Cornell.edu defines hyperbolic geometry as “the geometry you get by assuming all the postulates of Euclid, except the fifth one, which is replaced by its negation.“ I’m glad we cleared that up. It’s relevant because Coherent Path is an email optimization vendor that uses hyperbolic geometry to find the optimal time and message for each customer. The general idea is that Coherent Path looks at the long-term path each customer should be led through, rather than just finding the next best message for the particular moment. As they put it, the “machine learning solution analyzes all of a retailer’s email content along with transactional data, determining the ideal email to send to each customer, as well as the most optimal day to send it. The technology suggests the products and categories that are missing or under-exposed for each recipient, resulting in deeper and broader catalog email exposure.” The company has added a content library that can more easily reuse existing emails. Another example of automation replacing conventional campaign designs. CDP obsessives will notice they build some sort of unified customer database along the way.

Incidentally, they released a survey yesterday on retailers’ use of email: turns out just half use data from an individual’s past email behavior to decide what email message(s) they will receive each week. Ouch! You can download it from http://coherentpath.com/email-marketers-dilemma/