个性化营销的规模化：Uber的应用外推荐系统
Out-of-app (OOA) communication (such as email, push, and SMS) is an important growth lever at Uber. It allows marketers, product owners, and operation teams to connect with users on a plethora of topics, including user promotions, new and favorite restaurants, etc. Building a system to personalize these communications presents unique and exciting challenges. In this blog post, we walk through these challenges and our journey in tackling them.
Uber的OOA（应用外）通信（如电子邮件、推送和短信）是一个重要的增长杠杆。它使得营销人员、产品所有者和运营团队能够与用户就各种主题进行连接，包括用户促销、新的和喜爱的餐馆等。构建一个个性化这些通信的系统提出了独特而令人兴奋的挑战。在本博客文章中，我们将介绍这些挑战以及我们在应对这些挑战中的经历。
Lack of Recommendation Context
缺乏推荐上下文
The first challenge is the lack of user context in OOA communications. At the core of these personalized communications are restaurant recommendations and merchant offer recommendations. These recommendations are highly local (i.e., users can only order from nearby restaurants). In standard product recommendation systems, users are shown recommendations as they enter the app. Both the user’s location and intentions are often known. On the other hand, recommendations in OOA communications are pushed proactively to users for nondeterministic future viewing. Ensuring that recommendations stay relevant, even in the absence of critical user context, is a major challenge for our system.
第一个挑战是OOA通信中缺乏用户上下文。个性化通信的核心是餐厅推荐和商家优惠推荐。这些推荐是高度本地化的（即用户只能从附近的餐厅订购）。在标准的产品推荐系统中，当用户进入应用程序时会显示推荐。用户的位置和意图通常是已知的。另一方面，OOA通信中的推荐是主动推送给用户以供将来的非确定性查看。确保推荐保持相关性，即使没有关键的用户上下文，对于我们的系统来说是一个重大挑战。
The second challenge is that recommendations in OOA communications need to be relevant to both the end users and the context of the communications. An email on membership benefits should include exclusive restaurant’s promotions, while an email celebrating the city’s neighborhoods should highlight locals’ favorite restaurants.
第二个挑战是OOA通信中的推荐需要与最终用户和通信的上下文相关。关于会员权益的电子邮件应包括独家餐厅促销活动，而庆祝城市社区的电子邮件应突出当地人最喜欢的餐厅。
Lastly, being able to tackle the above challenges at scale and in a cost-effective manner is another challenge to us. The s...