On the Horizon: Personalizing the Path to Conversion on Social

Constant innovation fuels success.

Piano’s customers demonstrate that every day — experimenting and testing new ideas to continually drive conversion. And to help them achieve those goals, Piano strives to do the same.

Piano LT[x] — a machine learning framework that puts the power of intelligent one-to-one marketing in the hands of the companies that use it — was introduced to do just that. And our first propensity model, LTs — which predicts likelihood to subscribe — is already driving a lift in conversion rates and revenue for every client that’s deployed it. We’re excited by that impact and are working on other predictive models that will roll out later this year.

But the experimentation doesn’t stop there.

Since its launch, Piano has continued to look for new ways to apply LTs — whether that means deploying a targeted guest pass or a one dollar trial to users less likely to subscribe, or experimenting with varied meter heights based on propensity. When low LTs users get more pageviews than high LTs users before a paywall pops up, we’ve found that companies are able to intelligently balance between ad revenue and subscriptions, while giving users more time to “warm up” to the idea of subscribing.

Those LTs targeting initiatives are focused on users who have already landed on our clients’ websites, though. And that’s only a segment of the possible total audience. Users also spend time on Google, Facebook and other web destinations — platforms that are powerful marketing tools. Which is why Piano has started exploring ways to help clients use that bigger web ecosystem to retarget existing users or find new users altogether.

It’s an exciting next step in the ongoing evolution of LT[x], made possible through hooks that pass LTs propensity scores into Facebook. And the potential uses are exciting for anyone with a focus on optimization. Targeting a user with a high propensity to subscribe with the right article in their Facebook feed could bring them back at just the right time, ready to pay. For a mid-propensity user, the right conversion could be signing up for a newsletter (either directly on Facebook, via their CTA tools, or back on the client website using Piano targeting). And smart exclusion of low LTs users from marketing campaigns could make marketing spend more efficient while boosting ROI.