands, like the most ubiquitous household name brands."
- Here's how the technology works.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
There's a science behind getting people to open your emails. One tech startup is helping companies master that.
London-based marketing technology software company Phrasee uses artificial intelligence to deliver human-sounding copy for companies like eBay and Domino's. The software injects AI-optimized language into a company's email subject lines, push notifications, and ads to boost clicks and conversations from copy. And it can do it all in matter of minutes.
"People are so focused on the operational impact," Phrasee CEO Parry Malm explained to Business Insider. "But the thing is, the language used is the crux of your campaign."
The understanding that language has the power to make or break a campaign is at the center of Phrasee's ideology. The startup that was founded in 2015 has already facilitated conversation rates and clicks for many major companies like eBay, Domino's, Groupon, Hilton, and Virgin Holidays.
"I can confidently say that the vast majority of people in the US have received Phrasee content without knowing it," Malm said. "Because we work with some of the biggest brands, like the most ubiquitous household name brands."
How the technology works
Phrasee is tailored to work differently for each company, and every new client that implements Phrasee is equipped with its own language model. This is an important early step in the process that ensures that the copy that the system generates sounds like it is coming from humans in that specific company.
"The way that Hilton communicates with their audience, it's very different to eBay, it's very different to Virgin Atlantic, for instance," Phrasee's COO Victoria Peppiatt explained.
The Phrasee system can generate copy that takes note of regional slang, tone, structure, and can even include emojis when contextually relevant. The language model includes parameters within each company. For example, if there are words that the company would never use in its marketing, Phrasee is instructed to keep that out of the language model.
There is also a deep learning element to Phrasee, and that is where the AI technology comes into play. The copy that Phrasee generates is tested against human-generated copy. The results of this split test are then fed back into the Phrasee system.
"And that's how it's constantly learning and optimizes towards your audience," Peppiatt said.
Equipping, not replacing, human copywriters
To Malm, Phrasee isn't coming to steal the jobs of human copywriters. On the contrary, he believes the program frees up talented copywriters to focus on projects that require more brain-power than email subject lines and push notifications.
"Instead of briefing a copywriter, you brief our system," Malm explained, detailing what he saw as a lengthy and somewhat drawn process that occurred when a copywriter set out to get an email subject line approved through various levels of management.
Phrasee focuses on nailing the smaller parts of the copywriting job so that the humans can focus on more intensive tasks. This is efficient in terms of time as well as opportunity cost, Malm explained.
"The system can actually create stuff in a much more of a creative fashion than humans can in some ways," Malm said, explaining how Phrasee won't ever experience human side-effects of copywriting, like writer's block or burnout.
The proof is in the numbers
In many cases, Phrasee's data-based system understands nuances that can slip past human eyes. For example, One of Phrasee's first clients, Virgin Holidays, had been advertising their annual sale similarly for years, displaying the quantity of the discount front-and-center in the copy.
The company believed this tactic to be tried and true. But testing with Phrasee revealed that this practice actually guaranteed lower engagement and clicks than if the discount quantity was not mentioned at all. Phrasee helped the company change this tactic, as well as others, and spurred a 2 percentage point rise in email open rates and brought about several million dollars in revenue from their email channel.
"It challenges these sort of cognitive biases which we all hold," Malm said.
But beyond the tangible returns in the copy, Phrasee's strength is in its ability to sound like a person. This might be one of the more difficult aspects of the technology, but it is also the most important.
"It would be super easy to just get a bunch of spammy phrases and cobble them to make a robotic franken-line for example, right?" Malm said. "But it doesn't work."
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