Putting faith in artificial intelligence to help with marketing campaigns

Saul Lopes, Virgin Holidays customer lifecycle lead, took a leap of faith on artificial intelligence as a tool to improve the brand's email marketing efforts by working with UK AI start-up Phrasee, and has seen that faith rewarded with over the past three years. Virgin Holidays increased email open rates by two percentage points which generated several million pounds in revenue, though Virgin will not disclose the exact figure. Tnooz asked Lopes what led him to Phrasee in the first place, how the system was deployed, and how else Virgin Holidays applies AI in its marketing efforts. Lopes says that the first motivation for employing an AI system to generate subject lines for the brand's marketing campaigns was overcoming system and staff limitations. "We had legacy IT systems and technology in place, and we wanted to change our approach and process. Virgin Holidays has about 200 communication types and sends about 22 million emails annually. I was looking for quick wins to supercharge our email marketing without infrastructure changes. "It made sense to address changes to subject lines first.