FAQ

• What is Custora?

  Custora is a CRM activation platform built to help marketers leverage customer data across marketing systems and tools.

  First, Custora connects with all of a brand's customer data and uses predictive analytics to surface individual-level insights. Custora then provides marketers with direct access to build segments, answer complex customer-centric questions, and stream user-level insights across any marketing channel.

  More than one hundred leading retail brands, and 7 of the 20 largest US retailers, use Custora to acquire and retain valuable customers and increase customer lifetime value.

• Who uses Custora?

  Over a hundred retail brands (including 7 of the top 20 largest US retailers) use Custora to acquire and retain high value customers and improve customer lifetime value. We power over 200 million targeted communications per month, analyze over 500 million customer records, and handle over $200 billion in transaction volume daily.

• What kind of results can we expect?

  Crocs used Custora’s high value customer lookalike targeting on Facebook to drive a 10x improvement in ROAS.

  Eloquii used Custora’s predicted churn segmentation to reduce customer churn by 27%.

  Crocs used Custora’s promotion sensitivity models coupled with our web personalization integrations to improve profit margins by 2%.

  The Dermstore marketing team used Custora to better understand customer behavior and drive an overall 2% increase in revenue growth. Whoa.

  Tiffany & Co. used Custora’s predicted lifetime value segmentation to improve the performance of their direct mail catalog by 17%.

  Calendars.com used Custora’s predicted affinity segmentation to improve ROAS on display advertising by 10x.

  Lucky Brand used Custora’s predicted CLV for their direct mail catalog and generated an incremental $1.97M in revenue.

  Tory Burch used Custora’s predicted fragrance affinity models and generated an incremental $825k in sales.

• What makes Custora different?
  1. Deep retail knowledge (and a product purpose-built for retail).
  2. A marketer-friendly interface with a natural language, sentence-based query builder.
  3. Guidance and prescriptive analytics (we tell you where to focus).
  4. Transparent + collaborative models and insights (we’ll happily explain what is in the box).
  5. Our customer success team are strategic consultants.
  6. Channel agnostic: We are a system of coordination and don’t replace your existing systems of execution.
• What is "farketing" and how might Custora help?

  Your analytics team is top notch and can generate rich customer insights, but they’re too overwhelmed with requests. Insights get stuck. We call this friction in the marketing department, or, “farketing.” When entire marketing teams can access customer data, generate insights and leverage them in campaigns, beautiful things happen.

• What kind of ROI can we expect?

  ROI Calculator coming soon...

• How do your models work?

  When discussing models, we typically open with some sort of Zoolander joke. Not this time.

  There are a wide variety of retailing phenomena to model: When customers buy, what they buy, how much they spend, where they come from, and so on. Custora uses a variety of different statistical and machine-learning approaches for these different phenomena. Our core models lean on general optimization techniques (such as EM and stochastic gradient descent) over functions we have derived from models we’ve picked specially for their respective purposes. But in different areas we also use more conventional out-of-the-box techniques, like collaborative filtering or regression. If you’re ready to talk more sophisticated data science, let’s dance.

• What’s your approach to predictive modeling?

  We’re interested in helping you identify what makes each of your customers unique. Accordingly, we emphasize making differentiated predictions on the level of the individual customer over targeting aggregates. These individual predictions can be sliced, summarized, and compared according to flexible criteria, based on observed data or even other predictions.

  For example, you could look at your at-risk customers (predictive) by acquisition channel (observed), or examine the types of brands (observed) your high-value customers have bought (predictive).

  Our modeling philosophy tends towards Bayesian approaches. As we observe each customer’s behavior over time, we revise our opinions about his or her probable future behavior.

  We some some t-shirts that say Pareto No Big Deal. If you get this joke or even if you don’t and just want a free tee and have made it this far in the FAQ let us know and we’ll send you one.

• How will Custora help us reduce churn?

  Custora uses machine learning and predictive analytics to create a likelihood to churn score for each customer. The score is calculated and updated daily, so that shoppers that typically only purchase at holiday aren’t identified as at-risk if they haven’t made a purchase in 30 days, but weekly shoppers will be flagged after only a few weeks of non-activity. Retailers send tailored communications to shoppers when their churn risk score passes a pre-set threshold which maximizes the likelihood of keeping them in the fold.

• What if I already have a CRM? Do we need to replace it to use Custora?

  No, you don’t need to replace your CRM if you already have one. But maybe you could. So let’s talk and find out. In many cases, Custora sits “on top” of an existing CRM database (aka “Old CRM”) to unlock the value of that sweet sweet customer data within — providing predictive enrichment and making it accessible across the organization.

  Bottom line: Custora plays nicely with traditional CRM systems.

• Where can I find Custora’s latest puppet music video?

  Right Here