Insider Delivers Personalizaton at Scale and Speed with AWS

Insider increases the speed of customer notifications by 30 percent with AWS Lambda. Its Growth Management Platform (GMP) predicts customer behavior so marketers can personalize messages. Insider’s GMP uses Amazon Aurora for dashboard views, Amazon DynamoDB for categorization, and AWS Lambda for notifications.

With 24 offices around the world, Insider enables digital marketers to accelerate growth across multiple channels, from customer acquisition to revenue and retention, using its Growth Management Platform (GMP). The platform predicts customer behavior in real time so marketers can personalize messages to help acquire, activate, and retain customers.

The GMP constantly collects data from anonymous users through offline as well as fixed web, mobile web, and app sources. It categorizes users via hundreds of attributes and their past, present, and predicted behaviors in fractions of a second. The platform then personalizes interactions with those users based on the categorization results to improve the brand experience. The process must be highly reliable and easily maintained, so Insider’s IT team can concentrate on developing code and not lose time on platform management.

To deliver high performance, stability, and simple management, Insider chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). And to keep management expenses in check, the company maintains its infrastructure with a team of five, using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for application orchestration. If Insider didn’t have Amazon EKS and the infrastructure ran on-premises, it would need a team of at least 50 people. Kadir Evren Baykan, founder and head of the mobile business unit at Insider, says, “We stay tightly focused on development. In our world, continual improvement is a must.”

This focus on improvement led Insider to use AWS Lambda, which runs code without provisioning servers, as a way to distribute messages quickly and at low cost. Evren Baykan says, “AWS Lambda functions have helped deliver hundreds of millions of push notifications 30 percent faster, increasing the probability of customer engagement.”

Using AWS, Insider continues to grow. Digital marketers from more than 1,000 businesses now work with the GMP. To keep enhancing levels of service, Insider is updating customer dashboards in milliseconds using Amazon Aurora, which is up to five times quicker than standard MySQL databases.

Furthermore, with Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database, GMP categorizes website visitors in just 25 milliseconds compared to 500 milliseconds with its previous NoSQL database solution. This has increased categorization speeds by 95 percent.