Vipul Vyas, SVP of Go To Market Strategy, Persado – Interview Series

Vipul Vyas is the Senior Vice President, Go-To-Market Strategy at Persado. the only Motivation AI platform that enables personalized communications at scale, inspiring each individual to engage and act.

Vipul heads up the Go To Market (GTM) function. GTM is responsible for providing content and deal support for the sales, customer success, marketing, and operations organizations. Vipul has been a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for over the past 20 years. During that time, he has led multiple departments including business development, sales, customer success/account management, and products. His teams have engaged clients on strategy, change management, operations, and metric achievement using technology and business process improvement. He values developing close relationships with clients in order to drive real and lasting change.

Vipul has been responsible for creating over $10B+ in trackable benefit for his clients over his career and is named on 10 US patents. He has a B.S. in management information systems from the University of Virginia and an MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth College.

How did you find yourself as the Senior Vice President of Go To Market Strategy for Persado?

Over the past 25 years, I’ve worked at a variety of speech-related startups and prior to joining Persado, I was working at a machine learning startup in the healthcare space.

I saw an opportunity to extend that journey by joining the Persado team where I could bring my experience with natural language processing to work with some of the biggest brands in the world to help them better connect with audiences and improve customer experiences.

Persado describes itself as a Motivation AI platform, can you explain what Motivation AI is and how it connects emotions to language?

Motivation AI, a term we coined at Persado, is a specialized subset of generative AI technology used by brands to create language that is conversational, on-brand, and inspires customers to engage and act. Enterprise brands use Motivation AI to generate content for email, websites, social media, SMS, ads, and more.

Decision-making is intrinsically tied to emotion, and words can make or break a brand’s marketing success. So, although GenAI is often viewed as an efficient way to create text, images, video and other forms of content, it’s not always the most effective. Motivation AI takes GenAI a step further by evoking emotions and narratives proven to drive consumer action.

At its core, Motivation AI understands the factors that inspire and motivate behavior and it can match the right emotive language to different situations –– drawing on emotions such as achievement, gratitude, excitement, and more. Brands use it to personalize language in real time, zeroing in on the nuanced messages most likely to resonate with individual shoppers. Motivation AI has a profound impact on their engagement and conversion rates, and consequently, the bottom line.

Most enterprises are using generative AI wrong when they exclusively focus on increasing the quantity of messages. Why should the focus instead be on quality?

Consumers are inundated with advertisements and marketing messages. But, if your content doesn’t resonate with your audience, it doesn’t matter how quickly or how much you create.

Instead of just focusing on volume, brands should also pursue quality; in other words, demand effectiveness, not just efficiency, from AI. You can have both.

GenAI for marketing is a game-changer. It means brands can pivot their messaging to generate the right words and phrases that will perform best. When used to identify and deploy the best-performing language, the technology helps brands not only break through to customers but also realize its revenue-boosting potential.

Can you discuss how motivation AI leverages specialized data and insights to generate customer-relevant content?

Persado Motivation AI understands the emotions and motivators behind consumer behaviors more than other GenAI platforms. The platform is trained on a specialized dataset of real interaction and transaction data from 150 million U.S. consumers (the equivalent of 645 years of A/B testing) over 10+ years to measure and refine motivation-focused language, emotional response, and engagement. Using this data, the Motivation AI platform generates recommended copy that can improve digital marketing messages across channels and inspire consumer action.

How does Generative AI offer personalization at scale?

Personalization has become a requirement, with most consumers expecting it to some degree throughout their customer journey, but it can be difficult to achieve at an enterprise scale. With GenAI, brands can leverage insights from data to deploy personalized messages based on user behaviors and preferences in real-time. The Persado Motivation AI knowledge base is composed of 10+ years of customer communications, compared to GenAI tools that rely on the broader internet. The solution uses predictive analytics and decisioning models to generate content that “speaks” to each customer as if the brand knows them personally. This degree of personalization is more likely to resonate with consumers, ultimately motivating them to complete a purchase.

How are brands using Generative AI to reduce abandoned online shopping cart rates?

Language on the online cart and checkout pages — the most important stages of the buyer journey — is often static and falls short of motivating customers to complete their purchase. With specialized GenAI, brands can personalize this language in real-time based on browsing behavior, preferences, buying history, and the emotional drivers that are most likely to resonate with consumers, increasing cart conversion up to 5%.

Can you give an example of how a major brand is using Persado to create better customer experiences and drive results with emotion-informed marketing language?

Let’s look at Tapestry, the New York-based global house of modern luxury brands that includes Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman.

When Tapestry first came to us, the company was looking to achieve e-commerce growth. They wanted to learn more about how their customers interact with their brands and ultimately enhance the customer experience. With Persado, Tapestry gathered insights about their shoppers by using the Motivation AI platform to test message variations across the “Add to Bag” call-to-action, the “Shopping Cart” pages, as well as the final stage of checkout (“Shipping and Payment”).

From the tests, we were able to identify the text that significantly outperformed the alternatives –– and in this case, one of the winning phrases wasn’t a phrase at all, but rather a smiley face emoji. Based on the insights gathered using Motivation AI, Tapestry learned that something as simple as the addition of a specific emoji can have a major impact on conversion rates in the online shopping cart. This change, though small, elicited emotions like happiness and excitement and motivated customers to complete a purchase.

This is just one small example of how language insights can drive fast results, but it’s powerful nonetheless.

What is your vision for the future of customer interactions with Generative AI?

According to Gartner, 63% of marketing leaders plan to invest in GenAI in the next 24 months.

Marketers who are using GenAI to facilitate positive customer interactions will increasingly want to understand the why behind winning content. These tools can be used to help brands understand what emotions and narratives underpin content that improves CX and motivates action. In this way, brand marketers and GenAI solutions will be partners in creating the right content for any given brand, audience, channel, and goal.

In the future, GenAI will become more perceptive. We assume GenAI is about exclusively generating content but over time, it will be about listening as much as it is about saying. GenAI will further lean into its ability to understand what consumers want and become better at not only knowing what to say but also how to say it.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Persado.