OfferFit Software Review: Make the Leap From A/B to AI

Brinks Home faced a challenge. The home security company looked for ways to increase contract renewals.

“We wanted to find the perfect renewal offer for each customer,” said Jay Autrey, Chief Customer Officer.

Specifically, the company needed to know which customers wanted doorbell cameras, which ones wanted a rate lock for two years, and which preferred some other offer.

“The problem is we were trying to do this through A/B testing,” Autrey said. “And it just wasn’t gonna scale.”

Brinks Home management also wasn’t sure which offers were best for the bottom line. Without that knowledge, the company ended up sending offers that ate into its profit margin.

That’s when Brinks Home turned to OfferFit.

Armed with OfferFit’s artificial intelligence (AI) software, the company identified win-win scenarios: offers that were ideal for its customers and also generated a healthy return.

The pilot run with OfferFit lasted about a month. By the second week, Brinks Home doubled its profit. By the end of the month, the company quadrupled its profit.

“OfferFit allows us to achieve true, one-on-one personalization,” Autrey said.

“What used to take us months of A/B testing is now possible in a matter of days,” Brinks CEO Bill Niles said in a recent interview. “This means we are making quick, informed decisions on what our customers want. Our initial pilot of OfferFit far exceeded expectations, and based on that pilot’s success, we intend to expand from customer retention into cross-selling and upselling, prospecting, and lead nurturing.”

That’s what OfferFit can do for your business as well. In this OfferFit review, I’ll explain how.

“AI not A/B”

OfferFit uses a clever marketing slogan: “AI not A/B.”

If you’re new to digital marketing, that expands to “Artificial Intelligence instead of A/B testing.”

A/B testing, or split testing, is a process that plenty of online marketers uses to find the best way to promote a product or service.

For example, a marketer might like two separate headlines for an online ad, but he’s not sure which one is best. So he’ll run a split test.

He’ll display Headline A for part of the audience and Headline B for the other part. Then, he’ll look at the analytics and determine which one headline got the most clicks.

For the remainder of the audience, he’ll use that headline.

Plenty of marketers swear by split testing. They say it’s the best way to optimize your online marketing efforts.

OfferFit begs to differ. And, as you’ve read above, so does Brinks Home.

The problem is: what do you do when it comes to market segmentation? That’s when you split your market into numerous groups and then try to determine the best message for each.

You could split-test all those segments. But what if you have more than two messages you want to test? More than three? More than four?

That’s when A/B testing becomes A/B/C/D testing. And you can see immediately how tedious and complicated that becomes.

In the case of Brinks, the company would take four to six weeks just to create its tests, run them, and analyze the results.

It’s even more of a problem when one or more of your segments is small. It’s difficult to get a good test on a tiny audience that doesn’t offer the opportunity to establish any kind of statistical probability.

OfferFit solves that problem with AI. It’s software that learns through experimentation.

In a nutshell, OfferFit does the testing for you. It tries different scenarios and then determines what works.

The software gets smarter over time.

OfferFit Review: Putting the Fun Back in Marketing

OfferFit takes away the challenge of split-testing. All you need to do is plug your great marketing idea into the software and let it do the heavy lifting.

Over time, the service will determine which customers should receive which marketing messages.

It will even make a determination as to when those customers should receive the message.

And yes, it will also help you determine which marketing channel is best for specific market segments.

For one segment, email marketing might work best. For another segment, maybe search ads are where it’s at. For yet another, perhaps social media marketing will seal the deal.

In a nutshell, OfferFit will help you optimize your entire omnichannel strategy so you get the best bang for your buck when it comes to spending marketing dollars.

It does that with the same type of technology that marketers at Google and Facebook use today.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you read this OfferFit review:

• OfferFit is additive. It doesn’t replace any of your current systems.
• OfferFit integrates. It plays nicely with all your existing data and systems.
• OfferFit is smart. It becomes the “brain” for your martech stack.

OfferFit Review: Reducing Customer Churn

It’s one thing to attract customers, it’s a whole different ball game when it comes to keeping them.

When you attract customers but lose them over time, that’s called customer “churn.”

OfferFit helps you reduce customer churn by distributing personalized messages to people within your target market.

And you know who those people are because they’re already your customers.

Go back to the Brinks Home case study at the top of this article. What was the problem that the company was trying to solve?

It wanted customers to renew their contracts. In other words, Brinks Home aimed to reduce customer churn.

But there are challenges associated with that. What products should the company offer? To which customers? And how many times should the company send out marketing messages before giving up? And which channels should it use?

OfferFit used the company’s third-party data to answer those questions. That’s why I mentioned that it’s “additive” above.

The software also  “quantumized” the company’s customer base to design a personalized marketing campaign for hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Brinks Home took its churn rate from 18.5% down to just 13%. And the company says it’s going even lower.

OfferFit Review: How Does It Work?

OfferFit uses something called Reinforcement Learning (RL). It’s also known as self-learning AI.

It’s a technology that entered its prime only recently. So you won’t hear much about it from other services.

The concept is this: reinforcement learning uses a reward function. Any time a customer converts on an ad, that person is labeled a “one.” Those who don’t convert are labeled a “zero.”

OfferFit software uses that model to maximize the reward. In other words, it tries to get as many “ones” as possible.

But… there’s a caveat.

Just because the software found a solution that gets good results, that doesn’t mean the solution gets the best results.

In RL parlance, that’s the difference between exploitation (what works for now) and exploration (what might work better).

So the algorithm strikes the right balance between getting good results based on what it’s learned so far while still making room to learn more so that it can get even better results.

And how much data does OfferFit process on a given day? The company won’t say specifically, but it says that it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of millions of rows per day.

It’s safe to say your data can probably fit in there somewhere.

Wrapping It Up

I hope you found this OfferFit review helpful.

If you’re struggling with split testing, maybe you should let an algorithm do all the hard work on your behalf. Reach out to OfferFit today and see what the software can do for your company.

Be advised, though, the solution won’t be cheap. The technology is a trailblazer. Get ready to open your wallet.

But if you’re serious about personalized marketing, the expense will likely be worth it.