Activate Live 2020 Videos

2020 Recordings

Activate is Iterable’s signature conference that expands the boundaries of modern marketing. Watch insight-rich sessions below on how marketing industry leaders are putting customers first and leading tech-forward programs that are designed to drive growth.

Review the highlights

Keynote #1

Shifting From the Routine to a Future of Creativity and Compassion at Scale

Justin Zhu • Co-Founder and CEO at Iterable

Bela Stepanova • VP, Product at Iterable

We kick off Activate Live in style as Iterable’s co-founder and CEO, Justin Zhu, discusses how today’s growth marketing landscape came to be and what lies on the road ahead for marketers around the world. He’ll then dive into the role that automation and AI play in the future of growth marketing, from optimizing routine communications to driving compassion and human touch in customer journeys at scale. Iterable’s VP of Product, Bela Stepanova, will then give a behind-the-scenes look into our platform, with an exclusive demo you won’t want to miss. Especially in our current global environment, simplifying complexity and unleashing creativity is essential to accelerate brand innovation. In this opening keynote, you’ll learn how:

Brands at the forefront of growth marketing are building lifelong customer relationships
Marketing evolved from an age of expertise to an age of data
Automation and AI can bring the human back into marketing

Keynote #2

Brand Building in the 21st Century

Jonathan Mildenhall • Co-Founder and CEO at TwentyFirstCenturyBrand

As one of the most respected practitioners in transformative branding, Jonathan Mildenhall brings a level of expertise and success that few others can match to help drive significant growth and financial value. In this talk, Mildenhall presents the 4 Pillars of 21st Century Branding—a bespoke framework that clients can implement immediately. During this energizing session, Mildenhall illustrates how applying these four pillars to Airbnb helped create the most influential travel brand on the planet, recently valued at over $35 billion. Attendees will see real-life examples through Mildenhall’s riveting case study on brand activity in each of his four pillars:

Purpose-led, ensuring the purpose transcends, but is not disconnected from, the business plan
Community-driven with aligned incentives across customers, investors & employees
Technology-enabled by a world-class, data-driven product
Narrative-based to unify all stakeholders with one shared and compelling story across all touchpoints

Customer-First

The Customer-First track will discuss how to place empathy at the heart of your growth marketing strategy. These sessions will demonstrate how to create human connections that will lead to relationships, which in turn will generate long-term loyalty.

Emergencies, Email, and Everything in Between: How to Market Your Brand During a Crisis

Sophia Le • Email Marketing Consultant at Modulus7

It’s on every marketer’s mind in 2020: How do you sell your products and services during an emergency or crisis? In this session, former emergency manager and email consultant Sophia Le will unveil emergency and crisis communication standards used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and how they can be applied to your marketing campaigns. You’ll learn:

Four ways to establish trust with your customers, with accompanying email examples
Why managing your emotions is just as important as managing the message
The top three cross-channel mediums used in disasters around the world

Doing More With Less During a Recession

Gary Grimes • Senior Director of Consumer Product at CareerBuilder

Samir Shamma • Engineering Lead at CareerBuilder

April Mullen • Director of Strategic Insights at SparkPost

Join Gary Grimes, Senior Director of Consumer Product at Careerbuilder, on how to focus on core quality, operational efficiency and depth of experience in a post-coronavirus marketplace. Session sponsored by SparkPost.

Read the Signals & Grow through Downturns

Birk Cooper • Chief Marketing Officer at Fetch Rewards

Join Birk Cooper, CMO at Fetch Rewards, as he shares how Fetch Rewards has sustained continual growth in an uncertain consumer climate. Learn how their team used key funnel indicators to pre-emptively identify shifts in their customers’ values, as well as the steps they’ve taken to successfully tailor their marketing programs around them. In this session, you’ll also take away: – Tips for refining your own acquisition and retention strategies – Insights about the buying behaviors of COVID-19 customers – Lessons learned from TikTok users and more!

Mental Inbox

Matthew Smith • Founder, CEO at Really Good Emails

If your email is transacting with your customers rather than relating to them as people with human problems, then you’re missing out on huge opportunities for emotional connection that leads to loyalty, connection and big business. This session is designed to walk through how relational design for each part of the email cycle and the templates themselves can change the entire narrative of how your company messages customers—whether B2B or B2C or anything between.

Write Emails for Your Reader, Not Your Boss

Katie Raynolds • Retention Marketing Manager at Redfin

Nobody wants to be trapped in a one-sided conversation with someone who only talks about themselves. So, why is it that we as marketers allow that behavior from our own brands? In this session, Katie Raynolds, Retention Marketing Manager at Redfin, will cover how to write email content that focuses on your user—instead of content that focuses on your business. She’ll share examples of successful A/B tests that the team at Redfin ran to increase opens and clicks, and why they worked. Then she’ll walk through a helpful copywriting rubric to get yourself in your user’s mindset, and how to develop action-oriented copy to engage users.

Breathing Life Into Boring Business Categories

Alex Reed • Co-founder and CMO at Truman’s

Ceiling fans. Surface cleaners. Lighting. It’s okay—we’ll pause to allow for that yawn. Those products generate billions in annual sales, even as few consumers can name the brands they own. After guiding Big Ass Fans to a $500 million sale in late 2017, Alex co-founded Truman’s to bring much-needed disruption to the cleaning products industry. Along with an abundance of cleaning puns, in this session, Alex will detail his comprehensive approach to marketing and share his technique for breathing life into product categories that need a fresh start.

Tech-Forward

The Tech-Forward track will dive deep into the growth marketing technology stack, discussing the inner workings of cross-channel integration and automation. These sessions will discuss how to create, execute and optimize campaigns across email, mobile push, in-app messaging and more.

Taking the Sting Out of the Migration Process

Andrew Harner • Lead Email Manager at Scribd

Scribd, one of the world’s largest digital libraries, offers unlimited books, audiobooks, magazines and news to over 1 million paid subscribers. Discover how Andrew Harner, Lead Email Manager, and the Scribd team migrated 80 transactional and marketing emails from a legacy enterprise platform and an internal SMTP server to Iterable in just three months! You’ll walk away with guiding principles, including how to:

Develop a robust migration roadmap
Align the vision of the migration with your team
Nail every facet of project management and execution

How to Standardize Marketing Messaging for Maximum Efficiency

Bridget Overson • Associate Marketing Manager at Care.com

Do you find yourself coding the same things over and over again? Do your company’s headers give you a headache? What do you do when your creative team decides they want to change that blue headline color yet again? Filled with tips you can implement in your multi-channel marketing program starting right now, this session will cover some of the different ways Care.com is using Iterable Snippets to simplify their template builds—not only to increase efficiency but also to strengthen brand adherence across multiple channels and campaigns. We’ll cover the basics, as well as more advanced solutions utilizing handlebars, data variables and positional parameters. In this session, we will show you some of our favorite ways to use Snippets that help us to simplify our team and cross-functional partners’ day-to-day work, and make the Iterable platform more accessible to other users—even those with no coding experience!

In-App Messaging: To Infinity and Beyond!

Neil Wainwright • CEO at UpHabit

UpHabit, a contact relationship app on iOS, Android, MacOS and web, keeps the world a little more connected—one relationship at a time. With the user experience as a focal point, CEO Neil Wainwright and team knew their communications had to span across channels to build sustained customer interaction. Learn how UpHabit uses in-app messaging for user onboarding and engagement to achieve:

Customizable message design that includes graphics, animations and CTA buttons
Data flexibility to send tips and tricks based on user behavior
A whopping 718% increase in subscriber conversion and 42% drop in churn

Hey Alexa, How Do I Integrate Voice in My Cross-Channel Marketing?

Davida Gaffney • Email / Web Developer at Storage Mart

Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Bixby—voice assistants are one of the most talked-about marketing innovations in 2020. No matter the size of your team, or its development experience and capabilities, virtually any brand can harness the power of voice within its cross-channel marketing. Davida will demonstrate how StorageMart is using voice to catalyze cross-channel triggers leaving you with the knowledge to understand:

Why to start building your brand’s voice
What tools you can use to get started
How to align voice experiences with channel opportunities

Using Real-time Data to Power a Personalized Customer Journey

Laura Brodie • Director, Customer Lifecycle & Growth at Ritual

We will walk through the evolution of an example workflow, from real-time audience creation in Segment to defining enrollment triggers in Iterable, plus tips on how to bring this data into your BI tools to measure the overall impact on metrics such as retention and lifetime value. You’ll leave this session with the ability to: -Build real-time audiences based on website activity, user data, and purchase history. -Use these audiences to trigger relevant and personalized campaigns or workflows. -Measure the long-term impact of these campaigns on metrics such as retention and lifetime value. Session sponsored by Segment.

What I Learned From Driving Record Customer Growth to Being Blocklisted in the Same Week

Jade Kolber • Senior Marketing Manager – Email at 99designs

99designs’ Cyber Monday 2019 promotion was projected to be their largest campaign ever. They prepared to send approx. 6M emails to their 2.5M subscribers, translated into six different languages. What proceeded was every email marketer’s worst nightmare: being blocklisted by Spamhaus thanks to some spam trap emails that had found their way on their list. The team had to work swiftly to find a solution—and despite the chaos, they still managed to hit those record customer growth results! In this session, learn from this cautionary tale about how to:

Champion list quality over quantity
Trust in your subscriber community
Maintain email marketing list hygiene

Schedule a Demo

Iterable is the growth marketing platform that maximizes lifetime value by enabling you to create better experiences for – and deeper relationships with – your customers. See how you can synchronize messaging across email, mobile push, SMS, in-app notifications, web push, social and more. Personalize each channel to serve a unique purpose as you build a cohesive lifecycle experience for your customers.

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About Activate

Activate is about empowering anyone involved in the customer experience—the Dreamers, Builders, and Makers—to bring every customer a joyful, meaningful experience. Thousands of marketing experts come together every year at Activate to learn, grow, and inspire the next wave of memorable experiences for customers worldwide. Come along with us to make a lasting impact.

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