Ravi Kiran Holur Vijay  Manager, Applied Research

 data.linkedin.com

Holistic Email Optimization For Driving Growth & Engagement

Venue: Big Data Innovation Summit 2016

Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member

of the global workforce.

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Jeff Weiner

Our mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more

productive and successful.

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Jeff Weiner

LinkedIn uses email as a communications channel to connect members to opportunities and to keep them informed about their network

•  Right Message

•  Right Channel

•  Right Time

•  Right Frequency

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Email Communication

LinkedIn is a member’s first company

•  Respects member’s settings

•  Makes it easy for members to change settings

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Email Communication Settings

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Email Communication Contents

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Benefit of Sending Email

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Cost of Sending Email

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Aside: Delivery Time and Spread Optimization

V/S

•  Thresholding on Psess achieves a good trade-off between sessions and sends. •  For example, we could cut 40% of the emails and still maintain roughly 7% of sessions.

•  But, this achieves a linear trade-off between complaints and sends, which is no better than dropping emails at random.

•  On the other hand, thresholding on Pcomp achieves a good trade-off between complaints and sends •  But, this is a poor one between sessions and sends.

•  An ideal solution would achieve a sessions-sends trade-off of the blue curve and a complaints-sends trade-off of the red curve.

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Need for Multi-Objective Optimization

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Multi-Objective Optimization

Cost Benefit

Revenue

Growth

Engagement

Email Blindness

Complaints

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Modeling Multi-Objective Optimization

Machine Learned Models

Minimize Sends

Maximum acceptable loss in global engagement

Maximum acceptable loss in product-specific engagement

Maximum acceptable increase in global complaints

Maximum acceptable increase in global complaints

Ensure probability distribution

Online Send Decision

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Architecture for Multi-Objective Optimization

http://blog.linkedin.com/2015/11/10/sending-less-email-is-just-the-beginning/ https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2015/10/how-experimentation-helped-linkedin-improve-email-communication http://blog.linkedin.com/2015/07/27/less-email-from-linkedin/

©2014 LinkedIn Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

 I am grateful to my team at LinkedIn, this is OUR work!  Read more about our team at data.linkedin.com.

 Questions?