Phrasee Boosts Gumtree Customer Engagement

Gumtree recently partnered with AI innovator Phrasee as part of a wider expansion to its customer relationship engagement programme, steered by Gumtree Head of CRM Matt Button.

  • March 22, 2018

By Verity Jennings

A moped outside an online store
Share Article

LONDON–(March 22, 2018)–The adoption of Phrasee’s AI technology for marketing language has rejuvenated Gumtree’s customer communications, delivering results of 35%-50% increase in email open rates.

A key member of the eBay Group since 2005, Gumtree’s growing user base delivers over 16 million unique visits a month – making it the UK’s #1 classified ads site. Email response decay had led to Gumtree’s marketing copy gradually losing its ability to garner the opens, clicks and ROI required. Despite making a concerted effort to manage the problem in-house, plummeting email marketing engagement numbers continued to restrict Gumtree’s growth ambitions.

Head of CRM and Social, Matt Button stated, “Despite the fact that Gumtree is used by 33% of the UK digital population, email marketing open rates had been steadily declining. We needed to reverse the trend – and fast. We identified that we needed to revitalise our CRM strategy and bring in something to get our customers’ attention in order to actually make them want to open our emails.”

Integration of Phrasee’s AI technology for marketing language generation and optimization was simple and easy to integrate, aligning with Gumtree’s existing marketing technology, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The Phrasee Salesforce AppExchange app provides a straight-through integration for creating and sending split tests using Phrasee generated subject lines.

Button says that the results speak for themselves, “To date, we’ve had a 35% increase in opens, sometimes even going up to 50%.”

// ENDS

Notes to editor

About Phrasee:
Phrasee is the market leader in AI brand compliant language generation. Since founding in 2015, Phrasee has become the go-to solution for ambitious, intelligent and analytical marketers. Today, its team of data scientists, computational linguists and developers drive results for enterprise brands across the globe.

About Gumtree:
Gumtree is the UK’s #1 classifieds website and app, used by 1 in 3 adults[1] every month. With over 1.5 million[2] ads live on the site at any time, it’s the perfect place to buy or sell second-hand goods and cars.

[1] comScore, yearly average: June 2016 – May 2017

[2] Gumtree data warehouse

Trying to get ahead of the competition?

Check out our Learning Hub for everything you’ll need to know!

Take me there!