You’re the first-hired DS for a company. On your first week, an executive from marketing approaches you, explaining (in their terms) a serious business issue that they are having. They need to figure out an efficient means of communicating to customers through email to let them know of upcoming sales that they might be interested in. With very little additional detail provided to you, the executive merely says, “I want to see the click and open rates go up on our emails.” If this is the only information supplied, and repeated queries to members of the marketing team simply state the same end goal of increasing the clicking and opening rate, the number of avenues to pursue seems limitless. Left to your own devices, do you focus on
- content recommendation and craft custom emails for each user?
- Provide predictions with an NLP-backed system that will craft relevant subject lines for each user?
- Attempt to predict a list of products most relevant to the customer base to put on sale each day?
With so many options of varying complexity and approaches, and little guidance, creating a solution that is aligned with the expectations of the executive is highly unlikely.