Growth is hard. But change is harder. In this blog post, we’ll share some insider details from three different customers who, in pursuit of their continued growth, had to make a significant marketing change to reach the next phase of their company journey.
We’ll explore how these businesses carefully evaluated their most powerful marketing assets—people, processes and technologies—to identify a growth path that best complemented their strengths.
People Growth: Understanding Organizational Characteristics
One of our largest customers in financial services built their success from the ground up. As a dynamic startup, they established a unique and highly technical marketing organization. Their reach extended through most of their core service offering. Ultimately, their formula worked well and carried them through a high-performing IPO.
For years, they used a homegrown marketing automation solution but had recently maxed out its capacity. Further growth meant finding a new platform that could tie the independent marketing services of eight separate technical organizations together.
Their unique go-to-market (GTM) strategy called for a flexible solution that could adapt to each teams’ specific business processes while simultaneously extending itself across collaborative and centralized data initiatives.
Stakes were high because of their sheer scale alone:
- Tens of millions of monthly messages
- Thousands of campaigns per year
- Active users from dozens of different product and feature teams
This company had to get it right the first time. Production volume was too great to choose the wrong growth marketing platform.Â
Decentralized Growth
For this company, it was of utmost importance to integrate a growth marketing platform that drove cross-functional cohesion as they scaled further. Early on, they identified that their future growth was contingent upon decentralizing marketing operations while still maintaining data integrity, customer privacy and cross-functional resources.
Evolving Growth With Iterable
Bringing Iterable into the fold made a near-immediate impact for this customer. The platform’s flexibility has met their teams’ independent, data-driven marketing needs and has reshaped how their teams operate.
Most importantly, all organizations are able to use the platform in support of their team’s specific marketing initiatives:
- Streamlined operations have increased overall productivity
- Newly automated campaigns are driving 60% of all conversions
- Cross-channel messaging is generating 20-25% lift over their previous email-only approach
Process Growth: Eliminating Execution Friction
One of the world’s most popular fitness apps transformed itself from a snazzy app to the de-facto choice of outdoor fitness enthusiasts across the globe. They were growing by tens of millions of users each year, and it wasn’t long before they outpaced their legacy platform.
They had a powerhouse marketing team of just three scrappy marketers, who, during their rapid growth, built a playbook of successful programs…albeit, with significant process hurdles along the way.
Their legacy platform was the core of their biggest GTM challenges—getting data in and out was a slog and left them trailing behind their customers’ experiences. They found themselves far too reliant on external teams for generating the basic marketing data needed for them to execute. Case in point, this data inaccessibility was enough of a hassle that even rudimentary subject line testing was avoided due to the high level of required effort of all those involved.
Building From a Strong Foundation
This team knew that greater marketer empowerment would optimize their already proven campaigns and initiatives. But their growth meant more than just finding a tool to do things faster. Activating their still untapped troves of user data held transformative marketing potential—better automation, deeper segmentation, greater personalization, and sophisticated experimentation. They already possessed the fundamental processes, data, and vision in place to do it; they just had to eliminate the legacy linchpin holding them back.
Evolving Growth With Iterable
Since integrating Iterable into their marketing stack, they’ve brought their data-first marketing vision to life. They’re learning more about their customers—types of athletes, activity levels, etc.—and using that same data to usher in a new era of campaign personalization.
They’ve refined existing GTM processes and are constantly trying out new workflows to help improve their entire product experience:
- Data-enhanced lifecycle messaging, personalization and segmentation practices
- Significantly improved experimentation capabilities (A/B testing, holdouts, send times and more)
- Mobile messaging program expansion
Technology Growth: Continuity Across Experiences & Channels
A musical instrument company recently launched three unique mobile apps to extend their consumer reach. Each application was designed to keep players closely connected to their instruments as they grew as players: one for online lessons, another for instrument tuning, and a third for managing sound settings.
They sent emails through a legacy ESP while their mobile messaging came from a separate, bolted-on platform. For about a year, the combined solutions were reaching customers on email and push, but only as independent campaigns; meaning a customer could receive an email that might tell a different story than mobile push—one customer, two different experiences.
Customer data was living inside separate tools that couldn’t communicate with each other. With their three mobile apps gaining traction, it was imperative that the marketing team keep each player’s experience cohesive. Sticking with the same toolset meant further distancing their tools, data, teams, and initiatives and producing marketing that directly contradicted the immersive instrument experience that their apps could offer.
Piecing It All Together
This company needed a platform that was capable of managing not only their buyers’ journeys but their players’ journeys, as well. Players’ needs change as familiarity with their instruments grows and so must the company’s marketing. Content sent on all channels had to consistently reflect the player’s current experience—greeting a new player hoping to learn basic chords with an advanced tutorial video was unacceptable. Marketing with experiential data would pave their players’ paths to long-term brand affinity.
Evolving Growth With Iterable
Implementing Iterable helped drive a strategic shift in this company’s marketing strategy. By centralizing all of the company’s messaging channels and customer profile data, their teams were able to keep their customers engaged as they browsed, bought, learned and played.
Consolidation gave this team greater control over their customers’ experiences and led to a complete remapping of a much more personalized player journey:
- Personalized campaigns based on instrument, music genre, frequency and more
- Continually improving retention rates of month-to-month subscription players
- Consolidated customer profiles are capturing information across all digital sources
Visualize Your Potential
Organizational growth takes on many different shapes and sizes but its lift ripples through the rest of the company. As you think about your company’s best opportunities for growth, remember to consider all the potential within your people, processes, and technologies. What could be accomplished if you removed the current blockers and set your go-to-market team free?
Here’s a tip to get you started: imagine you’ve replaced your legacy technologies. How would that sole act impact all marketing operations? Come see what’s possible with Iterable by signing up for a customized demo today.
