Mark Lotman is the Co-founder and COO of Monocle, which creates AI-powered customer incentives for businesses. After developing product strategies and pricing and fostering customer engagement at Stripe and McKinsey & Company, Mark founded Monocle to optimize incentives.

Noam Szpiro is the Co-founder and CEO of Monocle, where he leverages his experience as an engineering manager and director at Lyft and Instacart. Noam is also the former Co-founder of Interviews.tech, a marketplace for mock interviews with tech companies that he sold in 2022. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:47] How Mark Lotman and Noam Szpiro leveraged their customer engagement and product experience to launch Monocle
• [7:06] Optimizing customer incentives for profitability
• [12:40] The role of AI and machine learning in personalizing customer incentives
• [16:46] How to integrate Monocle into email, SMS, and direct mail campaigns for improved segmentation
• [20:41] Tips for utilizing A/B testing to determine ideal discounts — and how incentives drive conversions
• [27:25] Trends in the customer personalization space
• [31:39] Noam and Mark’s recommended software platforms
• [35:32] Omnichannel strategies to increase profitability 

In this episode…

Customer incentives are gaining significant traction in the eCommerce space, with brands offering exclusive deals to drive conversions. Yet with customer acquisition costs rising, discounts have become costly, so brands must be strategic with their offerings to maintain profitability. How can you optimize your incentive programs?

Customer engagement experts Mark Lotman and Noam Szpiro leverage causal AI to personalize customer discounts and incentives. This analyzes key customer behaviors, preferences, and engagement rates to determine ideal offerings. Personalizing incentives based on how customers interact with your brand allows you to identify the offers’ incremental value so you can drive conversions and increase lifetime value. You can also utilize A/B testing to establish ideal discounts that boost profitability and ROI.

In this episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant chats with Mark Lotman and Noam Szpiro of Monocle about how to leverage customer incentives to drive conversions while maintaining profitability. Together, they discuss how to integrate Monocle into email, SMS, and direct mail campaigns, customer personalization trends, and their recommended software platforms.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Aaron Conant on LinkedIn
• BWG Connect
• Mark Lotman on LinkedIn
• Noam Szpiro on LinkedIn
• Monocle
• “Delivery - Increasing Profitability and Expectations With Avi Moskowitz” on The Digital Deep Dive
• Orita
• GoodDay
• Kyle Hency on LinkedIn

Quotable Moments:

• "There's a lot of opportunity in optimizing the promotions." 
• "It's not about recommending products; it's about recommending the right incentive." 
• "We're always looking at the cause and effect of different actions." 
• "There's an increased importance to engage your retained base, but also a cost to it that wasn't there before."
• "You want to understand the incremental value of giving that person a discount because giving a discount is costly."

Action Steps:

1. Implement personalized offer strategies to improve conversion rates: By targeting offers based on customer behavior, you're more likely to convert hesitant customers, directly addressing the challenge of profitability.
2. Embrace machine learning over rule-based systems: Leveraging AI to personalize offers can outperform static rules and adapt to changes in consumer behavior.
3. Ensure transparency in machine learning models to maintain control of marketing operations: This visibility helps marketers trust the system and utilize its insights for other strategic decisions.
4. Regularly experiment with A/B testing on an individual level: This approach of continuous, personalized A/B testing can fine-tune offers for each customer, ensuring maximum engagement.
5. Recognize the value of retention and develop targeted campaigns for existing customers: With acquisition costs rising, engaging your customer base with personalized incentives is crucial for long-term profitability.

About BWG Connect...

BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.

In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.

We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.

If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.