Founded by Dean Ginsberg, Stacked Collective is a strategic consulting firm that helps brands improve the lifetime value (LTV) of customers through the development of their marketing tech stacks. By partnering with Iterable, Stacked Collective aims to help their clients accomplish their marketing goals by advising them on marketing vendor selection, assisting with the building and execution of high-performing lifecycle programs, and refining data architecture and infrastructure to optimize their technology stacks. Understanding that LTV hinges on the customer experience.
In our Iterable Academy “Ask an Expert series,” we explore exactly how Iterable works with our partners and what our partners set out to accomplish. In this installation of the Ask an Expert series, we’ll explore how Stacked Collective both identifies clients and how they determine—and solve—the problems they’re facing.
Three Iterable Customer Scenarios
In our interview with founder and CEO Dean Ginsberg, he highlighted three scenarios in which brands may find themselves interacting with Iterable. When reading the scenarios below, consider your marketing team and which scenario aligns best with you.
Starting Fresh
In the first scenario, brands are either just getting started with Iterable and beginning their onboarding or, maybe they haven’t even made their final decision on which platform they are looking to use. Here, it’s helpful for these brands to understand what options exist and what they are looking to do initially with their marketing program.
Making the Switch
In some cases, the brand may already be using a marketing platform but they’ve decided to make the switch to Iterable. In these cases, it’s helpful to audit the existing campaigns and data to successfully align campaigns after migrating to Iterable. Initial implementation, like IP warming, determining events that pass through and the structure of the events, how to develop campaigns, and more, need to be taken into consideration as well. .
Looking for More
The third scenario is those brands who are already using Iterable and are just looking to get more out of the platform. In this case, they may not be aware of all of the platform capabilities or understand the data flow which can lead to potential errors or gaps.
Each scenario provides an opportunity for Iterable partnerships to be of help and improve a brand’s relationships with their customers. For those brands just getting started, first steps revolve around defining what the brand needs to successfully communicate with their customers. For those who are switching, it’s making sure no data is left behind and new campaigns can be created to elevate previous ones. Lastly, for those clients looking to get more from the Iterable platform, Stacked Collective focuses on optimizing the existing tech stack so it’s able to work more effectively for clients and customers. They also will assist with training if the client wants to become more self-sufficient on the platform.
Understanding these three scenarios is key to being able to help brands achieve their goals. But, taking a step back, the question then becomes: how do you know which scenario you, as a brand, fit into?
Identifying Client Needs
When a client—a brand—first reaches out to Iterable or an Iterable partner, there’s usually an initial discovery phase. Stacked Collective, for example, takes four-to-six weeks to have conversations with various members of the clients’ teams and collect information about the brand to help determine where they fall in relation to the three scenarios and how Stacked Collective may be able to help.
There are then four steps the Stacked Collective team takes when evaluating client needs:
- What’s Existing? The team creates an overview of the existing campaigns and automation programs in a centralized place, where everybody can see it. All teams involved can then have a conversation about what is currently up and running.
- What’s Missing? After the initial overview, the team performs a gap assessment with a focus on technology, people, and process. As Dean puts it, “Are we operating on a sprint cycle? How many emails are we pushing out in a week or a two week period?”
- What’s Working? Then, the team puts together an average impact assessment. This involves a list of projects across email, SMS, push, in-app. Using a metric based on reach, relevancy, and frequency, compared to effort, Stacked Collective determines what’s working and what’s not.
- What Needs to Happen? Lastly, the team compiles a strategy deck. The deck gives context to the low-effort, high-impact projects that are working and, as Dean mentioned, “fits into a more cohesive understanding of the core pillars that we need to start shifting towards to transform the whole program.”
These could be questions you ask yourself the next time you evaluate your marketing efforts. Think about what’s in the works, what competitors are doing, what projects are low-effort but high-impact, and lastly, how that all fits into an overarching marketing strategy.
As you evaluate your marketing plans, remember that you’re not alone in this process. There are some common challenges the team has encountered in their client experiences that, perhaps, your brand has run into them as well.
Common Challenges
When working with multiple clients across various industries, Stacked Collective was able to identify some common challenges. Again, this goes to show that you’re not creating your marketing strategy in a vacuum. There are other brands and marketing teams experiencing the same struggles. It’s how you approach and solve the problem that sets you apart.
- Data Integrity & Streaming. Oftentimes, data collection and processing can pose huge challenges for marketers. As Dean said, “Is [it] the right data? Are the right data streams funneling into Iterable and [is it] the right structure that we need to run the program?”
- Automation. No business wants their marketing team sitting behind a screen, click-clacking the keys to create manual messages for individual customers. Re-evaluate what your current automations look like to make sure they’re serving your team.
- Testing. To ensure processes and automations are working correctly, you need to be able to test. “What level of testing is there,” Dean asked, “[is there] a system that we’re leveraging for testing, or are we just kind of testing things ad hoc? When we test something, is it systematic, meaning we’re learning and then iterating on it, regardless of the outcome?”
- Resources. Lastly, it can be difficult for marketing teams to understand what resources they need if they’re not sure what exists. But, rather than just listing off resources that could be useful, Stacked Collective says, “if you added these resources, this is the impact that would have on your attributable revenue to this channel, and you can look at it on an ROI basis.”
Any of these sound familiar? These are common challenges for a reason—it’s not just your team. But, if you’re looking for help solving for these marketing woes, you’ve come to the right place.
Stacked Collective + Iterable
There are going to be hurdles your team faces as you explore your marketing strategy. Whether you’re just getting started or knee-deep in the Iterable platform, just know there’s a web of partnerships here to support and help.
If you’re already an Iterable customer, check out the Iterable Academy for the full Stacked Collective course.
If you’re not an Iterable customer but want to learn more about our customer activation platform, schedule a demo today.
