It’s been a busy 2021 for us here at Iterable. We’re growing, changing, expanding, learning—we’re iterating. But this iteration expands beyond our company alone. It’s manifesting throughout our product, too! Inside this post, we’ll shine a light on some exciting new product enhancements we’ve brought to market.
But before we get there, let’s first revisit the inspiration behind these builds. During our Activate keynote, we discussed the evolution of marketing to better understand how we got to where we are today. Quick recap below.
Revisiting the Marketing Eras
The first era, which we’ve called the Creative era, was marked by compelling, bold ideas that captivated broad audiences. As you’d imagine with a label like “creative,” marketers of this era leaned hard into storytelling, narrative and striking visual details to elevate their products. Brands were differentiated by representing themselves in ways that made them as memorable as could be.
As time passed and technology advanced, marketers were soon armed with the tools needed to measure and understand the impact of these creative campaigns. This quest for comprehension naturally encouraged the marketers’ desire to optimize and fine-tune performance in search of growth and success. This was the transition into the Data-Driven era.
Now, it’s 2021 and we’ve entered an era centered on the human experience. In this Human-Driven era, marketers are challenged to fit into the context of each consumer’s daily life. Any claims made by brands and marketers must be substantiated through experience.
Seeking Improvement On Behalf of Customers
For many brands, playing by the consumer-mandated rules of the Human-Driven era are challenging. For some, a call for total transformation is needed in order to craft the intimate customer experiences that their audiences demand. For others, it’s a matter of rethinking their marketing approach and leveraging their tools and resources differently to meet customers on their terms.
At Iterable, we’re well aware of the different needs of different brands at any given stage of their journey. Our unifying factor, however, is our shared belief in the importance of delivering human experiences that resonate at the individual level. As we think about the way we grow and innovate, our customers and their needs serve as our guiding light.
With that in mind, we’re very excited to share some of our recent product enhancements and tools that will help you elevate your own customers’ experiences—here’s what’s new!
Messaging Insights
Messaging Insights is our new reporting page that gives you a better look at how your campaigns are performing. It provides both aggregated and campaign-level metrics so you can drill down into campaigns as needed. You can find any of your campaigns by filtering by message medium, campaign type, campaign state, and more.
User-friendly drop-down menus give you easy access to messaging insights.
We’ve also made changes behind the scenes to make this page faster so you can see your data sooner. Messaging Insights is your go-to for monitoring outreach performance!
Campaign Analytics
The new campaign analytics layout give users the ability to pin the most-viewed metrics to the top of the view.
On a similar note, we’ve revamped our existing Campaign Analytics page to make it easier to monitor and analyze how a campaign is performing. With a new look and feel, the new layout lets you pin your teams’ most important metrics to the top of your view before drilling deeper into other markers of performance.
The new left-hand navigation makes it easier to pinpoint granular information about your campaign’s delivery, engagement and retention. It’s a more intuitive and visual way to see what is (or isn’t) working.
Brand Affinity™
With Brand Affinity, customer sentiments can be saved to dynamic lists.
Brand Affinity offers marketers a new way to automatically classify how customers feel about their brand, and easily create meaningful campaigns across channels to build deeper connections and trust.
Understanding customer sentiments gives you the ability to send customers messages based on how they feel towards the brand.
Brand Affinity automatically calculates a customer’s engagement with email and mobile marketing and converts these scores into affinity labels. Marketers can leverage these affinity labels inside Iterable to easily create affinity-based segments and highly-targeted cross-channel campaigns to maximize retention with loyal customers, nurture customers through lifecycle stages, and mitigate churn with at-risk detractors.
Campaign Holdouts
Holdout groups are groups that will not be sent the specific campaign you’re working on.
Holdout groups provide marketers insights into how campaigns and campaign variants are affecting audience behavior and quantifies the impact of a conversion event. By defining and excluding a subset of your audience from receiving a marketing campaign within an experiment, you can better analyze the uplift of a desired custom conversion event from those who have received the campaign against those that have not.
In short, Holdout groups help answer the question, “Are campaigns making an impact on performance metrics and business goals we care about?” With Holdout groups, you now have the ability to measure the effectiveness and high-level impact of your campaigns to understand what’s working (and what’s not).
Selective In-App Notifications
Selective in-app messaging lets you customize messaging for Android and iOS separately.
With this product enhancement, you can easily toggle selective in-app messaging on or off.
Selective In-App Notifications enable the granular targeting of in-app message campaigns. Now, you can send in-app messages to specific apps under your projects, and better tailor messaging to Android and iOS platforms separately.
From the campaign set up page, you now have an option to enable Selective In-App and choose which of your different apps to target. We built this because we know that improving your reach is just as much about optimizing as it is about expanding it. For example, there’s times when a message is only relevant to one particular app or platform and now you have total control over how you fine tune it.
Cross-Channel Product Enhancements
We’ve made some major mobile traction this year and with that came a few select features we’re highlighting below.
SMS Opt-Out
Here, you can determine which SMS messages include the opt-out language.
Iterable’s SMS Opt-Out Settings helps you manage customer preferences and carrier compliance from a simple drop-down. Customize your SMS opt-out language and control your template settings to strike the right balance of appearance, privacy and deliverability that meets the needs of your brand and your customers.
As carriers like AT&T tighten filters around brand-initiated text messages from 10-digit-long codes, Iterable makes it easy for you to choose your compliance preferences—with inclusive opt-out messaging in initial, all or none of their SMS campaigns.
In-App Template Optimization
With the template optimization, excess HTML was removed and, as a result, file size is smaller.
Iterable recently optimized our In-App message performance. We discovered that our in-app template editor was baking-in excess HTML into messaging and was unnecessarily increasing file size.
We implemented a backend fix that removed the extra code from In-App messages and successfully reduced file size by 30%—all without any negative impact to customer delivery or display!
Mobile Inbox Persistent Read State
With this enhancement, mobile inbox message states remain the same across devices and with app re-installs.
Iterable also enhanced the Mobile Inbox experience with a few backend changes to unify message read states across devices and app re-installs. Making this change eliminates any potential duplication of previously read/displayed in-app Mobile Inbox messages! Similarly, this fix ensures any silently delivered messages reflect their most recent read/unread status.
The Next Iteration
Though we wish we had a crystal ball to predict how this Human-Driven era will shape the future of B2C marketing, one thing we know for certain is that experience will remain as prominent as ever.
At the end of the day, we marketers must continually prove our brands’ worth and earn the right to talk to our customers. But even as the lines separating the digital and real world continue blurring, we’re here to ensure that you’re appropriately future-proofed.
We’d love to chat with you about these new product enhancements and features. Schedule a demo today to speak with one of our many experts!
