Learn about how Machine Learning can be used to holistically optimize email communication for driving growth and engagement.

2. ​ Ravi Kiran Holur Vijay
​ Manager, Applied Research
​ data.linkedin.com
Holistic Email Optimization For
Driving Growth & Engagement
Venue: Big Data Innovation Summit 2016

3. Our vision is to create economic
opportunity for every member
of the global workforce.
3
Jeff Weiner

4. Our mission is to connect the world’s
professionals to make them more
productive and successful.
4
Jeff Weiner

5. 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
5
Email Communication

6. LinkedIn is a member’s first
company
• Respects member’s settings
• Makes it easy for members to
change settings
6
Email Communication Settings

7. 7
Email Communication Contents

8. 8
Benefit of Sending Email

9. 9
Cost of Sending Email

10. 10
Aside: Delivery Time and Spread Optimization
V/S

11. • 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.
11
Need for Multi-Objective Optimization

12. 12
Multi-Objective Optimization
Cost Benefit
Revenue
Growth
Engagement
Email
Blindness
Complaints

13. 13
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

14. 14
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/

15. ©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?