Ryzeo’s email marketing platform caters to ecommerce businesses, particularly targeting shoppers who don’t add an item to their shopping cart, and using real-time data and AI to generate personalized recommendations to convert these shoppers into buyers.

With traffic to ecommerce websites getting harder to acquire, merchants need to do their best to avoid lost sales from abandoned online shopping carts, and why they need to target shoppers who browse but ultimately buy elsewhere. Ryzeo helps e-tailers beat the odds and achieve double-digit revenue increases with the company’s digital behavioral marketing solutions.

Ryzeo leverages real-time data generated by events on its clients’ ecommerce websites, such as what a shopper views and searches for, to make AI-driven recommendations through website “suggested items” widgets and customized emails. The company can quickly present personalized offers and follow-up messaging to potential buyers.

Ryzeo’s platform was built on Apache Cassandra® many years ago. “We found Cassandra to be the best solution, with much less latency for database write operations compared to alternatives,” says Waheed Iqbal, Ryzeo’s Head of Networking and Systems. The active-everywhere architecture helps ensure consistent high availability.

Data platform reliability and performance are important because Ryzeo sends 500,000 emails a month in the form of newsletters and automated email sequences that are customized depending on which brands, products, or merchandise categories a shopper has browsed, searched, put in a cart, or purchased. “We have to reliably capture every event that comes in. We can’t afford to drop any events. If we lost some of that data, that would mean revenue-generating email sequences going unsent that would cost our clients money,” says Ryzeo COO Russell Miller.

Engineering managed to shorten the team’s development cycles with a microservice and API-first architecture built on Kubernetes. The Stargate data API gateway streamlines developers’ use of schemaless JSON, REST, and GraphQL, eliminating drivers and the need to learn Cassandra Query Language (CQL).

Ryzeo’s fine-grained system for product recommendations, customer segmentation, and message targeting helps put the right product in front of buyers at the right time – before they purchase from another merchant. As a result, Ryzeo’s clients see response rates that are ten times higher than they would be otherwise, with average email open rates of 40 percent and conversion rates of three to six percent.

The behavioral marketing operations depend on rapid database performance, with Cassandra delivering writes in under 20 milliseconds. If Cassandra didn’t reliably catch all the data events and write them to the database fast, their business couldn’t function.

By enabling clients to swiftly personalize recommendations and follow-ups to the 95 percent of shoppers who look at a product but don’t add it to their cart in the same visit, Ryzeo has a dramatic impact on sales. “On average, our clients see a total revenue increase of between eight and ten percent. The data we have suggests that our recommendation widget on a client’s website can increase sales up to another 30 percent,” Miller says.

The company’s recommendation widget, currently in beta, is just one new business opportunity made possible by smarter, faster use of data. “By unlocking exciting possibilities with rapid ingestion and analysis of data, we’re helping e-commerce merchants large and small compete against industry giants.”