Spotting a Diamond in the Rough: Crushing Data & Uncovering Success

Rocksbox is an interactive, hyper-personalized discovery and shopping service for fashion jewelry. For a monthly subscription fee, members gain access to rent unlimited jewelry from premium designers & brands. Stylists rely on in-house technology and customer-provided feedback to personalize each box shipped directly to the customer’s door.

How does Rocksbox work?

1. New members take the Style Survey to indicate style preferences. They can also select pieces directly from the Wish List.
2. Rocksbox Stylists send members a curated, 3-piece jewelry set to wear on loan.
3. When they’re ready for a refresh, members can swap at anytime for a new set of jewelry. Members communicate with their Stylist by leaving feedback, ensuring an even more personalized next box.

In addition, Rocksbox members can purchase jewelry right out of their box using member rewards and discounts.

Growth Marketing

Member engagement is inherent in Rocksbox’s business model with personalization at the core of the experience. Growth marketing at Rocksbox combines user acquisition and member engagement, optimizing all points of communication to maximize ROI. The team is highly experimental and data-driven, always exploring new ways to engage their members and implementing journeys based on testing outcomes.

Email marketing and member communications are key for growth, customer activation and ongoing engagement – and this is where Iterable comes in!

One-Stop Customer Messaging

Rocksbox uses Iterable for all customer messaging, including:

• blast marketing newsletters
• drip campaigns
• re-engagement campaigns
• gifting campaigns
• influencer outreach
• triggered emails based on customer characteristics and actions
• transactional emails for purchases, forgotten passwords, etc.

This compares to their past use of separate systems which were difficult to scale, error-prone, lacked reporting/analytics and were not easy for a marketer to set up and use without the help of an engineer.

Iterable now allows a team of two marketers to manage engagement campaigns sending well over 500,000 monthly messages to hundreds of thousands of customers and subscribers!

Sophisticated Campaigns and A/B Testing

Rocksbox has taken advantage of Iterable’s tremendous flexibility to create sophisticated journeys and to optimize all aspects of their campaigns.

A simple example of a journey in action is Rocksbox’s feedback request journey:

• When a member’s return box is scanned by the postal service, they are prompted via email to leave feedback (if they haven’t done so already on the website) for their Stylist. Rocksbox Stylists rely on this incredibly valuable feedback to curate an even more customized experience in their next box.
• In a certain time period, if a member has not yet left feedback on the pieces in their Rocksbox, they will receive an email prompt upon receipt of their returned box from an Iterable journey.
• At that time, if they’ve already left feedback, they will instead receive an email notification with a secondary call to action, like a reminder to add new items to their Wish List.

This flow has been tested and been found to have excellent results in terms of future engagement.

To make the most of their opportunities, Rocksbox has A/B tested every single message they send with Iterable. This includes testing bolder subject lines, sender name and title, main copy and more. Among other benefits, this testing has led to a 20% increase in email open rate across all campaigns, with similar gains for click-through rates, conversions and ultimately revenue for the company

The growth marketers at Rocksbox have standardized on Iterable as their key platform for managing and optimizing all ongoing customer engagement.

Founded in 2019, Headway is a global edtech startup with Ukrainian roots. They make learning easy, fun, and accessible through bite-sized, on-the-go learning experiences. Their flagship product, the Headway app, is used by more than 15 million people in 35-plus countries, featured in the Apple App Store and Google Play stores, and top 10 in the education category.

With Headway, users decide how they want to learn—through video, audio, or text—and what they want to learn, based on their self-growth goals, such as productivity or leadership hacks. Subscribers can use it throughout the day, like while getting ready, commuting, waiting in line for coffee, etc. There’s a gamification element to the Headway app as well, which allows users to set goals based on their quest for new knowledge and skills, track progress, and collect achievements. 

As Headway emphasizes, “Enjoy the fun, fully customized journey of learning!”

In a Mobile World, Single-Channel Communication Misses the Mark

As an app-based platform, Headway understands that mobile channels are the best avenues to reach repeat and new subscribers. Last year, they recognized that using an email-only platform limited their opportunities to reach and engage a vast number of mobile-inclined customers, and resulted in these marketing limitations: 

• They lacked powerful tools such as advanced segmentation, AI, and A/B testing to streamline the end-to-end lifecycle management process and improve marketing activation, creation, personalization, scale, and impact.
• Their previous Email-Service Provider (ESP) wasn’t built for data—that meant an inability for Headway to unlock key information which influences more customer-centric communications across multiple channels.
• An inability of the ESP to integrate with existing tool stacks (e.g. Amplitude and AppsFlyer) meant fewer advanced data application possibilities like richer customer insights.

By depending on an email-only platform, Headway couldn’t deliver cross-channel communications to different audiences, at certain times, including unique content that resonates with each subscriber and supports their quest for knowledge and self-improvement.

Getting Ahead, With Iterable

In May 2022, Headway switched to Iterable and they haven’t looked back. They found joy by having one solution with an intuitive interface and wide-ranging features, such as robust segmentation, a flexible data model, and machine learning. With Iterable Headway can create unique, timely, cross-channel communications that forge deeper customer connections for better brand awareness, satisfaction, and loyalty. 

As the latest addition to Headway’s marketing toolkit, Iterable also helps them to “maintain balance in the type of communications users receive, and how often, which is essential to stay more reactive to users’ wide-ranging activities, behaviors, and desires to enhance their knowledge and skills,” said Zarubina.

Now, Headway can effectively segment subscribers according to behavioral and user data like how often they use the app or whether they have a subscription, and send emails, push notifications, or both—a benefit that wasn’t available less than a year ago. This has especially impacted Headway’s onboarding experience.

A Better Onboarding Experience With A/B Testing, AI, and Journeys

Freemium and premium users are both important to Headway’s business objectives. They make up their evolving customer base, but have different behaviors. Freemium app users may hesitate on purchasing a premium subscription. Meanwhile, premium users don’t always use the app consistently or for a long period of time.  

The first week after signup is the most important for the lifetime value of Headway users because this is when they are getting acquainted with the product and deciding on a subscription purchase. With this in mind, Headway’s marketing team created a journey using Iterable Studio for someone’s first week on the app. The flow for the journey has two paths for freemium and premium users. 

• For freemium users, communications convey the app’s benefits, show how flexible and easy it is to use, and entice them with offers so they opt to become a premium subscriber, and eventually see how this option meets their needs. 
• For premium users, communications emphasize reasons to continue using the app. For example, it has interesting features like gamification, plus a wealth of resources and curated collections available in multiple formats, but only found in Headway. The messages emphasize the different ways to use the app for lifelong learning.

Taking this approach to better connect with both groups of users, Headway hopes to keep all of their users engaged by habitually using the app, and ultimately convert freemium users to premium subscribers. By having access to user data in Iterable, like a user’s educational interests, and behavioral data, such as the actions a user is taking in the Headway application, they can better segment their audiences and increasingly personalize communications throughout the user lifecycle. With Iterable, they can also add event checks to a journey to see if someone makes a purchase or opens a specific message, for example, or include exit rules that remove someone from the journey based on a certain action or attribute change. 

By sending more personalized messages based on user data and using features like exit rules, Headway has avoided overloading someone with irrelevant notifications, created more opportunities to deliver useful advice that makes the app stickier with its users. These personalized messages have also supported more click-to-purchase, and freemium-to-premium subscriber conversions.

Fast, Comprehensive A/B Testing Improves Performance and Conversion

Headway appreciates the ability of fast, comprehensive A/B testing using Iterable’s experiment builder, which reassures them that they deliver the right messages, at the right time, through the best channels as people are introduced to the app. Previously, it took them more than a week to launch a test, but they launch them in a matter of minutes now.  

In their onboarding journey, they’ve tested different email subject lines or the call-to-action (CTA) in the email body. They recently ran A/B tests on three different subject lines for their welcome email with the goal of improving engagement and conversion to purchase:

1. Let your growth begin 💪 
2. Learn in less time with Headway! ⏰ 
3. So nice to meet you 💙 

The third subject line test result was the winner with a 46% email open rate (OR), contributing to an overall OR lift of 14%, an increase in click-to-open rate (CTOR) of almost 3%, and conversion to purchase increase by 2.3%. 

Iterable’s testing capabilities help them learn what resonates with users, and what doesn’t, so they can modify existing campaigns or execute new ones that generate lasting impact and positive results.   

AI-Driven Features Create Meaningful Subscriber Experiences

Headway leverages Iterable’s AI Suite within their journeys, including Send Time Optimization (STO) that uses machine learning to analyze historical engagement behavior and select an optimal, per-person send time for email and push messages. In fact, applying STO in their journeys has resulted in an average 7-9% increase in email open rates. They also concluded that the best time to send communications is late in the morning in a user’s time zone. 

Another AI feature, Brand Affinity™, automatically labels each individual user within Iterable according to their level of engagement with the brand. Headway is using Brand Affinity to test sending specific offers only to their engaged freemium users in an effort to convert them to paying subscribers.

Finally, Headway plans to begin using Predictive Goals to identify segments of users who are likely to convert on their business goals of monetization and retention. It might involve sending personalized messaging to segments who are “most likely to complete their next challenge” within the app to excite them to do. For example, if someone is interested in learning to boost their productivity, Headway might follow up with a list of book summaries and challenges about productivity.

Improved Onboarding Journey Lifts Open Rates and App Purchases

Thanks to the combination of Iterable’s robust segmentation and cross-channel capabilities, A/B testing, and AI Suite, Headway has experienced the following results:

• The OR with emails sent to freemium and premium users increased by 12%, on average, and nearly doubled with push notifications. 
• Conversion to purchase from clicks in personalized emails for freemium users increased by 2.4%, on average. 

Conversion to purchase from opening push notifications for freemium users increased by 1.3%, on average.

Across emails and push notifications, they will continue to test, analyze, and measure average opens, clicks, conversion to purchase, app metrics like challenges completed, and unsubscribes. They’re focused on continuing to improve customer engagement, monetization, and retention with Iterable’s help, too. Going forward, Headway plans to add in-app messaging as another avenue to target and engage with their 15-million—and growing—customer base. 

 “We hope to send even more events from the app and use them to segment users by behavior. We’re also building logic for the recommendation system conditions in the app so users can receive more personalized content, powered by Iterable,” concluded Zarubina. 

There’s abundant opportunity ahead, and if they experience any challenges along the way, Headway knows Iterable will provide partnership, problem-solving, and collaboration to strengthen their communications, user experience, brand reputation, and LTV.

Memories, launched in 2020, is a digital memorial provider where users can capture, share, and save cherished memories and other reflections with friends and family in a private, secure place. When people are separated by distance or unable to physically attend a funeral or memorial service—which was a common occurrence during the pandemic—Memories is invaluable during a difficult time.

Now serving customers in 195 countries, they’ve hosted 500,000 online memorials and preserved 1.9 million memories that uniquely celebrate a life legacy for families, friends, and future generations. They’re also the partner-publisher of digital tributes for leading news mastheads in the United Kingdom and Australia, the digital memorialization partner for more than 250 funeral services in Australia and New Zealand, and part of Memories Group, the operator of FutureMe—a self-reflection product.

Evolution of Memorials Requires Scalable, Multi-Faceted Communications

When planning a memorial, people are often overwhelmed by the to-do list. There are higher-order tasks to manage (e.g. deciding between a burial or cremation) and supporting the emotions of loved ones, while processing both grief and loss. In such sensitive circumstances, Memories focuses on thoughtful customer engagement by considering how and when they distribute customer messages, the receptiveness to those messages, and users’ actions to plan and create their memorial for someone close.

A few years ago, Memories Group went through a significant relaunch, but wasn’t equipped with a customer communication platform that could support their B2B2C messaging needs, including personalized communications for each audience and individual user. For example, they couldn’t connect emotionally with their users during this sensitive time and journey of loss because they were unable to activate and segment customer data. This resulted in generic communications that were insensitive to a user’s grief— leading to lower engagement and a disconnect with their brand. They couldn’t test communication tactics either, which made it more challenging to know what resonated with users at each point of the customer lifecycle.

Memories’ distribution strategy is two-fold—via direct selling or partnering with resellers, such as White Lady Funerals, who may set up a Memories memorial on behalf of a client. This adds complexity to their communication needs. “It’s a true business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) distribution model, where we need to communicate with different audiences at the same time,” explained Lachlan Davidson, Chief Marketing Officer at Memories Group Limited. For example, there’s direct communication to end-users and as well communication to the resellers about actions a user takes to create their memorial. 

The combination of these challenges, plus the desire to closely collaborate with partners who share their “growth” attitude and trajectory were factors in Memories’ decision making and selection of Iterable—a like-minded partner to build their new communications.

Comprehensive Testing Improves “Welcome” Email Performance and Customer Volume from Resellers

Memories is focused on purchase and continued engagement, which makes “welcome” communication critical. Since the welcome journey combines administrative and marketing communications, Memories spent time evaluating and refining their approach to send the right messages at the right times so customers have positive experiences from the beginning. “If someone’s not using our product, they won’t get value from it, and we want to understand why, which means testing and retesting dozens of journeys and different communications,” shared Lachlan. 

Memories performed A/B testing using Iterable Experiments to improve the welcome communication series, looking at these variables:

• Timing – They factor in whether someone recently experienced loss and is planning a service or if they’re retrospectively compiling memories. Respectfulness is key, regardless of timing, so Memories tested communication outreach before, right after, or several weeks following a service, and settled on gradually-increased communications based on users’ actions in the platform. 
• Content and messaging – Depending on direct-to-consumer selection—through the website or a mobile app—or introduction through a reseller, unique customer communication is key. Memories found that with existing brand awareness, a straightforward welcome email with inspirational call-to-action (CTA) content had higher engagement. For customers unfamiliar with Memories or introduced to it through the funeral service provider they used, a welcome email required more Memories background, co-branded messaging, and CTAs to help someone know what to do next. 

By running these A/B tests, Memories improved the performance of their welcome email series sent after reseller introduction—75% of emails are opened activating users to create their first memory. This resulted in a 50% increase in open rate and this performance has influenced customer volume from resellers and incited the creation of 500,000 memorials across more than 190 countries. What’s more, as a result of cross-channel communications, Memories has seen a significant impact to their bottom line with revenue doubling year-over-year.

While their “welcome” communications strategy initially focused on email, Memories is starting more cross-channel engagement in Iterable. Mobile push notifications are first, and then they plan to try in-app messages to improve the number of mobile users creating memories. Then, they want to add SMS to support a concierge service intended to collect direct customer insights and give users the chance to voice feedback with a service representative.

Behavioral-Based Data and Individualized Media Influences User Engagement

From the “Welcome Series” journey, Memories hopes that customers take two steps as contributors that improve activation rates with memorials: 1) add their memories or 2) invite and then prompt friends and family to contribute by adding photos, videos, or sharing their life story—perhaps on a loved one’s anniversary, birthday, or the date of their passing. This way, the memorial grows at the beginning, evolves over time, and extends Memories’ lifetime value. 

Memories relies on Tealium to manage its event data, which informs behavior-based messages and outreach that help with customer engagement and retention. Lachlan explained that “behavior is what we thrive on and personalizing our communications based on this resonates emotionally with our users.” Iterable easily integrates event data from Tealium with a flexible model to inform and strengthen marketing communications with all of their audiences, in-turn improving their activation rates.  

To further personalize each experience, Memories is adding digital funeral elements to their welcome series. For example, a short tribute video that was created by a Funeral Director or family gets sent to their customer database and is uploaded into The Memorial, creating familiarity straight away and providing comfort and the knowledge that the memories a user has created of their loved one haven’t been lost. Additionally, a user may receive a message that shares an update on how many people have signed the digital guest book for a loved one’s funeral—prompting them to log in to see more details on who has signed. Memories has found that sending personalized content increases how many users  create memories, and their trust in and emotional connections with the brand.

Memories regularly measures user interest, engagement, and brand trust by collecting feedback during monthly concierge sessions with customers, tracking the users who take that first step in creating a memory or inviting others to participate, and reviewing weekly customer feedback reports. In the concierge sessions and feedback reports, they specifically explore details of users’ experiences, the influence of cultural or secular norms, if communications feel appropriate or inappropriate, and how these variables support more personal, impactful, trusted experiences with their brand. These different inputs give them indicators of how best to approach future marketing campaigns, plus their communication strategies and tactics. 

Iterable Support: A Key Differentiator and Success Driver

As the user base grew and their front-and back-end data architecture evolved, Memories was confident that Iterable could handle these changes, and others. There were instances where Memories was connected with highly-technical Iterable specialists who dug into their product, understood it and the unique data setup, and then provided solutions. 

The level of support and responsiveness from the in-market team makes Iterable feel like “an extension of the small Memories team,” and having a reliable partner that addresses any questions or concerns was “absolutely critical” for Memories.

Secret Escapes, founded in 2011, is a leading, members-only travel site that operates in 14 global markets. By partnering with suppliers, tour operators, and accommodations in 150 countries, they negotiate exclusive deals at hand-picked hotels and for holidays to support customers traveling in the UK, Europe, and beyond. 

Whether someone books a family getaway, honeymoon, or anniversary trip, Secret Escapes regularly negotiates and shares relevant deals to make your next trip exciting, enjoyable, stress-free, and affordable.

Business Expansion Puts Pressure on Communications Platform

With over a decade of supporting a variety of travelers’ requests, Secret Escapes recognizes and understands the nuances of marketing to different customers and geographies. According to Eurostat, average EU tourism expenditure varies—83% is travel inside Europe (and 43% within someone’s country of residence), while 17% is to other countries and continents (e.g., Asia and Africa). 

To support various needs, destination choices, and customer locations, Secret Escapes first personalized their advertising, creating more relevant ads for each market to maximize return on investment and marketing results. This happened with the wildly-popular “Whispering Lady” advertisement, which rolled out to 14 markets, with one billion impressions, and a 1.8X total return on investment (ROI). 

Applying personalization to all customer communication, including emails, became a higher priority as Secret Escapes scaled globally, faced unexpected industry pressures—like the pandemic—and memberships evolved. Unfortunately, before using Iterable, Secret Escapes was unable to track which deals and the order they were shared with users in their emails. This hampered personal targeting for more than 62 million customers and how the CRM team leveraged data to inform artificial intelligence. 

Another challenge from lack of data integrations involved ‘Search Emails’—one of the company’s most lucrative campaigns. Sometimes the deals a user saw online after a search weren’t the same ones they received in email. And Secret Escapes was limited to only showing discounts based on the destination searched vs. factoring in other crucial data such as trip type or date parameters.

Secret Escapes needed a comprehensive communication solution that optimizes timely member data to personalize engagement, supports cross-channel messaging, and creates stronger customer connections. Iterable was selected, with migration occurring in December 2021, and has steadily helped improve customers’ confidence in Secret Escapes meeting their unique travel needs.

Personalized Member Deals with Data Feeds

Iterable’s in-built data feeds have played a powerful role in helping Secret Escapes personalize customer communications—especially their emails. The CRM team uses data feeds to create a smart ‘send log’ solution—inclusive of all deals shared with members and all marketing campaigns—which now tracks impressions data to influence AI-driven engagement and targeted messaging. This approach involves three steps:

1. They use a ‘parent snippet’ that matches relevant holiday deals with a user’s recent search event data. 
2. They send that list to an internal server, which captures and stores the data, then returns it to Iterable in array format. 
3. Using a second snippet, they examine each deal in the returned array, and output the data to future email campaigns so each communication is personalized to a member’s different vacation needs and desires. 

With help from their tech and data team partners, the CRM team also uses Iterable data feeds to send full search queries to the same API used by the company website. The queries return near-real time search results that complement a member’s online search and reflect their destination, trip type, and date criteria. Now, CRM produces and distributes dynamic, timely ‘Search Emails’ with a 45% open rate and 8.3% click-through rate, and they foster better connections with current customers that builds long-term brand value, including member loyalty and a growing user base.

Learn more about this data-driven communications approach and how Secret Escapes benefits in this Loom video.

Centralized Communications Management Helps Secret Escapes Adapt to Market Demands

Along with enhanced customer targeting and engagement, centralized communications management with Iterable, plus alignment of CRM operations by function, has improved the speed at which Secret Escapes reacts to market and customers demands. This proved valuable when the pandemic hit (and in its aftermath), and travel nearly stopped.

“There’s nothing like a global pandemic to give a travel business some time to think.” Jen Lang, Chief Customer Officer at Secret Escapes conveyed during Activate. After taking time to strategically restructure and to choose partners like Iterable that support global scale, they are poised to successfully navigate a new industry and customer landscape as people return to travel.

Understanding Customer Affinity to Optimize for Conversion

In our increasingly digital world, brands that thrive build strong, personalized relationships with their customers. For many non-profit organizations, fundraising and building donor relationships are done in-person, and one-to-one—missing the opportunity of nurturing and engaging with donors online. 

dgtl fundraising, an agency for nonprofits, helps social good organizations build and execute digital strategies to fundraise and campaign—integrating the online and offline experience.  

“People want to support causes they care about, they want to be involved, they want to be part of something bigger than themselves,” said Dani González, Founder and CEO of dgtl fundraising. “But the way they engage and get involved [with non-profits] has changed. We work with organizations to help them adapt and become truly digital.” (Source)

Partnering with organizations like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund, dgtl fundraising helps acquire and nurture potential donors through highly-personalized, cross-channel campaigns.

“We focus first-and-foremost on building an emotional connection. We then look for engagement signals to indicate whether someone is a likely donor. There’s a direct correlation for us between engagement and propensity to donate,” said González.

Intelligent Segmentation With Brand Affinity

By leveraging Brand Affinity™, an intelligent personalization solution powered by Iterable AI, dgtl fundraising can intelligently identify and segment potential donors based on cross-channel engagement signals. Each donor (or potential donor) is assigned an affinity label indicating their overall sentiment (loyal, positive, neutral, or negative), which can then be used for segmenting new audiences, tailoring customer journeys, or personalizing dynamic content in templates using conditional logic. 

With a deep understanding of customer sentiment, dgtl fundraising can improve the donor experience by tailoring content and calls-to-action (CTA) based on where someone is in the customer journey. For example, donors with a loyal or positive Brand Affinity may receive a stronger CTA, while those identified as neutral or negative receive a softer CTA with content designed to nurture. Using Brand Affinity to tailor messaging helps optimize for conversions, minimize unsubscribes, and maintain high deliverability their agency customers depend on. 

Prior to Brand Affinity, the dgtl fundraising team used a series of dynamic lists to segment based on recency and frequency of engagement.

Converting Loyalists Into Donors

dgtl fundraising leverages Brand Affinity in a journey designed to convert their most engaged prospects into regular donors for Alzheimer’s research. Becoming a regular donor is a commitment to donate a set amount for the next 12 months. This cohort is high-value due to their recurring donation, and sees less than 10% attrition over the 12-month period—significantly less than the 20-30% attrition common with other agencies in the sector.

Historically, this journey was segmented based on email engagement only—looking at what they called “hyperactive” users based on the recency and frequency of engagement. 

Brand Affinity labels, in contrast, are dynamically assigned based on a user’s email and mobile engagement signals, and are weighted based on the types of messaging a user is engaging with or the actions they are taking—in addition to recency and frequency. 

Knowing that users who are highly engaged with their content are more likely to convert, dgtl fundraising tested the journey with their loyal and positive donors. While open rates for their loyal cohort exceeded 70% (yes, 70%!), what the dgtl fundraising team found most compelling was the significant jump in conversion rates for their loyal and positive donors. 

Using Brand Affinity, dgtl fundraising was able to nearly double conversion rates for their positive cohort—seeing 0.11% conversion with their previous targeting strategy,  to 0.2% conversion with Brand Affinity.

Improving Facebook Performance

dgtl fundraising uses Iterable’s integration with Facebook to create highly-targeted Custom Audiences and drive new donor acquisition. Knowing engagement is a key indicator of someone’s propensity to donate, these audiences were previously based on email open and click behavior (similar to their approach with “hyperactive” users). 

After seeing the lift in conversion from introducing Brand Affinity to their journey strategy, dgtl fundraising tested Brand Affinity with Facebook Custom Audiences. Users identified as either loyal or positive were synced to a Facebook Custom Audience, which then received ads with donation-focused CTA. 

By combining Brand Affinity™ with Iterable’s native Facebook integration, dgtl fundraising saw a 50% increase in conversion from their previous targeting strategy, with a lower Cost Per Action.

Delivering Higher ROI for Their Nonprofit Customers

With a deeper understanding of customer sentiment, dgtl fundraising is now able to deliver a customer experience that is optimized for conversion, minimizes unsubscribes, and improves deliverability. Donors receive messaging that is tailored to where they are in the journey to becoming consistent donors—educational content for those with a neutral or negative sentiment, and more CTA-driven content for those identified as loyal or positive. 

Being able to quickly identify potential high-value donors will also have implications for other areas of the customer experience. Telemarketing, for example, has historically been a lower-ROI tactic but by introducing the Iterable Brand Affinity™ labels to identify target cohorts, the dgtl fundraising team anticipates seeing better ROI for their nonprofit customers.

The Athletic subscription news service delivers powerful sports stories and analyses that bring millions of fans closer to the game. From breaking news and live commentary, to in-depth reads and exclusive interviews produced by more than 400 editorial staff members, subscribers receive meaningful coverage of professional and college teams. Their coverage spans a majority of North American markets, across the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NHL, MLB, MLS, NWSL, PGA, NCAA along with all 20 football clubs in the English Premier League (EPL). 

They prioritize delivery of a high-quality product so fans, avid and casual, get unrivaled reporting on their favorite leagues and teams. Subscribers can choose how they engage, consuming news online – through the highly-rated mobile app, their podcast series, The Pulse—a free daily newsletter—and more. Because users are able to customize their unique content preferences, the cross-channel experience must feel personal and dynamic. This way, each individual can have a meaningful connection to The Athletic from their first interaction.

Thrown a Curveball: Outgrew Their Legacy Platform

As The Athletic grew rapidly, they needed to expand their audience, and sharpen the focus on delivering a hyper-personal, cross-channel experience that keeps subscribers happy and satisfied. But, their legacy marketing solution required more manual time and effort to deploy customer communications. It was more challenging to optimize user data to build stronger customer connections, and overall, it couldn’t support cross-channel engagement, including mobile push, in-app messaging, and email. 

Subscriber satisfaction, growth, plus overall business success and efficiencies were on the line. “We are focused on personalization. It’s our core approach to marketing and we need to deliver personalization throughout the cross-channel experience and the entire user lifecycle, which our legacy platform couldn’t do,” explained Casey Malone, Director of CRM. Enter: Iterable.

Iterable Helps The Athletic Hit Goals with Scaled, Cross-Channel Connections

As a full-scale, marketing communications platform, Iterable can evolve with changing market dynamics and needs, help staff be more effective with their marketing efforts, and support The Athletic’s current business priorities. Those priorities include:

• Expand the subscriber base through personalized messaging to bring more sports fans unrivaled coverage
• Create brand visibility and awareness through automated cross-channel messaging
• Optimize The Athletic experience through targeted segmentation and testing to deliver the broadest, deepest, engaging sports coverage that retains subscribers

The Athletic now creates engaging marketing campaigns that span multiple user touch points—from email and push to in-app messages. Having a straightforward solution with a user-friendly interface means marketing and certain teams (e.g. CRM, Editorial, Social, Programming, etc.) get time back while gaining more data, insights, and avenues to enhance the creation, delivery, and promotion of top-notch sports reporting for fans. 

Robust Segmentation, Unique Targeting Drives Subscriber Engagement and Retention

The Athletic embraced Iterable’s sophisticated segmentation and uses Handlebars in their templates to easily customize and send targeted emails based on user profile and event data. Leveraging these Iterable features, the CRM team creates unique messages and outreach segmented by users’ favorite teams and leagues and tied to key moments, events, or real-time news. There’s no longer a “batch and blast” approach taken with subscriber emails.

By having these capabilities, plus Iterable’s experiment builder—which supports campaign testing—and a unified reporting system which reveals key insights at their fingertips, The Athletic marketing team can successfully produce individualized campaigns for existing and new subscribers.

Timely Communications for Existing Subscribers

When timely email campaigns such as a team or league’s season preview are sent to subscribers, The Athletic can customize the subject line, preheader, imagery, and body copy in Iterable. By optimizing a personal experience for individuals and groups (i.e. an avid MLB fan or casual NHL fans), they have observed through periodic testing a 2x increase in click-through rates, including a +127% lift in subscriber click rate.

A Warm Welcome for New Subscribers

The Athletic has to nail its first message to new customers. That’s the first opportunity to create happy subscribers and increase the user base, leading to consistent growth and success. During registration, when someone chooses their favorite teams and leagues to follow, The Athletic taps into data feeds in Iterable to send personalized “welcome” emails and follow-up communications. 

The data feeds inform the personal message, as well as the top five recent stories featured in the welcome note, so the entire email reflects each subscriber’s sports preferences. This makes for better onboarding, a stronger brand connection, and encourages further exploration with the outlet’s vast sports coverage.  

The welcome email is the highest performing in The Athletic’s onboarding series—due to the applied personalization—with a 70% higher click-through-rate than the next best performing email. While email is a key avenue to connect with subscribers, personalization must extend to all channels of engagement, including mobile.

Iterable’s Push Notifications Net Positive Attention

An increased digitization of sports means that fans increasingly leverage mobile devices and alerts to track the latest news for their teams and leagues. Mobile alerts must be attention-grabbing, timely, and relevant to each fan, whether they’re at the live event, watching from home, or monitoring on the go. 

With responsibility for growth, engagement, and content strategies, the CRM and programming teams were seeking a better, automated way to send mobile push notifications and optimize subscriber engagement through mobile content. 

Kenny Dorset, Vice President of Social and Programming at The Athletic explains, “Previously, we were sending more batch and blast push notifications and were unable to personalize based on user engagement patterns and timezone information.” Iterable has given them stronger, automated push capabilities within Studio, and used machine learning to account for the types of stories a subscriber reads most, the teams and leagues they care about, and the time and format that makes them more likely to engage and react to unique content. 

Now, subscribers receive more relevant messages and aren’t inundated with communication. Having automated pushes also means a smaller team can increase their work volume to best support the campaigns and messages targeted at The Athletic subscribers.

With technology creating a higher volume and velocity of information, it’s becoming more challenging to bring order to information chaos. Evernote, founded in 2008, helps people “remember everything” and “accomplish anything” by providing solutions that keep notes, project plans, to do’s, and calendars organized in one place—improving productivity. It’s one of the easiest ways to find what you need, when you need it, and within context. 

Evernote was one of the first apps offered in app stores, which increased its visibility with the 250 million customers it serves worldwide, in more than 25 languages. A majority of features are offered for free, but you can pay for advanced features to augment personal, professional, and now team use—the company’s recent B2B play.

Legacy Platform Struggles to Meet Customer Marketing Demands

After experiencing massive growth at launch, Evernote faced similar customer challenges as many brands—declining or stagnant engagement. Specifically, weekly active users (WAU) were steadily decreasing. During Activate Summit 2022, Sterling Bailey, Senior Director of Marketing Infrastructure at Evernote, explained that there were, “a very large number of user created accounts, but for one reason or another, many had stopped using the app.” It became increasingly important to maintain existing customers, attract new users, and demonstrate Evernote’s long-term value as a productivity partner. 

While overcoming these challenges seemed achievable, further examination of Evernote’s existing legacy marketing orchestration platform revealed issues. It couldn’t support real-time communication triggered by user activity or push notifications for iOS. Plus, Android push notification capabilities were limited. It also had limited in-app notification—and no native mobile in-app—functionality. These issues, which resulted in decreased communication volumes and a stagnant or decreased customer database, combined with increased costs and account support frustrations, prompted a replacement search. Evernote’s choice was Iterable.

More Productivity for All: Iterable Helps Evernote Build Cross-Channel Connections

From the beginning, Iterable handled Evernote’s need for real-time customer communication and functional requirements for communication volume—including push and in-app notifications—which the legacy platform couldn’t. It also addressed other unexpected needs. For instance, when Evernote lacked a production API endpoint so that data files could transfer between Google BigQuery—their data warehouse—and Iterable, Iterable built, tested, and pushed a new SFTP data transfer endpoint through before the former platform’s contract expired. “This enabled us to jump on board with Iterable, gaining success and scale from the start,” shares Sterling.  

Communication volumes at launch included 387 million emails—a 23% increase from their previous platform—387 million in-app messages—which weren’t previously possible—and 139 million push notifications, up from 42,000. Marketing, product engineering, and operations recognized that these initial metrics were the spark of stronger customer engagement and more strategic communications via Iterable. If they were to consolidate all customer communication within Iterable, they could gain a deeper understanding of customers, better track personal and professional productivity behaviors and Evernote journeys, and combine resources to conquer business goals tied to customer retention and user acquisition.

Consolidated Communication Drives More Engagement, Savings, and Revenue Streams

The Evernote marketing team manages brand voice and tone, but, in the past, they didn’t own transactional messages. It was less than ideal for these messages to be sent from a different system than other marketing messages. This separation prevented marketing from seeing the full view of customers’ habits and journeys, required a second, costly data center, and took extra engineering resources to make updates. By streamlining all customer communication production in Iterable, Evernote transitioned from “batch-and-blast” to focused, personal communications which engage users at multiple touchpoints, including email, push, and in-app.

With consolidated communication, Evernote can tap into segmented user data to understand popular features and use Iterable’s in-app message capability to survey active customers and investigate their preferences, tendencies, or where there are gaps to close so needs are met. These insights influence various tactics, from triggered push and in-app notifications to unique monthly summary emails that recognize individual accomplishments in the application. 

Take their “Driving Habit” campaign, for example, that’s intended to increase WAU. Specific results from that campaign and Iterable adoption include: 

• Increased clarity with marketing of the messages created, sent and consumed—from a password reset notice or a reminder on notes and tasks
• High click-thru and open rates with monthly summary emails that drove: a nearly 5% open rate increase as people connect their calendar with Evernote, and a 14% increase in the reactivation rates of lapsed users with spikes in 6-, 11-, and 23-month inactive users 
• Reduced data center costs with $144k in yearly infrastructure savings
• A 46% increase in overall campaign revenue 

Weekly Active Users on the Rise

As a means to target and increase the number of active free users, potentially leading to more paid users, Evernote launched weekly tests for evergreen push content using Iterable Experiments to consistently drive 10,000 to 20,000 incremental free WAU per week. “After seeing that number decline for years and years, it’s flattened, and is now ticking upward because of our multi-channel engagement messages sent with Iterable. We’re excited and amazed,” added Sterling. 

A similar go-to-market approach is now being applied to Evernote’s Teams Product using Iterable. The company will focus on sending personalized communication that engages professionals and add new collaboration features that kickstart more product journeys, revenue streams, and prompt app use for group productivity.

They finally have the right communications partner, executive prioritization of a data-first mindset, and the necessary enterprise infrastructure and analytics expertise to accomplish current engagement challenges, future business goals, and all customer needs tied to personal and professional productivity. 

About A+E Networks

A+E Networks is a global content company comprised of some of the most popular and culturally relevant brands in media, including A&E, Lifetime, The HISTORY® Channel, LMN, FYI, VICELAND, and Crime+Investigation. A+E Networks’ channels and branded programming reach more than 335 million households in over 200 territories in 42 languages. The company’s vision is to be famous for creating and sharing stories that matter—unique, trusted, entertaining, and everywhere. 

Due to limited marketing bandwidth and siloed tools and communication, A+E Networks was in need of a dynamic automation tool that could handle the large volume of email communications the team produced weekly.

Lack of Personalization and Siloed Email Communications

With a two-person marketing team sending out thirty campaigns a week—each with diverse voices, brand demographics, audiences, and messages—campaign creation was a manual and time-consuming process. The team had to manually export data and rebuild each campaign from scratch. 

Plus, the two-person team was working with up to eight stakeholders daily to gather the content needed to develop the campaigns. It was difficult to get visibility into when their campaigns were scheduled to send, what new program content they could leverage, and which stakeholders were providing that content. Additionally, there was new asset gathering and revisions that needed to happen regularly. Ultimately, the siloed tools and communication, and a lack of automation reduced operational efficiency across teams. 

As A+E Networks continued to scale, they realized they needed a modernized tech stack that allowed them to create more emails, in less time. With new programs continuously being added to their channels, it’s important for A+E Networks to be able to measure the impact that email has on their bottom line.

Iterable’s Impact at A+E Networks

Iterable’s future-proofed marketing communication platform was exactly what A+E needed to quickly and efficiently craft harmonized, individualized, and dynamic communications at scale. 

Segmentation

Iterable’s segmentation capabilities enable A+E Networks to easily send curated messages to specific subscribers, compared to the team’s previous manual processes. Advanced segmentation and filtering capabilities with Iterable enables A+E Networks to granularly target customers with relevant communications.

Studio 

Iterable’s Studio is an easy to use, drag-and-drop journey creation tool that automates message coordination seamlessly across channels, including email, mobile, web push, social, and direct mail. 

For A+E Networks different brands, there are various ways that someone can sign up for an email list. With Studio, the team is able to curate what that journey looks like for someone and personalize the messaging based on different avenues of entry from each brand. Setting up Studio just once allows A+E Networks to be free from manually sending multiple emails at a time. 

Utilizing Studio, the team is also able to create dynamic, brand-specific welcome messages for all of the company’s subscribers based on their sign-up location. Each message is individually personalized based on the show page, brand page, or single sign-on sign up. For example, if a user subscribes to a HISTORY® Channel show or a Lifetime show, the emails are branded with that particular logo, that particular image and that particular copy to reflect that. 

Snippets

Additionally, the marketing team uses snippets, which are reusable content blocks that they add to templates to make building and personalizing messages in Iterable even easier. When an email is opened, content updates daily based on what is on one of A+E Networks’ channels that day. With snippets, the team can manage frequently used elements like email headers and footers, store complex logic blocks, and update multiple templates at the same time. 

Snippets save the team the time and effort it would take to build upwards of 20 different campaign variations to ensure they’re sending the right campaign to a subscriber based on their profile attributes or behavior. Now, the A+E Networks team can effortlessly send individualized content based on user profile data or event data, all within one email template using only a few lines of code. For example, they can create one campaign that will show a program-specific image, depending on what program a user is signed up for. This prevents the team from having to build out multiple campaigns all the time, which was a key barrier to growth.

A/B Testing

With help from Iterable, the team also completes A/B testing to make sure their content is sent out to relevant audiences, ensuring it’s going to receive the most engagement. For example, the team tested subject lines to determine which wording increases email engagement. They also tested CTA types to determine which type (more or less detail) received more clicks. 

A Tech Stack for Dynamic, Behavior-Based Individualization

A+E Networks now has a time-saving tech stack to help power automated campaigns. Iterable provides a centralized hub where all the marketing campaigns are created and sent out to respective users. Using user profile and behavior data gathered across all sources, Iterable can trigger individualized cross-channel messaging in real time.

In addition to Iterable, A+E Networks uses Movable Ink to accelerate their personalization initiatives.

Movable Ink helps create individualized content at scale by tapping into A+E Networks data at the second a user engages. A+E Networks uses Movable Ink to pull in content and data from their CRM, website, and APIs, including the moment a new program launches and a user’s browsing behavior on their website. 

Together, Iterable and Movable Ink enable marketers to generate creative that is data-activated and contextually relevant at the time of engagement to ensure a consistent and joyful experience for every customer.

What’s Next for A+E Networks?

Looking towards the future, the A+E Networks team is working on ways to increase personalization on a show level for all of the company’s brands. For example, the team plans to roll out emails featuring dynamic content based on the users’ past email activity or profile data. 

In addition, the team is looking at ways to integrate show-specific information via a RSS feed to automate even more of the company’s weekly campaigns and further increase production capabilities.

Located in downtown Atlanta, and receiving more than 2.2 million visitors in the past year, Georgia Aquarium is the most-visited non-profit aquarium in North America and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. Although it’s land-locked, hundreds of miles from any ocean, the facility provides guests the opportunity to move between oceans and experience unique wonders. 

With thrilling hands-on exhibits, experiences, and presentations, visitors are inspired while learning about the ocean and encountering its inhabitants, including whale sharks, manta rays, African penguins, dolphins, and more. Georgia Aquarium strives to demonstrate how research and conservation support biodiversity underwater. 

A critical part of customer attraction, acquisition, and retention is delivering a consistent, interactive brand experience from start to finish. If positive personal connections aren’t made, guests likely won’t come again. That’s why Georgia Aquarium has chosen Iterable to support engaging, personalized brand experiences as guests buy tickets, plan their visit, arrive at the facility, view exhibits, participate in events, shop, and even after they depart.

Ticket Woes: Delayed or Failed Delivery Creates Unideal Guest Experience

Aquarium ticket sales fund research, food and care for the animals, facility maintenance, and more. The Aquarium operates solely on ticket sales. Before Iterable, ticket delivery relied on an old email service provider (ESP), which had delays, failed to arrive in inboxes, and content was sometimes flat, feeling disjointed from guests’ in-person brand experiences. As a result, guests suffered, and so did the Aquarium. 

“We want our guests to have a smile on their face at all points in their interactions with us, from initial research to excitedly planning a trip to the facility,” explained Josh Cherfoli, Senior Director of Marketing and Digital Engagement at Georgia Aquarium. 

Without a prompt ticket delivery, customers may encounter a longer-than-expected wait at the door or miss an event altogether. When they open their ticket to find lackluster, unintuitive content, the ticketing scenario is further strained, creating more friction for the high volume of guests expected at Georgia Aquarium each year. This friction can lead to strained brand perceptions or increased frustration that eventually dampens visitors’ joyful experiences, and will deter someone from returning. 

Iterable’s Cross-Channel Capabilities Keep Customer Acquisition and Retention Afloat

As the Aquarium missed key opportunities with its former ESP to enhance visits, drive revenue streams, and build guest relationships that create repeat visits, memberships, or donations, they sought a straightforward solution that could evolve with changing needs. 

The search led to Iterable, a solution that seamlessly delivers individualized, harmonized customer communications and supports in-depth data management. The user interface is intuitive, with a drag and drop template editor to create more sophisticated emails reflecting the Aquarium’s visual brand identity and voice. 

With Iterable Studio, Georgia Aquarium develops and activates broader email campaigns—a welcome or promotional series for new guests or loyalty campaigns for returning members that engage customers at all phases of the brand lifecycle.

With cross-channel capabilities and a flexible data model, Iterable also integrates ticket, transaction, and customer data with the aquarium’s back-office ticket system and content management system (CMS). As a result, each customer receives targeted, relevant messages tied to planning, visits, purchase history, and more. Instead of a transactional mindset with customers, Georgia Aquarium now has conversational, fruitful interactions—thanks to Iterable.

SMS Improved Ticket Delivery

It was impossible with the previous ESP solution to guarantee ticket delivery to guests. With Iterable integration to the ticketing system via API, guests choose to have their tickets delivered via email or SMS. With SMS functionality in Iterable, guests will instantly receive a ticket barcode that is scanned at the door, and that speeds up their aquarium entry. 

Since implementing this option for guests, Georgia Aquarium observed a 3.97 percent increase in customer transactions with a 2.5 percent increase in average order value. And customer satisfaction improved: There’s been a 96 percent decrease in issues tracked during call center interactions and social media monitoring. 

In-Person Hybrid Experiences

Booking tickets for animal encounters and different shows has historically meant a long wait for guests. When there are multiple shows during the day and limited capacity, it means hundreds of visitors stand idle, growing impatient to get seats and see thrilling animals up-close. Their time could be better spent. 

Using the Iterable SMS functionality with the Aquarium’s reservation system, guests scan a QR code that takes them to the Aquarium site where they book. That prompts a text with their seat reservation. Alternatively, they can text a keyword or number that delivers a reservation booking link and confirmation. Waiting lines are a thing of the past and guests gain more time to explore exhibits, browse the gift shop, grab a snack or meal, and see their favorite animals. 

This change resulted in a 96 percent increase in the Net Promoter Score (NPS) score for tickets and happier, more joyful customers.  

On the Horizon: SMS Cancellation Notices

There are occasions where a program must be canceled unexpectedly, on short notice. The Aquarium hates to leave guests hanging and would rather give them a heads up so they can maximize their time and see as many exhibits as possible during their visit. Reaching them quickly and directly with cancellation notices is essential. 

Iterable allows the aquarium to immediately distribute a message to guests’ emails while they move through the facility. This took hours to perform the same task in their former ESP solution. They hope to pivot to SMS delivery by the end of 2022, further improving communication, connections, and the aquarium experience for every guest.

About RealSelf

RealSelf is a leading healthcare marketplace for people to get factual, unbiased information on cosmetic procedures. Their mission is to create a world where every investment in modern beauty is worth it. RealSelf aims to be the go-to advisor for medical and aesthetic procedures by making the experience easy, personal, and trusted.

If a user has an aesthetic concern they’re looking to get fixed, they can browse RealSelf’s platform by concern or procedure, and then get connected with a physician to begin a consultation. RealSelf also works closely with the physician, offering a variety of opportunities—like featuring them on their website or showcasing them within their emails. 

Due to an unwieldy and ineffective in-house AI model that led to a decline in engagement and high opt-out rate, RealSelf was in need of a more reliable, automated solution that would leverage AI to deliver their messages at the most optimal frequency.

The Challenge: The Ugly Side of Low Engagement

RealSelf relies on user-generated content (UGC) to drive sessions—which is why customer reviews make up 95% of their emails. Sessions are their biggest revenue driver, making UGC crucial for the bottom line. A session is counted when a user logs into their platform, both on the website and app. The goal is to increase sessions, with the hopes of increasing the number of contacts who book an appointment with a physician—a key conversion for RealSelf. Since June 2021, the company had seen a steep decline in sessions due to low email engagement as a result of a cumbersome and unsuccessful internal AI algorithm that determines email send frequency.

RealSelf’s AI Needed a Facelift

RealSelf had built an internal AI algorithm that determined how frequently content would be sent based on user engagement with their emails and on their website. However, this model was time-consuming to manage and didn’t prove to be successful with improving their user engagement and ultimately driving more sessions.  

One part of the algorithm involved excluding users with Microsoft Outlook—a notoriously difficult email service—who haven’t opened an email in greater than 30 days. Another part was excluding users based on a lack of email engagement—any user who has not opened an email for 180 days or more would not receive these emails. However, with Apple Mail Privacy Protection changes that went into effect in the summer of 2021, they could no longer rely on email opens as a predictive metric for engagement. What’s more, these exclusion lists became complex to independently manage for every campaign.

Solidified Send Frequency with Iterable AI

To resolve the challenges with their AI model, RealSelf turned to Iterable’s Brand Affinity, which uses AI to automatically calculate a loyalty score based on a user’s recent interactions across their marketing channels, and converts these into affinity labels tied to each user profile. For example, users labeled as loyal are those who are highly engaged with RealSelf and can be considered brand advocates.

Using these affinity labels, the RealSelf marketing team gains a unique advantage by intelligently translating user engagement data into deeper, more meaningful connections. This helps them maximize retention with loyal customers, nurture customers through lifecycle stages, and mitigate churn with at-risk detractors.

RealSelf has replaced their in-house AI model and now uses Brand Affinity to determine how many times per week their users will receive their UGC emails in hopes of improving email engagement to drive more sessions and conversions. 

For instance, the RealSelf team segmented their loyal and positive affinity cohorts as well as any new user to receive UGC emails seven times per week, or one email a day. The neutral group—those who are sometimes engaged and who occasionally interact—receive UGC emails four times a week. The negative group—those who are typically disengaged—receive the emails only once per week. RealSelf then allowed Iterable’s Brand Affinity model to auto-adjust the frequency of sends within these groups on a rolling weekly basis based on real-time engagement levels. 

Using Brand Affinity, RealSelf was able to reduce their opt out rate with their neutral group. Iterable AI showed this group was underperforming (compared to other groups) so they reduced the send frequency of this group from 4x a week to 3x. Within one month, the opt outs declined by 33%. Prior to Brand Affinity, RealSelf could not make quick send frequency adjustments to a specific group due to potential data flow issues with their in-house algorithm. 

Within the first month of launching Brand Affinity, RealSelf has seen sessions and contacts increase by 30% and click-through rate increase by 13%.

Iterable Helps RealSelf Put Their Best Face Forward

With the help of Iterable AI, RealSelf spends significantly less time and effort reconciling and managing their user engagement data, and has completely eliminated the need for their exclusion lists, leading to better utilization of resources. To illustrate, RealSelf is saving their data engineers about two hours each week when downloading their user engagement to their data warehouse. Furthermore, RealSelf’s marketing team has been able to completely eliminate back and forth internal messaging and meetings about possible data flow issues and setting user frequency of emails.

What’s Next for RealSelf?

Using Brand Affinity, RealSelf plans to launch a re-engagement journey for users who move from loyal to negative in an attempt to re-engage them and mitigate churn risk. 

Individualization is Key

RealSelf also plans to launch phase two, which will include implementing Iterable Catalog with Brand Affinity to send more relevant review content based on individual interests and behavior.  With Catalog’s easy-to-use Collection Builder, RealSelf will be able to drive more conversions with intelligent content and automate millions of unique messages across channels.

For example, RealSelf collects customers’ birthdays. With Catalog, and this customer data, they can promote popular cosmetic treatments to get in your 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and more. Additionally, RealSelf can match physicians to users based on cosmetic category of interest and geo-location. A California-based plastic surgeon specializing in rhinoplasty would be matched with a user who is interested in a rhinoplasty procedure who resides in California. The RealSelf team will also individualize content based on where the user is within the journey—from research phase to procedure and beyond.

About OBRIO and Nebula

OBRIO is a fast-growing product company developing its own products in three areas: applications, web products, and SaaS. This includes their flagship astrology application, Nebula. Nebula is a one-stop shop for astrology lovers. Whether new to astrology, or experts, this global (reaching 50 countries and six localizations), multifunctional platform was created to inspire people in finding their way to happiness. 

In addition to highly-personalized horoscopes, natal charts, and compatibility tools, Nebula users can also have a live consultation with astrologers and other spiritual advisors, chat in the Nebula talk (a social network inside the app), read articles and guides in the learning center, and take notes in a diary section.

Launched three years ago, Nebula has quickly grown to a community of over 17 million global users, ranking several times as the top lifestyle app in the Apple Store and Play Market in the USA, UK, Canada, and France. 

To help address the demand for their growing app community, Nebula’s team of marketers needed a cross-channel marketing platform to help provide deeper individualized experiences that cultivate joy for users. 

Siloed Tools, Worlds Apart

In the past, the Nebula team tested a number of tools to send emails and push notifications to users. After recognizing pitfalls of these tools, the team set out to find a cross-channel marketing solution that provided centralized data, allowing the team to make data-driven choices. 

Without centralized data, Nebula’s previous tech stack made it difficult to effectively connect with their mobile users, who make up the bulk of the team’s community base. It was challenging to determine how their users were interacting with various marketing channels. Without a strong cross-channel strategy across in-app messages, push notifications, and emails, the team was not able to reach the company’s retention and subscription conversion goals.

A Stellar Solution: Activating Mobile Users

The solution? Iterable’s future-proofed customer activation platform provided the marketing automation tools needed to joyify Nebula’s customer experiences and capture more long-term loyalty and retention. 

This cross-channel success was exemplified through Nebula’s global campaign to celebrate their third birthday.

Subscription Success Written in the Stars

To celebrate the third anniversary of Nebula, their marketing team, with help from Iterable, created a cross-channel marketing campaign. The overarching goal of the campaign was to promote customer loyalty and trust by featuring the app’s origin story and giving away gifts, ultimately increasing premium subscribers and converting in-app purchases by getting users to chat with a live astrologist.

A/B Testing Subscription Offers

With one goal of the campaign being to turn freemium users into subscribers, the team, using Iterable’s A/B testing functionality, tested a variety of subscription offers and messaging to determine the most successful options. 

As for the goal of increasing in-app purchases, the team launched similar push notification A/B testing with different offers to replenish a user’s balance to chat with a live astrologer. Through this test, the team found that the winning variations resulted in a significantly increased purchase rate on iOS and Android.

Conducting such tests allowed the Nebula team to find the offers that resonated best with their mobile audience.

Deep-Linking Through Push Notifications and In-App Messaging

To activate users on social media during their birthday event, the Nebula team also employed push notifications and in-app messaging to direct users to the giveaway.

Iterable’s mobile deep-linking functionality made it possible to seamlessly send users to their subscription and ”chat with an astrologer” special offers, Nebula’s festive horoscope page—which was implemented specifically for the birthday campaign—and their Instagram page.

Also of note, Iterable allows Nebula to set expiration dates on their in-app messaging that align with the end of their giveaway. This gives marketers the ability to easily and automatically manage campaigns.

By automating push notifications and in-app messages, rather than sending and creating them manually, the Nebula team saves at least 8 hours per week by implementing their largest automated journey—made up of 242 campaigns sent to new app users.

Segmentation

With Iterable’s segmentation tool, Nebula could send notifications to different audience groups, for example: iOS versus Android users, premium versus non-premium users, and users of different versions of the app.

For example, looking at the push notification conversions of the “chat with an astrologer” special offer—which was sent only to premium users—was 9 times higher, compared to push sent to all users on iOS, and 29 times higher for Android premium users, compared to all Android users.

Iterable’s Impact at OBRIO

The Nebula app community is instrumental in growing OBRIO’s overall brand awareness and increasing user engagement. Since adding Iterable to the company’s tech stack, OBRIO now has a cross-channel customer activation platform with strong mobile functionality, making it possible to engage their mobile users across channels in real-time. 

As a result of harmonized cross-channel functionality, centralized data, and A/B testing, OBRIO has seen a 24x increase in revenue compared to a similar global campaign they’ve launched in the past, prior to Iterable. 

By partnering with Iterable, OBRIO enhanced the company’s marketing program with a tech-forward approach that prioritizes individualization and harmony with every customer interaction. 

Iterable’s real-time data-ingestion and user behavior tracking gives Nebula the ability to individualize messaging for each user, driving more meaningful engagement and, as a result, greater conversions.

Looking toward the future, Iterable’s data-driven platform, which includes an intuitive user interface and drag & drop template editor to create highly targeted campaigns, provides a foundation for OBRIO to explore even deeper personalization, a priority for the company.  

How LOLA Began

Started as a women-owned direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce brand in 2015, LOLA is a mission-driven company supporting women’s reproductive and sexual wellness “from your first period to your last hot flash.” Originally a subscription service, LOLA branched out to in-store sales, —through a major in-store retail partnership with Walmart—and then expanded its services to individual, “á la carte” purchases on its website.

LOLA’s variety of purchasing options, retail outlets, and partnerships with other e-commerce marketplaces give LOLA’s customers more affordable avenues to buy their unique lines of organic-based products for period care, vaginal hygiene, fertility and pregnancy support, and sexual wellness.

The Challenge: Bringing Back More “Á La Carte” Buyers

As LOLA expanded their business model, the marketing team saw the need to address growing competition and increase trackable revenue. The solution? A winback journey aimed at “á la carte” buyers who occasionally purchase via website but don’t subscribe to a product replenishment plan. 

The winback journey serves a dual purpose—primarily to bring more á la carte buyers back to the website to purchase again, but also to keep LOLA top of mind whenever they need products, wherever they shop.

What’s in That Winback Program?

The team designed a winback journey using Iterable’s Studio with four email touchpoints. LOLA incorporated product lifecycle data to determine the optimal event trigger—two months after an onsite purchase—to bring customers back to the website  to buy products, discover more of LOLA’s benefits, and learn how the company supports women’s healthcare. This includes discovering the informative content on LOLA’s The Spot, a safe space for community and conversation.

Here’s the winback journey:

• Email 1: A low-pressure reminder that it might be time to come back and shop with LOLA again, with recommended best-sellers and customer comments to build social proof. 
• Email 2:  LOLA is using Iterable’s A/B testing capability to determine with various incentives to learn more about customer behavior.
• Email 3: Non-responders receive an incentive—LOLA uses the results from this message to identify and segment for future messaging.
• Email 4: Repeats Email 3 copy, which also reminds shoppers about where they can buy LOLA products. 

In designing the winback journey, LOLA’s team capitalized on three of Iterable’s leading capabilities:

• Individualization. Allows brands to go beyond standard segmentation and create unique messages for each recipient. 
• Harmonization. Enables no-code multi-channel journey automation.
• A/B split testing. An algorithm-powered testing tool that allows teams to create multiple variations, even as the test is running, to continuously test and improve campaigns.

Loyalty Matters, Period.

Many winback journeys focus on the singular goal of moving potentially lapsing customers back to the site with a basic incentive. However, LOLA incorporates loyalty messaging in winback journey emails as well. 

This winback messaging also offers bonus loyalty points as an incentive. Links to popular purchases remind customers about the benefits of shopping online—they earn loyalty points only on website purchases, not on products they buy in stores.

For LOLA, loyalty isn’t just about rewarding purchases. Members also can earn loyalty points for posting reviews, referring friends, following on social media, and even having a birthday—all of which tell LOLA’s customers the brand values them as individuals and advocates, not just as buyers.

Joybird combines the classic with the contemporary in an innovative way. The furniture brand specializes in the sleek lines of mid-century modern furniture styles, but its approach to customer messaging is thoroughly 21st century. 

But it wasn’t always that way.

For Joybird, the key to customer loyalty is creating joyful experiences that forge deep emotional connections. But a legacy technology stack, inaccessible data, and dependence on one-off workarounds thwarted those efforts at almost every turn.

Today, after retooling its stack top to bottom, Joybird can create those joyful experiences with free-flowing data that powers “right message/right time/right customer/right channel” messaging and generates a rich profile of each customer at every step of the customer journey.

About Joybird

Founded as an e-commerce furniture company in 2014 and acquired by La-Z-Boy in 2018, Joybird established itself immediately in a market niche between more inexpensive assemble-it-yourself furniture and custom designs with price tags to match. 

The company’s value proposition, then and now, is this: “Joybird was founded on the idea that people should never settle when it comes to their home furnishing, but rather have the freedom to be boldly original.”

In recent years the company has expanded its initial e-commerce-only presence into a wholesale business and five showrooms around the United States. 

Shoppers now can sink into a sectional sofa, try out an occasional chair, or contemplate the work-from-home experience at a Joybird desk—in-person and online. Besides helping customers connect their virtual and physical experiences, the showrooms give Joybird even more data to better understand its customers, their needs now, and what they might want down the line.

A Major Concern: Modernizing the Technology Stack

Adding physical outlets to its previously online-only universe created major challenges—among them, understanding where Joybird’s customers are shopping: on the website or visiting a showroom.

The company’s legacy tech stack had been built solely to serve online customers. This worked at the time, but its data systems and communication platforms didn’t give Joybird the unified customer views and supply-chain efficiency the company needed to continue its evolution into a fully hybrid operation.

The solution: build a modern, scalable tech stack that serves customer and company needs through

1. a data warehouse that houses profile and modeling data. 
2. a complex messaging service that fuels immediate messaging to customers and funnels data back to other sources such as the supply chain, production, and logistics. 

3 Challenges to Overcome

Teams throughout Joybird found themselves stuck in the gap between its data and the engagement channels where its customers engaged with the brand:

• For stakeholders: Business units found it difficult to make informed decisions because the company lacked a uniform, real-time event stream and locked data away in silos.
• For engineers: Joybird’s siloed data forced engineers to spend days and weeks building workarounds and one-off solutions to manage customer events. But even with this significant time investment, the company didn’t have everything needed to convert its data into essential customer insights.
• For marketers: As the rest of the e-commerce world shifted into automated messaging and one-to-one personalization, the marketing team was stuck in batch-and-blast mode. Lack of real-time data access and messaging meant Joybird couldn’t reach out to customers at crucial points in the customer journey, such as repeated product browsing, abandoned carts, and other lucrative marketing initiatives to capture sales and build customer relationships.

The Solution: Real-time Data Streaming

Why Joybird Partnered With Iterable: Joybird’s team needed an ESP that would help the company anticipate and respond to the seismic shifts in customer expectations and relationships with brands.

Joybird realized measurable business value in three key areas with Iterable in its new, streamlined tech stack, which also includes RudderStack for data architecture and customer data platform and Snowflake for the data cloud. 

Joybird now enjoys these benefits:

• Data flexibility

The nature of Joybird’s business means the company has complex data structures, so it needed a platform that would give them maximum flexibility.

The company can achieve its goal of staying in communication with its customers wherever and whenever they engage with the brand, whether on a website, responding to an ad or social media campaign, or in a store. 

• Cruising in the fast lane and the slow lane

Be gone, batched and siloed data! Joybird now enjoys a free flow of accessible data flowing in and out of its data warehouse and Iterable in two major configurations:

• • The fast lane: This sends real-time data and event streaming to Iterable to trigger custom messages based on customer behavior, such as welcome/onboarding or cart abandonment.
  • The slow lane: Here, data from many sources—inventory, transactional, and behavior—goes into Joybird’s data warehouse for analytics, modeling, and building segments and can get pushed back into Iterable for messaging.

• Robust segmentation

With its previous ESP, Joybird needed a custom integration in order to segment the way the team wanted. With Iterable, Joybird is able to leverage existing front and backend events for more customized segmentation and testing without tapping into developer resources. Iterable’s ease of use empowers Joybird to create dynamic segments using a variety of data sources like a customer’s distance from a store, lifetime value, RFM model labels (recency, frequency, monetary value), and style preferences from website interactions. 

Results: Faster Activation, Less Down Time

Joybird’s new tech stack delivered measurable business value almost immediately:

Launched in 2015, Imperfect Foods set out to eliminate food waste and build a better food system. After raising a total of $239 million in funding, Imperfect Foods turned to Iterable to help improve their customer experience and Hightouch to activate their data. 

Using a subscription model, Imperfect Foods gives their customers the option to select the groceries they want in their box each week. If they don’t “shop their order,” however, customers are sent a pre-filled box with default options. 

Realizing that customers who receive a default box are more likely to churn, Imperfect Foods needed to find an effective way to communicate with their customers, reminding them to select what they want in future orders.

In a Pickle With the Customer Experience

Imperfect Foods has a wide array of customers. On top of just those who are looking to fight food waste, some have certain dietary restrictions, and some are on a plan in which, if they don’t spend a minimum of $30 on their box, their order is canceled. 

So, the challenge for Imperfect Foods was not only reminding customers to shop their orders, but also understanding which segment of customers required which options–and how to communicate with each audience in a way that would resonate with them.

Hungry for Data Access

With all of their customer data stored in Snowflake, Imperfect Foods needed a way to easily sync their data directly to Iterable for lifecycle marketing, but downloading individual datasets as CSV files was a time-consuming and manual process. 

To make matters worse, this had to be done on an ad-hoc basis every time Imperfect Foods wanted to launch a marketing campaign. With numerous data points (ex: canceled orders, unengaged customers, device type, most ordered foods, etc.) across hundreds of thousands of  customers, Imperfect Foods wanted to activate this data in Iterable.

Data Activation is Hightouch’s Bread and Butter

Implementing Hightouch, Imperfect Foods has completely eliminated manual CSV uploads and downloads. With Hightouch, Imperfect Foods can easily ingest all of their customer data directly to Iterable or any of their marketing tools at a moment’s notice. What used to take hours has now dropped to minutes.

“We want our data in Iterable to be as accurate as possible and as fresh as possible. Uploading a single list could take an hour. With Hightouch, this has gone to zero because our analysts can use it directly”.  —Adam Smith, Data Analyst

Imperfect Foods has also been able to identify lookalike audiences by sending ads to high-value audiences. They have also successfully lowered their customer acquisition costs (CAC) by creating exclusion lists for active users and low value users (ex: users who signed up in the last six months and quickly canceled). Instead of manually downloading and uploading these lists, Imperfect Foods is able to reuse these custom audiences across all of their different marketing tools and sync all of this data automatically.

“Hightouch has made it really easy to link up our different tools to Snowflake so we can send data to those platforms and optimize around our most successful customers.” —Adam Smith, Data Analyst

With Hightouch and Iterable, Imperfect Foods serves relevant and dynamic content across multiple touch points to accelerate product adoption and encourage usage. By serving coupons to its most active customers Imperfect Foods saw a 53% lift in reactivation. Imperfect Foods also uses this same type of dynamic content to incentivize customers with low order values to order more regularly.

Going Bananas for Iterable Journeys

Using Iterable’s Studio, Imperfect Foods created customized, triggered cross-channel messaging that reaches different customers depending on where they are in their customization process. As soon as the shopping window (48 to 72 hours) starts, an email is triggered to remind all customers to start their shopping process. Sending this initial email resulted in engagement from 40% of their customers. But, it still left 60% of customers in the danger zone. 

Then, on the second day, Imperfect Foods can see who customized their orders and who didn’t. To those customers who didn’t customize their order, a second email and an SMS message are triggered at the same time, again reminding them to order but with more urgent messaging. By incorporating SMS, Imperfect Foods is ensuring they’ll reach the customer where they are. After the combination of messages on day one and day two, Imperfect Foods saw a 67% engagement rate with over 85% of orders customized each week. 

The last element in the journey  is connecting with those customers who have not reached their minimum threshold. If the customer is below their order minimum, a Segment event triggers an email and SMS message through Iterable. These messages contain dynamic dollar amounts to tell each customer how much they need to spend to reach their minimum. As a result, Imperfect Foods saw a 38% lift in completed orders and a 45% increase in revenue per user within this segment.

Iterable + Imperfect Foods: Two Peas in a Pod

On top of the specified shopping-window triggered journeys, Imperfect Foods included supporting messaging. Through the combined efforts of the Marketing and Merchandising teams, they were able to highlight new products, include dynamic catalog content in messages, and segment those messages to relevant audiences. 

For example, by showing omnivores a sale on their Cooks Chicken products, while showing vegetarians and vegans a promotion on plant-based “chicken” products, Imperfect Foods generated an incremental $75k in revenue the week the campaign launched. They also saw a +0.8% lift in orders completed and +0.85% lift in topline revenue per user. And, over a series of experiments in Q1 of 2021, their strategy created a +1.06% lift in revenue per orders generated and led to a +0.91% increase in total orders completed. 

By creating customer segments and developing journeys that trigger personalized messages, Imperfect Foods found a significant impact on the bottom line.

“Iterable is very intuitive and easy to use. We have been able to train a small team of Customer Care agents to deploy simple campaigns that notify customers when deliveries get canceled, changed, etc. This frees up so much time for the LCM team to focus on improving the user journey and allows our Customer Care team to directly connect with customers en masse.” 

—Carlos Govantes, Sr. Director of Lifecycle Marketing & Retention

For a subscription-based business service like Homebase, monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the big number to hit. Acquiring new customers is one obvious way to grow MRR, but so is retaining those customers by helping them discover and use all the features the company offers. 

With the right data and integrations, a company can respond in the moment with the information its users need–making it a must-have member of the team instead of another add-on expense.

About Homebase

For Homebase (motto: “HR for people who don’t do HR”), this means detecting the signals its users send when they search the company website for help with specific challenges like new-hire onboarding or labor-law compliance. But that’s just the first step. Homebase also responds to those signals with personalized follow-up messages that direct users to the help they need.

Homebase helps small businesses manage everything from the daily grunt work of scheduling and timeclocks to hiring and onboarding new employees, HR management, payroll, taxes, and labor-law compliance. Its subscription model runs the gamut from basic free services to its top-level “All In One” package.

The Challenge: Improve ‘Feature Discovery’ with Automated Messages

“People come to Homebase primarily for scheduling and time-tracking help. They aren’t always looking at the bevy of other features we offer, such as HR support and advice, or onboarding new employees,” says Ryan Milligan, marketing and sales ops lead for Homebase. 

“We’re looking for intent triggers that we can use to upsell our users to more services that would really benefit them,” he says. “We want to identify people who are signaling a need for solutions in our non-core areas, such as hiring, HR compliance, and document support and storage.”

Another strong intent signal comes from customers who investigate the features offered in a higher-level service plan but leave the page without upgrading.

Homebase needed a way to reach out to these inquisitive users with relevant messages that would speak to their queries. Solutions-seekers, for example, would often search the knowledge base on the company’s marketing website, looking for help with common issues, such as complying with state labor laws. Something was missing, however.

“We were never able to tie this web activity to our automated marketing messages,” Ryan said. On eCommerce sites, those visits would trigger abandoned browse or abandoned cart messages aimed at bringing customers back to the site to convert. For Homebase, these messages aim to help customers discover more solutions to their problems.

“If a customer visits our labor-law guides, they clearly need guidance through complex state labor laws,” Ryan says. “We want to be able to detect that and push them an email through Iterable saying, ‘It looks like you need compliance support. We have a product that can solve this problem for you.’”

How Homebase Hit a Relevant Messaging Homerun with Heap and Iterable

Homebase provides its services through an application. A parallel marketing website houses the company blog and other knowledge resources, pricing plans and feature lists, services targeted to specific industries, and general company information. 

Right now, Homebase creates custom events within its app to track customer activity and tie it to specific customers. Homebase passes those email addresses through to Iterable to create personalized, targeted messaging using Iterable’s custom events framework. 

“That framework doesn’t exist on our marketing website. That’s where Heap’s identity resolution and event tracking becomes very valuable in passing information over from the marketing website,” Ryan says.

“The Heap and Iterable integration slices hours of development time off the process of building and testing personalized message tracks,” Ryan says. 

“I would not be surprised if we started creating more in-app events through Heap because it doesn’t require engineering time,” he adds. “That’s one of the major values–we don’t have to use an engineer to format a custom event. There’s a lot of value for us being able to use in-app events as triggers, such as a manager’s log, document storage, or reviewing reports.”

All of those activities then become intent triggers the company can use to persuade customers to upgrade their plans.

Homebase Hits Home with Personalized Messages

Nobody at Homebase needed to be sold on personalization. Messages triggered by user activity drive generally twice the open and click-to-open rates as the already-respectable rates other emails generate. They also help to boost traffic to pages within the app–another key point that can help Homebase achieve its goal to increase feature discovery, boost retention, and lead to robust monthly recurring revenue.

Being able to build custom segments quickly to respond to user activity has been a major benefit, he says. But beyond that, the marketing team is also aiming to use Heap and Iterable together to find the “sweet spot” for abandonment messaging that capitalizes on user interest at the right moment without overwhelming them with messages. 

With the right tools and strategy in place, Homebase is empowered to focus on scaling and building more sophisticated campaigns that deliver a tailored experience. The end result? Homebase saves time for both its customers and team alike–and that’s a home run.

UNiDAYS is the world’s largest Student Affinity Network, with over 20 million verified members across 115 markets including the USA, UK, Germany, Canada and Australia. They offer discounts and special offers for more than 800 brands, specializing in apparel, food, beauty, tech, entertainment and more. Available on the App Store and Google Play, UNiDAYS helps students live their best lives on- and off-campus. 

UNiDAYS is a major source of market intelligence on Generation Z consumers, which is surfaced through Gen Z Insights—a resource dedicated to understanding, and marketing to, the Gen-Z audience. (Curious how to get Gen-Z to love your brand? Find out here.) 

Gen Z are a hyper-informed, hyper-connected consumer, who expect customized personalized products, services and value, across every device, every platform, AND whose real world and digital existence are basically one of the same. Brands must urgently connect with this unfamiliar, digital-native consumer who is defining social commerce. They live and breathe social media, instant messaging, video games and live-streaming – often all at the same time. Gen Z are the ultimate early adopters, and we see their habits now influencing the behaviors of Millennials and Generation X too, and even the younger generations following them. They are the most influential but elusive consumers in history. Both start-ups and legacy brands could find this new world order daunting, but it represents great possibility. 

To engage with their Gen-Z audience, UNiDAYS leverages both push notifications and email to send offers, discounts and content to its members.

Minimizing Manual Work, Maximizing ROI

During the COVID-19 pandemic when students were unable to shop in-store, UNiDAYS began sending daily email campaigns for its major discount verticals such as shoes, fashion, tech, beauty and food/drink. While these campaigns were critical to maintaining engagement with their members, building each email required the team to manually sort through brands and look for the best offers. 

In order to support these daily campaigns for the long haul, the team needed to automate as much of the creation process as possible. Saving 30 to 40 minutes per email would return valuable time to the team, which could then be used to strategize new campaigns, optimize existing campaigns, and continually improve the member experience. 

As an Iterable client since 2019, UNiDAYS implemented Iterable Catalog, a proprietary metadata storage service that enables highly personalized messages without the complexity or maintenance of traditional data feeds. 

However, before adopting Catalog more broadly, the CRM team completed two phases of testing: an initial phase to test the viability of using Collections (a feature of Catalog) to pull personalized content into the daily emails, and a second phase to test the impact of automation on engagement and daily active members (DAM).

Testing with Catalog: Phase 1

The UNiDAYS team needed to validate that using Collections to automate the process would reduce time and effort, both in building each email and in cloning the message template for use in other recurring marketing campaigns.  The team chose the “Shoesday” campaign, a top-performing campaign sent weekly to UNiDAYS members living in Germany. 

The team tested with two lookalike audiences drawn from UNiDAYS members who had opened email during the previous 90 days. Each audience received the same templated message with identical subject line and preheader. The only difference was in the showcase content. 

One email featured manually selected offers, while the other audience received the email built using Collections, which automatically selected shoe brands that have “ending soon” deals. 

The test ran for six weeks.

Team members found the automated process using Collections indeed reduced the amount of time needed to produce the weekly marketing initiatives. In addition, the team learned that cloning these recurring campaigns easily ensured that email content remained consistent from one campaign to the next, with the only difference being the Collections content in the email.

Testing with Catalog: Phase 2

Next, the CRM team set up a four-week test to determine whether automating with Catalog instead of manually selecting offers would impact engagement or Daily Active Members (DAM). This time, the testing was expanded to include both “Shoesday” and “Limited Time Only” (“LTO”) initiatives.  

The testing base was divided into three groups:

• 45% received the current manually created version
• 45% received the version automated with Collections
• 10% was a control group that received neither email

To the delight of the team, the email automated with Catalog performed equally as well as the email with manually selected offers, while both versions outperformed the control group for both perk engagements and DAM.

Based on the test results, team members concluded that introducing Catalog would save 1.5 hours a week between the Shoesday and LTO initiatives alone, while maintaining the performance and engagement the UNiDAYS business depends on.

Conclusion

UNiDAYS’ team found that implementing Iterable Catalog across their CRM programs would save over 3.5 hours a week, or 182 hours annually, while maintaining the deep personalization their Gen-Z audience expects. In turn, those hours can now be spent further optimizing UNiDAYS CRM program, increasing ROI, and continuing to expand the UNiDAYS business.

Iterable’s Impact at CreativeLive

Streamlined Email Management for Focused Execution

Studio Spotlight

In 2007, Scribd launched the world’s first open publishing platform. Today, with over 100 million unique monthly visitors, a digital library of more than 1 million titles, and readers around the globe, Scribd is living its mission to “change the way the world reads.” 

Scribd monthly subscribers gain unlimited access to books, audiobooks, magazines, news and more, on the web or through Scribd’s mobile app (available on the App Store and Google Play). 

Since the beginning, email has been an integral channel for Scribd for everything from acquisition and engagement to lifecycle management and communications. Under Andrew Harner, Scribd’s Lead Manager for Email, email has grown its acquisition share at Scribd ten-fold. In addition, testing across Scribd’s acquisition suite has driven a 10% increase in click rate through optimizing mobile email templates and a 300% increase in click rate from a redesign of Scribd’s welcome email, which combined have resulted in a 30% increase in month-over-month signups across Scribd’s new user acquisition flow.

As Scribd’s product, subscriber base, and global presence grew, the marketing team outgrew  its legacy martech stack. In order to efficiently manage messaging volume and leverage user data to power more personalized messaging, the Scribd team modernized its tech stack with Iterable and Mailgun by Sinch.

Wanted: the right tech plus a trust-based partnership

Scribd relies on its tech stack to help tackle challenges common to subscriber-based services: increasing paid subscribers, boosting user engagement (ex. daily sessions and monthly active users), and influencing long-term user retention. But neither its in-house messaging platform nor its previous cloud services provider were robust enough to handle its ever-increasing database. 

“We wanted to partner with a company where we could build  a relationship founded on trust,” Andrew says. This is a quality that can be hard to define in the typical request for proposal (RFP). 

But then Andrew walked into an Iterable vendor conference in 2019.

Collaborating with Iterable and Mailgun by Sinch

The Iterable and Mailgun partnership with Scribd began at Activate 2019, where he witnessed the companies’ values of humility and honesty in action.

“We wanted to invest in developing a high velocity of lifecycle testing to build a robust lifecycle program for Scribd,” he says. 

Mailgun by Sinch’s long-standing reputation for consistently reliable email delivery and Iterable’s cross-channel automation capabilities, such as those that simplified testing and gave the marketing autonomy and control over the process, helped move the deal forward, Andrew says.

Following the conference, the Scribd team put both platforms through a rigorous and fast-paced implementation. That meant working with the Mailgun and Iterable Deliverability team to warm up 11 IP addresses and scaling up transactional, triggered lifecycle, and batch marketing sends to about 1 million a day. 

Even in the early stages of implementation, “we saw massive improvements out of the gate,” Andrew says.

Taking the pain out of the switch

With the wrong technology partners, migrating to a new platform can lead to one headache after another. With Iterable and Mailgun, the process was so painless that Andrew took a two week vacation mid-transition. 

“The main warm-up went really well,” he says. “It was absolutely painless. We were onboarded seamlessly, equipped with a playbook and guidelines around best practices, including how many emails to send on which day, when to start activating additional IP addresses and how to spread those sends out. Iterable and Mailgun’s partnership and close collaboration ensured we were set up for success.”

But cooperation is a two-way street, and Scribd was on board with the process, which moved more than 80 transactional and marketing email journeys over 10 weeks and targeted only actively engaged users at first.

“We didn’t have any issues with ramping up with Mailgun and Iterable,” Andrew says. ” In fact, we immediately saw improved attribution because of how Iterable applies link tagging to dynamic links, which helped us understand the full impact of the email program.”

Today, Scribd teams with Iterable and Mailgun by Sinch to send over a million marketing and transactional emails daily along with another 10 to 20 million broadcast messages per month across its active user base.

How Iterable + Mailgun help Scribd build stronger lifecycle programs

Like most subscription-based brands, tackling churn is a top priority. 

Scribd built several new lifecycle programs in Iterable that target critical points in its user lifecycle, all of which help the company reduce churn, convert more trial users to paid subscribers and increase the engaged user base, including:

• An acquisition program that upsells current customers to expand their subscriptions
• Journeys targeting canceled and inactive users
• An onboarding program that aims to engage trial users quickly – within a day to a week after signing up – to increase frequency and session durations and to reduce inactivity and attrition. 

As part of the onboarding program development, the company used Iterable’s localization function to quickly set up live onboarding journeys in English, Spanish and Portuguese for users in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, Australia and several other key markets.

“We were able to develop and push 14 of these onboarding touchpoints live with translations and market-specific content in a span of just three weeks,” Andrew says.

Scribd rapidly advanced their lifecycle programs and Iterable’s platform allowed the team to be agile and iterate with ease, and Mailgun’s burst scaling ability provided the stability needed to deploy emails without having to worry about email volume.

An unexpected bonus: A platform that sparks joy

“The people we work with at Iterable are human, they care, and they’re invested in our success. Iterable is aware of our needs, cares about our results, and develops programs that meet our specific needs. 

The dependability of the platform has always been a major factor. Many of the emails we send are part of our legal compliance–we have an internal SLA around delivery times for key transactional emails like receipts and password receipts. Having that confidence in our transactional sends helps me sleep at night. 

Iterable’s tooling is accessible enough and intuitive enough that, in the words of my lifecycle marketing manager, ‘it brought the joy back to our work. Yes, it sparks joy.’”

When Jersey Mike’s Subs first opened in Point Pleasant New Jersey in 1956, exceptional subs and a friendly face behind the counter were enough to deliver a top-notch customer experience (or, what Jersey Mike’s refers to as A Sub Above). Now 65 years later, as one of the fastest growing chain restaurants, the Jersey Mike’s team knew they needed to double-down on digital in order to continue building and retaining loyal, sub-loving customers. 

Harnessing the Power of Mobile Ordering

In 2019, Jersey Mike’s partnered with World Wide Technology to revamp and relaunch its mobile app. With nearly 2,000 retail locations worldwide, scalability, speed-of-ordering and a personalized customer experience were top of mind. 

“Our franchisees and our crew members do a really great job of engaging customers in-store—they banter back and forth, they remember people’s orders and first names—we really wanted to bring that personalized experience into our online, digital experience,” said Kelly McGee, Director of Digital Marketing at Jersey Mike’s. 

The launch of the new app in August of 2019 introduced a plethora of new user event data. Activating this newly accessible data, however, required the right marketing technology stack and deep organizational alignment to continually prioritize its digital experience.

Enabling A Sub Above Experience

When building the martech stack around its new mobile app, Jersey Mike’s introduced Segment as its customer data platform to unify online and in-store data, Amplitude to understand and manage in-app behavior and Iterable to engage with customers through their preferred channels. This combination of tools unlocks engagement data and enables the personalized end-to-end digital experience customers expect.

“We’re able to use the data we’re getting from our app to send more targeted, relevant messages. We’re able to see what channel people interact with the most. We currently use push and email with Iterable, and we’re able to engage with our customers where they want to engage with us,” said McGee.

For example, during its annual Customer Appreciation event, Jersey Mike’s ran a loyalty campaign to incentivize members of the MyMike’s loyalty program to place an order and earn bonus points, while non-members were encouraged to join the MyMike’s program. The push notifications were built and sent through Iterable, based on cohort data sent to Iterable from Amplitude. The member cohort saw a 13% lift in orders placed when compared to the control group, while 38% of non-members converted and became members of the MyMike’s program.

Agility Driven by a Modern Marketing Stack

While Jersey Mike’s is still investing heavily in the growth of its in-store, dine-in experience (even going as far as paying for franchisee remodels), its mobile experience has become critical to Jersey Mike’s exponential growth.    

Proactively investing in its mobile app experience enabled them to pivot and capitalize on the rise of digital ordering driven by 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic accelerated consumer adoption of technology for meal ordering. At Jersey Mike’s, online ordering more than doubled in the last year, with customers appreciating the ease of use, ordering speed and contact-free options. While the mobile app itself manages the influx of orders, the marketing touchpoints that surround the app (enabled by Iterable, Amplitude and Segment) ensure loyal customers come back for more. 

Automated email and in-app campaigns like welcome, birthday and re-engagement campaigns were in place to nurture and engage new customers, which allowed Jersey Mike’s digital marketing team to focus on responding to the ever-changing landscape and regulations of 2020.

Looking Forward

While technology is certainly an enabler of today’s most powerful mobile customer experiences, Jersey Mike’s also credits strong cross-functional prioritization and planning. 

“We do a really good job of aligning our priorities as a company. Marketing works very closely together with our IT and operations teams to make sure we’re all on the same page–that the products we’re pushing out are what our customers want and need,” said McGee.  

Looking ahead, Jersey Mike’s plans to build on the success of it’s mobile app, continue to grow the MyMike’s loyalty program, expand in marketing channels to include SMS, and most importantly, listen to customer feedback. 

“I don’t think we would have built the app the way we did, had it not been for customer feedback. To this day, we continually look at app reviews to see if the features we’re launching are resonating with our customers. It’s really important to take that feedback into account if you’re going through a digital transformation.”

Hipcamp’s mission is simple: “Get more people outside.” The adventure-camping company is a comprehensive resource for discovering and booking unique outdoor stays. 

Hipcamp’s marketplace model matches landowning hosts with “Hipcampers” seeking unique campsites and nontraditional lodgings, such as glamping tents, yurts, treehouses and RVs.

Thus, Hipcamp has two missions: encouraging hosts to complete the listing process so they can receive bookings faster, and encouraging campers to post reviews, which give hosts valuable feedback for improving their listings and services and helps other campers run more successful searches.

Testing and experimentation in Iterable have been a key part of the marketing team’s operations, to learn quickly, optimize, and move on to the next project. 

Challenges

The team used to rely on manual testing management and record keeping, an inefficient process that limited its ability to experiment and optimize messaging and to serve its host and camper audiences.

Solutions

Hipcamp’s operations team had two primary goals: 

• To engage with and support landowners (hosts) as they begin their hosting journey and to increase the number of completed listings 
• To increase camper engagement through the review journey to increase the number of most reviews

The team replaced its manual testing process with Iterable’s A/B testing and user filtering and Amplitude’s funnel conversion and performance evaluation.

Host Audience journey

The Hipcamp team built an automated Iterable journey that uses a series of emails, texts, and other communication to supplement live support in the quest to help more hosts create and post listings.

“It was super easy to export user lists and see what was happening at the granular level,” Tran says. The team could track host behavior in each testing segment, discover which email messages they were receiving and then update message content quickly. 

The Iterable events stream automatically to Amplitude for conversion tracking, such as comparing how different host groups move through the reporting funnel.

Camper Review journey

The team created a camper review journey in Iterable that staggers communications and uses personalization to connect with campers.

“We filter campers based on specific fields, such as listing location and date of stay,” says Business Operations Analyst Lukas Ronkin. “Whether a camper is staying at a California campsite or a Massachusetts cabin, they’ll get specialized and personalized language catered for them.”

Camper events also stream from Iterable to Amplitude. The team tracks and evaluates how each message type performs, using metrics such as review completion rate and sentiment score.

Results

The Hipcamp operations team has been able to run 4.5X the number of successful, operations-driven experiments, which produces more insights Hipcamp can use to benefit both hosts and campers. 

This created a multiplier effect – more hosts are completing the listing process and receiving bookings faster. As more campers complete the review process, hosts receive more feedback they can improve their listings and their campsites and get more bookings. Campers, in turn, have more host reviews to consult in their searches. This helps them find the right sites. 

Hipcamp has achieved more experimentation and greater efficiency, Ronkin says. The team can create and run more tests and get results faster. Faster time to insights means the team can put what it learns to work faster and create more successful experiences for hosts and campers alike.

Available in more than 20 countries, Care.com is the world’s leading platform for finding and managing high-quality family care. Care.com is designed to meet the evolving needs of today’s families and caregivers, offering everything from household tax and payroll services and customized corporate benefits packages covering the care needs of working families, to innovating new ways for caregivers to be paid and obtain professional benefits. Since 2007, families have relied on Care.com’s industry-leading products—from child and elder care to pet care and home care.

Challenges

Care.com needed a modern data structure so its marketing systems could keep up with the company’s rapid growth, says Matthew Naturman, Care.com’s Associate Marketing Manager for Lifecycle Marketing. 

Its “Frankenstein” collection of platforms – for marketing email, transactional email, mobile app and push notifications, SMS, personalization testing, business intelligence (BI) and data storage – was inefficient, requiring too many workarounds to pass data and insights from one platform to another.

Care.com had three major priorities:

1. Invest in journey mapping its user experiences, replacing time-consuming manual processes with streamlined data and automated journeys.
2. Test and analyze data quickly and use those insights to create and optimize new marketing programs
3. Make greater use of its data sources without relying on its data engineers.

Solutions

Care.com replaced its stand-alone messaging platforms with Iterable, for marketing and transactional emails, app/push/SMS and testing, and Amplitude for user analysis and reporting, and measuring engagement. This gave the operations team the full picture of their customers’ experience with the Care.com marketplace platform.

The Care.com team used its revamped tech stack to launch dozens of new testing programs, email journeys and data initiatives, including these:

• Set up journey mapping on key events, such as tracking caregivers from the job search through the subscription purchase and comparing behavior based on email activity.
• Tracking abandonment activity and using that information to switch marketing efforts, such as abandonment reminders.
• Set alerts in Amplitude to monitor Iterable campaigns to quickly detect unexpected changes in key metrics like abandonment email triggers or conversions.
• Launched dozens of new experiments, such as the optimal sending order of email and push notifications for abandonment. 

Results

Adding Iterable and Amplitude to the tech stack enabled the team to journey map across channels, and continually optimize based on user behavior. The team also found efficiencies all through its various programs, from testing and optimization to campaign development and management, reporting and data tracking and analysis. 

Care.com has been able to scale up its operations without adding more human or tech support. These are some of the benefits Care.com has realized so far:

• Pairing member engagement with messaging on the platform helps the team  understand how marketing efforts affect user engagement
• Alert system highlights problems quickly for fixes that have reduced abandonment and conversion losses.
• The team now has a deeper understanding of care-seekers and caregivers through email and web activity.
• An expanded testing program optimizes messaging all through the customer journey for higher conversions.

Since 2011, crypto services provider Blockchain.com has managed 28% of all Bitcoin transactions. Blockchain.com was one of the first names in the crypto space and today, the company is synonymous with trading in cryptocurrency. Its millions of users have created more than 72 million wallets and more than $800 billion in transactions across 200 countries (as of April 2021). 

Blockchain.com offers traders a single platform experience, a built-in user-controlled wallet, interest accounts and other clients services.

Challenge

With Blockchain.com’s growth and the increasing adoption of cryptocurrency, the team knew the opportunity of delivering a more tailored user experience was significant. 

“We have people coming to Blockchain.com every day with a vast difference in knowledge of crypto and from different places in the world with different restrictions on crypto. In order to retain those users and increase adoption we have to speak to each of them as individuals,” said Indi Pollard, Email Marketing Lead.

But with only a small team managing email marketing for millions of users, Blockchain.com needed to prioritize personalization strategies that capitalized on individual user behavior and were quick to implement and prove ROI.

Using Data to Drive Strategy

With Iterable in place, Blockchain.com can leverage user behavior to personalize both the email content and overall user journey. The initial goal was to simply increase email open rates, which had suffered from a largely batch-and-blast approach, and automate as much of the user journey as possible.

First, they evaluated user engagement across two axes—Last Email Open and Last Wallet Access. This provided the insight that guides how Blockchain.com engages with each cohort. Cold users are driven toward more email-oriented actions, while disengaged users are driven toward more product-oriented actions.  This analysis of user behavior shifted Blockchain.com’s approach from high-volume email sends to targeted, goal-oriented campaigns.

Using Studio to Personalize the Journey

Once the Blockchain.com team had a grasp on how engaged their audience was, they built automated journeys to segment and engage with each cohort. 

“Iterable’s Studio is a great way to segment and personalize so we can send a single campaign to different cohorts with just small changes that personalize the content for each audience,” said Pollard. 

For example, Blockchain.com’s monthly Market Outlook events are an important part of their education and retention strategy. With Studio, they can easily filter users into two groups—users who have attended previous events and those who have not. Users who have attended past events receive a straightforward invitation, while those who have not attended, or didn’t open earlier invitations, receive additional contextual information to help nurture them to action.

Having access to user event data in Iterable enabled Blockchain.com’s nascent email team to identify and automate critical moments of the customer journey.  

Beyond “Hi {{defaultlfEmpty firstName “there”}}” Blockchain.com implemented simple logic statements to personalize email content based on the currency each user is interested in. 

For example, to promote a product feature called Swap, which allows users to directly trade one cryptocurrency for another, they use simple logic statements to deliver targeted messages like “Do you want to swap your Bitcoin for Ethereum?” instead of “Do you want to try Swap?” 

Rewarding User Behavior to Build Loyalty

With a small team and restrictions on how customer data can be used in the Financial Services industry, the Blockchain.com team looks for creative ways to reward user behavior and build customer loyalty. 

Identity verification is an important step for new users to take when joining Blockchain.com. Verified users are granted additional permissions and higher trading limits, while verification provides Blockchain.com additional context to each user. 

Using a basic logic statement in the snippet of Blockchain.com’s email headers, verified users will see a “VIP” symbol on all communications they receive. This is a small way to leverage data, and incentive and reward favorable in-product behavior. 

Results

When the right tech stack is in place, even small marketing teams can execute effective personalization strategies and have a significant impact on user engagement and retention.

Pollard urges other marketers not to let lack of data keep them from exploring personalization. Having data in Iterable such as “last email open” and “last wallet login” enabled her to begin segmenting and personalizing messages, she says. After that, “it’s all about figuring out how you can make your job easier by letting Iterable do the work of personalization to bring you higher conversion metrics.”

Ritual, a subscription based, direct-to-consumer wellness brand, was founded in 2015 on the premise that “better health begins with better ingredients.” 

As Founder and CEO Katerina Schneider puts it, “When I was pregnant, I turned my house upside down to get rid of products with ingredients I couldn’t get behind. I replaced everything from my cleaning supplies to my deodorant. But, in my search for the perfect prenatal vitamin, I found many of those same questionable ingredients. I couldn’t find a brand that I trusted, so I decided to build my own.” 

What started with a women’s multivitamin only, has now expanded to include a complete line of both women’s and men’s multi-vitamins tailored to the needs of specific age groups. Along with the expansion in products (and audience) came the need to deliver highly-targeted and more personalized journeys that could drive long-term LTV and retention — something Ritual’s legacy tech stack wasn’t ready to handle. 

From Disparate to Unified Customer Data

Like many growing companies, Ritual had a plethora of customer data but struggled to harness it to drive their marketing touchpoints. A number of cloud data sources sent data to Snowflake (their analytics database) which then sent data to Looker (their business intelligence tool). 

From there, Laura Brodie, Vice President, Customer at Ritual, relied heavily on manual data extraction and list creation, and was limited on the data she could use to trigger personalized customer journeys. Their legacy ESP could trigger based on email engagement and purchase behavior, but not the rich event data captured in Snowflake. Siloed data and limited automation capabilities resulted in a number of disparate customer touchpoints, and limited ability to a/b test and optimize in real time. 

With an ever-growing audience and product line, Ritual couldn’t afford for their current tech stack to handcuff their long-term LTV, AOV and retention goals.

Fueling Growth with Data

By replacing their legacy ESP with Iterable’s growth marketing platform, and enhancing their use of Segment, Ritual was able to orchestrate cross-channel campaigns on key intent and engagement behavior. In 2020, with the introduction of men’s products, this became mission critical functionality that enabled them to successfully launch into an entirely new audience. 

Layering additional filters and personalization into their existing nurture journeys allowed Ritual to target their men’s audience and deliver the rich customer experience necessary to drive conversions.

In addition, launching a new product into an entirely new audience required continual iteration and testing. With Iterable Experiments, Ritual was able to create an aggressive testing calendar to help them learn about their men’s audience and optimize their messaging in real-time. 

Launching new products and breaking into new audiences is an exciting step in Ritual’s growth. But having the right tools in place to ensure their success was critical. 

By unifying key persona and purchase intent data in Iterable, Ritual was able to deliver targeted, personalized touchpoints without adding unnecessary complexity to their automation strategy. And in the first ten days of launching Men’s products, Ritual completed 5 a/b tests that resulted in a 12.5% overall lift in conversion and a shocking 45% lift in conversion in a single campaign. 

For Zoopla, one of the UK’s leading property marketplaces, increasing digital engagement is the key to delivering ROI to their partners and hitting its long-term growth targets. 

With over 55 million visits across their mobile apps and websites, and coverage of over 70% of UK real estate listings, Zoopla collects a massive amount of consumer data. That data can then be used to match homehunters to their dream property, and connect Zoopla customers (estate agents and developers) to relevant consumer cohorts. 

With their legacy tech stack, however,  Zoopla was handcuffed to manual data queries, batch data imports, and fragmented views of customer engagement. Knowing data-driven strategies based on geo-intent and Segment Personas were critical to recognizing rapid growth in their business, the Zoopla team knew they needed to modernize their tech stack.

Choosing Data-First to Fuel Growth

With their legacy ESP, Zoopla was reliant on manual SQL queries, batch data imports, and best-guess segmentation. 

“Our previous ESP could not handle the scale of our business. We weren’t leveraging the rich data we have, and segmentation was inconsistent or inaccessible across our tech stack. Any change we needed to make required at least two weeks of engineering effort.” said Chris Frost, Senior Product Manager at Zoopla. 

Beyond native cross-channel and segmentation capabilities, Zoopla needed a provider with the data foundation, scalable APIs, and rich partner integrations to  activate their latent customer data.  

“This evaluation wasn’t ever about a jazzy UI. The central thing for me as a marketer is, ironically, not the marketing functionality. Those elements, if you choose wisely, feel like table stakes to me” said Adam Knight, Director of Engagement at Zoopla. “It’s all about how it enables the engineering function of our business to support us as marketers so we can accelerate the pace of testing and iteration.”  

After completing an extensive evaluation, the Zoopla team chose Iterable’s data-first approach to customer experience to supercharge their growth. 

“After workshopping our use cases and mapping our data architecture—one of the most helpful phases of our review process—it became quite clear that Iterable was the best partner for us,” said Knight.

Rich Customer Experiences with Iterable

By introducing Iterable to their tech stack, previously complicated (or altogether unreachable) use cases are now accessible. 

Geo-intent, or understanding which locations a consumer might be interested in, is foundational to connecting homehunters with the right properties. For example, someone currently located in London may be looking to move to specific postcodes in Manchester. Zoopla looks to browse data, lead data, saved searches, and more to determine and score consumer intent. That score is then used to deliver relevant content and recommendations tailored to the locations a consumer is interested in. 

Prior to Iterable, data silos prevented Zoopla from having a clear understanding of geo-intent. Data housed in their ESP was not unified in real-time to data housed in Segment, or the rest of their tech stack. This disconnect gave a fragmented view of customer behavior and limited Zoopla’s ability to effectively action on geo-intent. 

In addition, Zoopla launched a new program ‘Zooploma’ in early 2020 with the intent of supporting and educating first-time home buyers. 

“First time buyers are a significant proportion of the market, accounting for almost 40% of all property transactions. Understanding their challenges and helping to support and guide them through the process is central to our ethos.” said Knight. (Source)

With Iterable’s deep integration with Segment, Zoopla can now quickly identify target Zooploma participants based on a variety of attributes.

Platform and Partnership for the Long Haul

For Zoopla, modernizing its tech stack meant finding both a platform and a partnership that would unlock growth. With Iterable in place, the Zoopla team can now deploy the strategies necessary to increase engagement and build the consumer preference that is integral to Zoopla’s long-term success.

Aspiration, a Los Angeles-based neobank, provides a socially conscious digital banking alternative to traditional financial institutions. 

“At the heart of Aspiration is a mission: helping our customers make money and make a difference at the same time.” (Source)

Through its “Dimes Worth a Difference” program, Aspiration donates ten cents of every dollar earned to charitable organizations focused on expanding economic opportunities. And while its product and service offerings mirror what you might find at a traditional bank, each offering is structured with social consciousness and sustainability top-of-mind. 

To engage with its socially-minded customers, Aspiration relies heavily on email and mobile push notifications. Having “exploited the limits” of its previous marketing platform and recognizing the opportunity of a more personalized customer engagement strategy, Aspiration unified their cross-channel customer experience with Iterable.

To engage with their customers at the right moment, Aspiration leverages Iterable’s Send Time Optimization (STO), which applies machine learning to automate and personalize the optimal send time for each unique recipient. Powered by Iterable AI, STO has enabled Aspiration to more than double open, click, and conversion rates.

Turbocharging Campaigns With AI

Prior to STO, the Aspiration team tested and tweaked campaign send time in order to optimize for engagement. While tailoring send time to the segment or time zone improved engagement, it lacked the ability to continuously learn, adapt and personalize send times across channels at scale.

The first time the Aspiration team applied STO to a campaign, they saw an immediate increase of over 100% in open and click rates. By analyzing historical engagement data and weighting more recent engagement signals, Iterable STO predicts the optimal send time for each unique individual. 

“When I first saw the results of the campaign with STO, I was truly shocked. I assumed we’d see some percentage lift in engagement, but more than doubling engagement across the board (opens, clicks, and conversions) was astonishing.”

Following the success in campaigns, Aspiration introduced STO to their journeys. They ran an STO experiment in Studio designed to increase engagement with low engagement users. The results showed a 27% increase in open rates of customers who received the STO-enabled email compared to the control group. 

Looking to the future, the Aspiration team will continue to seek out AI-driven solutions for the ability to improve performance beyond what they could ever do on their own. 

“Even with the largest, most technical marketing team, I could never match the results we see with Iterable AI.”

*Note: Any business subject to HIPAA compliance requiring a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) should contact the Iterable team to learn more about Iterable HIPAA requirements and exclusions.

It’s no secret—the healthcare system is complex. As patients, navigating a web of providers and specialities is not only frustrating, but also creates a disconnected view of our medical history. 

For PicnicHealth co-founder and CEO,  Noga Leviner, being diagnosed with a chronic illness and lacking a single, comprehensive view of her medical history was just the “aha!” moment she needed. Started in 2014, PicnicHealth is a platform that combines patient medical records into a single, easy-to-understand timeline and allows users to share that history for anonymized medical research. 

Early on, PicnicHealth’s homegrown marketing solution was enough to support their nascent email and automation needs. But as their platform and research programs grew, they recognized that the engineering effort spent maintaining their marketing tools could be better spent on the PicnicHealth platform. 

With the security and privacy of sensitive patient data top-of-mind, the PicnicHealth engineering team (the marketing team didn’t even exist yet!), set out to find a solution that would minimize their time spent coding email logic while also allowing them to deliver a more seamless user experience.

Recognizing the Opportunity of Personalization

Helping tens of thousands of patients better navigate their unique medical history requires personalized touchpoints that put the patient first. From new user onboarding to updating user profiles as additional medical history became available, the PicnicHealth team was spending tens of hours a week manually segmenting their users and building emails in their homegrown marketing tool. 

As part of onboarding, one of the most critical milestones in the user journey is signing the consent form that enables PicnicHealth to collect a patient’s medical records. While many users opt for a one-time collection of their records, the customer experience and PicnicHealth’s research programs benefit greatly when users subscribe to recurring record updates. For the user, their PicnicHealth record stays up-to-date with a comprehensive view of their history, while PicnicHealth’s research programs gain valuable real-world data with patient-reported outcomes—insight not included in traditional clinical research. 

With their homegrown marketing tool, nurturing users to sign up for ongoing medical record collection required the PicnicHealth team to manually segment users who had not opted-in to recurring updates and send an additional consent form. This manual process was inconsistent and wasn’t producing the results they hoped to see. 

Recognizing the extent of their limitations in segmentation, automation and analytics capabilities, as well as the burden of their homegrown solution on their engineering teams, PicnicHealth upgraded their tech stack to include Iterable.

Tailoring the Customer Experience with Iterable

With Iterable, PicnicHealth nurtures each user differently based on their medical condition, the types of doctors they’ve added, and the opportunities to improve the quality of their medical history. For example, some research programs offer compensation, while others request additional surveys to be completed to gather patient-reported outcomes. 

“We evaluated other marketing tools, but they didn’t have the advanced segmentation logic we needed for our diverse customer base,” said Justin Maslin, Software Engineer at PicnicHealth. 

Since making the switch to Iterable, the process of identifying and nurturing users to complete the ongoing medical history consent form is now fully automated, with a nearly 90% conversion rate.

Prior to Iterable, 25-50% of an engineer’s bandwidth was dedicated to building and managing email logic in their homegrown solution. Today, PicnicHealth’s marketing team is largely self-sufficient and able to easily support the continued expansion of PicnicHealth’s research programs.

The demands of everyday life can often leave us stressed, anxious and unable to focus. Many find relief in self-care practices that ease the mind and foster healthy habits. Enter Calm—the #1 app for sleep, meditation, and relaxation that offers guided meditations, sleep stories, soothing background music and more. 

While Calm has seen continual growth since its founding in 2012, Sue Cho, Head of Lifecycle Marketing, knew the company needed a deeper, more holistic view of its customers to drive sustainable growth and retention.

By coupling Iterable’s cross-channel customer journeys with Amplitude’s visualized product analytics, Calm gained a deeper understanding of customer behavior. With visibility into how their marketing influenced in-app behavior, Calm was able to test and optimize for incremental gains in their new-member onboarding sequence.

Data as the Source of Truth

As marketers, we’re continually seeking to answer “what’s right,” “what performs” and “what’s true?” We look to industry best practices, internal teams, and sometimes our own gut instinct in search of answers. But instead of letting best-guess drive her growth marketing strategy, Sue Cho turned to data and testing. 

Calm’s previous new-member onboarding flow included a series of eight emails over the course of one month, with the first email being triggered one day post-signup. The subsequent emails in the series were set to deploy every two days thereafter. 

In auditing their onboarding program, Sue reviewed Amplitude’s retention analysis chart, which displays how many users come back to a product after a given period of time. After drilling down to the hour, the chart revealed that about 80% of users drop off after the first 30 minutes with a low likelihood of returning. Sue recognized that the first hour was a critical opportunity to capture engagement, which could have significant implications for long-term user retention. Equipped with this knowledge, Sue went back into the journey to look for opportunities to optimize.

Test, Learn, Iterate, Repeat.

Recognizing that user engagement is highest in the first hour of downloading the app, Sue began testing her new-member onboarding flow. In her experiment, half of new members were funneled through the same onboarding touchpoints, but without the existing delays—instead of 27 days, the same eight emails went out in 15 days. With this shift, Sue quickly saw that users sent down the shortened path were engaging at a higher rate than those on the extended journey.

Continual testing and optimization are foundational and applicable to all of Calm’s campaigns. “If you don’t know where to start, study the people who are using the product the most. Study the people who are retaining the most. That’ll nudge you in the right direction on what content to show, how often you should message, and what your superstar user looks like. Take that intel, then build your campaign to start having users that aren’t super engaged begin to exhibit and practice those wanted behaviors.”

In gaining a deeper, more holistic view of user behavior, Calm identified opportunities to improve user retention that the team might have otherwise missed.  By optimizing their customer journey in Iterable based on user-engagement data from Amplitude, Calm’s new-member onboarding sequence saw a 4x increase in revenue performance. 

Investing in Amplitude and Iterable helped Calm build a MarTech stack that was fit to scale and keep pace with their rapid growth. It has enabled their team to be better informed about their users and continue to refine communications throughout the entire customer journey, ultimately bringing a little more Calm into people’s lives—one test, one conversion at a time.

The Proof is in the Data

Analyzing product usage in Amplitude inspired simple changes, like shortening the onboarding series length from 27 to 15 days, that produced significant results.

Revenue attributed to their new-member onboarding sequence increased 4x through testing and optimization. 

Leaning into user behavior trends gathered from product and campaign analytics allowed the team to more effectively tailor their communications.

When three friends joined forces in 2017 with a mission of making the world’s best fitness classes accessible to everyone, it’s doubtful they could foresee the massive shift the fitness industry would experience in 2020. As the world shuttered physical gyms and boutique fitness studios, Fiit.tv was uniquely positioned to step in and fill the void for fitness enthusiasts and newbies alike. 

As a U.K.-based subscription fitness app, available in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, Fiit provides on-demand classes, group workouts and tailored training plans to support every stage of the fitness journey. 

While Fiit had seen healthy year-over-year (YoY) growth, nothing could have prepared them for the massive influx of new users trading in-person workouts for virtual, resulting in 300% YoY growth in 2020. 

To effectively capitalize on their expanded addressable market and deliver an experience that would retain those users for the long haul, the Fiit team began testing their cross-channel onboarding sequence to optimize for conversions and retention.

Getting Smarter About Onboarding

In early 2020, Fiit introduced a 14-day free trial for all new user sign-ups. The trial period provided a finite runway for Fiit to educate new users on the various features within the app, and prove enough value to encourage a conversion from free trial to paid subscription. 

Fiit’s existing onboarding sequence lacked clear objectives and left new users unclear on how to best get started. 

“Fiit is quite a complex business, and frankly we were giving too much information to our users upfront. We included information on how to take classes, how to get started in the app, and we also included upsell information on our wearable technology,” said Jimmy Davis, Head of Retention.  

With too much information and not enough clear direction, trial-to-paid conversion rates dropped to just over 56% from a previous average of 60%. Given their influx of new users, Fiit knew even incremental gains in conversion would have long-term implications for their business. 

But before they started testing their onboarding journey, the Fiit team did extensive research to identify trends in their customer base and clearly define the steps a user needed to take within the trial period to increase the likelihood of converting to a paid subscription. What they found were two actionable insights. 

First, users who complete a class within the first five days of the trial have a higher propensity to convert to a paid subscription. Second, Fiit was being introduced to a new type of customer they had previously struggled to capture. This new persona, “Alli,” saw fitness as part of their lifestyle, held memberships to boutique gyms, and had discretionary income to spend on fitness. 

Knowing the optimal timeframe to engage with new users, and having a better understanding of the personas they were seeking to engage with, gave Fiit the direction they needed to experiment with their onboarding journey.

Optimizing for Peak Performance

The Fiit team already knew that Iterable’s email and push notifications were the right channels to employ during onboarding, leaning on in-app messaging to engage with users once they are active in the app. Leveraging Iterable Experiments, Fiit tested both content and timing of touchpoints to determine what drove users to complete their first class within the first five days, and ultimately provide the highest trial-to-paid conversion performance. 

First, Fiit A/B tested sending new users a single, recommended class against encouraging them to join a more structured training program. They hypothesized that encouraging users to join a training program would result in lower engagement rates, but initial results actually indicated slightly higher engagement—63% activation within the first five days, compared to 60% activation from users who were sent a single-class recommendation. 

Second, Fiit tested increasing the number of touchpoints (both email and push) on the very first day a user joins. They were concerned that the number of communications might increase unsubscribes and churn, but by capitalizing on user intent, which is highest when a user first downloads the app, Fiit saw first-day activations jump from 58% to 70%. 

In addition to experimenting with content and timing, Fiit added a number of filters to the journey to identify key customer personas and ensure each user received the most relevant content. By checking the number of classes a user has completed, whether they’ve purchased a Fiit health monitor, what their referral source was, and more, Fiit personalized every step of the onboarding experience.

Building Strength for the Long Haul

Having the right tech stack in place enabled Fiit to optimize their new user onboarding experience and capitalize on an astounding year of growth. 

Prior to leveraging Iterable’s cross-channel Experiments and Studio to improve new user onboarding, Fiit’s overall trial-to-paid conversion rate hovered around 56%. After testing and optimization, trial-to-paid conversions increased to 65%.

As the Fiit team looks to the future, they’re focused on establishing their platform not as a replacement for in-person fitness, but a complement to it. 

“There’s an interactivity between physical spaces and community that will be critical for us to tap into in order to retain this wave of new users. Fiit really is a platform we see being used everywhere—whether you’re in a gym, at home or outdoors.”

In the late ‘90s, elite triathlon and cycling coach Joe Friel started to recognize the limitations of traditional coach-to-athlete communication—handwritten training logs, email and fax machines weren’t efficient enough to keep up with the needs of elite athletes and coaches. 

In partnering with his son Dirk, and family friend Gear Fisher, Joe and team built TrainingPeaks, the world’s first online training log that enables coaches to connect with their athletes over the web. 

Today, TrainingPeaks creates endurance training apps and solutions that help athletes and coaches prepare the right way to reach their goals.

Expanding in Audience and Channels

As TrainingPeaks grew, so did the diversity of its audience and the channels they used to engage each member. For example, coaches typically engage with TrainingPeaks on desktop, while roughly 90% of athletes prefer to engage on the mobile app. 

Michelle Hiland, CRM Marketing Manager, knew that interacting with their audience in the right channel with the right content at the right time was key to increasing upsells and maximizing retention, but she was limited by the functionality of their legacy tech stack. 

“We couldn’t use our data the way we wanted to, and the API was a lot harder for our engineers to use. We were basically limited to profile data only,” said Hiland.

In addition, TrainingPeaks was leveraging two separate tools to manage its email and in-app experience. The disconnect between tools created a disjointed customer experience and crippled TrainingPeaks’ retention and upsell efforts. 

In order to continue growing their international network of coaches and athletes, and optimize their mobile app experience, TrainingPeaks knew it was time to reassess their tech stack.

Unifying Channels for a Seamless Customer Experience

After evaluating a handful of automation platforms, TrainingPeaks chose to unify their inbox and in-app experiences with Iterable’s growth marketing platform. 

“Choosing a platform our engineers approved of was a big sticking point for us,” said Hiland. “The fact that everything is in JSON makes Iterable really easy for them to work with.” 

The ability to easily get data into (and out of) Iterable enabled TrainingPeaks to build journeys that support their multi-channel customer experience, and deliver personalized content based on the events and training programs athletes are interested in. Across their lifecycle campaigns, TrainingPeaks is now able to trigger channel-specific messages based on web, desktop and mobile app engagement. 

In planning for 2020, TrainingPeaks recognized that many athletes were adding events to their calendar, but not purchasing a training plan to help them prepare. Because they had access to all relevant customer behavior, TrainingPeaks was able to create a journey that triggers when someone adds an event, but does not purchase a training plan. Without Iterable’s flexible data integration, TrainingPeaks wouldn’t have been able to capitalize on this key upsell opportunity.

Stronger Performance for the Long Haul

Unifying their inbox and in-app experiences with Iterable has enabled TrainingPeaks to engage with its users at critical moments in the customer journey. In-app click rates have increased to nearly 70% with an average conversion rate of 6%, and email clicks-to-open rate averages nearly 12%.

TrainingPeaks has also seen a drastic decrease in time spent building their weekly newsletters—what previously took 10 hours a week to create now takes less than 20 minutes, leaving the TrainingPeaks team more time to continually optimize and find incremental gains in their behavior-based automations. 

Having access to the data and the channels to deliver a cohesive customer experience has been critical for TrainingPeaks to effectively support their elite athletes and coaches. Bringing disparate data and channels into a single platform enables personalized touchpoints that consistently increase conversion rates, and drive the long-term retention TrainingPeaks depends on for growth.

Flowers for many represent life and love. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Funerals. Even random acts of kindness. Flowers are a love language in their own right, a visual expression of growth and brightness in the world and a relationship of any kind. 

For the founders of bloomon the flower business had lost that brightness. The joy inherent to receiving or buying flowers had been stripped from the experience. From roadside carts to supermarkets, flowers became something impersonal, something pulled unceremoniously from their plot and stuck in a shop waiting to be bought. 

The supply chain was broken. And so, over a cup of coffee, the three friends devised a plan to get the finest flowers curated into the latest designs from the grower to your door in the fastest way possible.

Reviving Any Fallen Petals

Much like many other subscription-based organizations, bloomon faced the challenge of retaining customers and avoiding churn. For flower aficionados, bloomon’s subscription service brings surprise and delight from their constantly-changing artisanal bouquet designs.  

But for many, flowers are often associated with an event, making purchases a one-off occasion rather than a sustained practice. This resulted in customer churn, kickstarting bloomon’s re-engagement campaigns. 

Before selecting Iterable, bloomon ran into troubles personalizing and automating their campaigns in their legacy system. The company started noticing new, advanced opportunities for personalization and automation in their reactivation campaigns. 

As part of their retention efforts bloomon sent incentive-based email campaigns to encourage users to stay. But, in order to disseminate relevant incentives, bloomon needed a way to capture this information and personalize future emails accordingly. Without this data, their reactivation campaigns suffered as a result.

Growing Relationships… One Seed at a Time

With Iterable in place, bloomon sought to revive any wilting customer relationships. The company’s new reactivation campaigns fostered a closer relationship by incorporating customer behavior at the individual level. 

bloomon adjusted their multi-touch campaign to utilize personalization and incentives in varying capacities. The company even preempted the reactivation flow by offering a call-to-action to reactivate the account.

From there, using Iterable’s flexible data management and journey builder capabilities, bloomon looks to the user profile to determine how to proceed based on the different possible reasons for churn. Perhaps this is not the first time a customer is churning? These customers will receive a different overall experience than those who are looking to churn for the first time. 

If the first email doesn’t prompt reactivation, two emails with incentives and deadlines follow. For those that don’t have it, a free matching glass vase is offered with their bouquet. For customers with the vase, they receive a free matching ceramic vase to broaden their experience. By looking in Iterable at the historical behavioral data of each customer, bloomon is able to curate the customer journey at the individual level. 

bloomon is also using this as an opportunity to encourage use of new benefits and offerings, such as Atelier, a new, premium line of bouquets that differ from the standard membership bouquets. Throughout the whole reactivation campaign, bloomon stops sending promotional messages to the customer, ensuring the incentives and reactivation messaging are getting the user’s full attention. 

Now, bloomon is able to quickly and easily test what works best for their customer base. And this expands beyond just reactivation emails. Bloomon now sends SMS reminders regarding subscriptions and deliveries.

In crafting a cross-channel experience such as this, bloomon is setting itself up to fulfill its promise of bringing humanity and joy back into the flower business for each and every customer that needs a little brightness added to their days.

Freelancers and small business owners—including photographers, designers, marketing consultants, and lawyers—start their businesses to pursue the craft they love. Too often, however, they have to spend much of their time bogged down by paperwork and overwhelmed by accounting.

That’s why so many of them have turned to HoneyBook. This end-to-end client management app streamlines project tracking, bookings, invoicing and payments, giving these entrepreneurs more time to devote to creative endeavors.

In 2019, Loren Elia, Director of Product Management at HoneyBook, and her team realized that their marketing platform was not the right fit for the company’s business model. Replacing the platform became an urgent matter as their contract was up for renewal in just a few weeks. Unless the team moved quickly they would be forced to stay with the wrong tool for another year.

The team identified Iterable as the ideal solution for their requirements. After moving their campaigns over to the Iterable platform, the team was executing campaigns in just 15 days.

Fast Time to Value

With close collaboration across their product management, engineering and data teams and Iterable’s implementation consultants, HoneyBook completed the Iterable migration in just 15 days and went on to expand on their current communication strategy through the rest of their implementation

Prior to starting, product management carefully documented all current campaigns along with their data properties, user triggers and audience descriptions. Iterable’s Implementation Consultants also provided guidance on the best, most efficient way for HoneyBook to achieve its goals that helped scale over time. These efforts established a clear roadmap for the cross-functional implementation team.

Loren also noted that Iterable’s excellent support and documentation helped fast-track the implementation process. “The Iterable support team was quick to respond with answers to our questions,” she explains. “And while we had a few training-related questions, the system is intuitive.” 

With Iterable in place, HoneyBook is now focusing on marketing campaigns that drive growth for both the short and long term. The team has built multiple campaigns to address various lifecycle stages, including encouraging new leads to start a trial, guiding trial users through the onboarding process, and engaging new subscribers so they understand how to leverage HoneyBook’s capabilities to grow their own businesses. 

“With Iterable we can continually feed new leads into the funnel,” Loren concludes. “And we can now move people more effectively through the lifecycle—from the time they start a trial through conversion and finally to a subscription. ”

More effective, personalized lifecycle campaigns have not only made it simpler for HoneyBook to focus on subscriber activation and retention but also streamlined the process for users to enjoy the full extent of the benefits Honeybook offers.

From backpackers to glampers, everyone camps in their own way. Some prefer multi-day hikes. Some don’t even leave their campgrounds, opting for the serenity of just being away from it all. For years, campers struggled to find readily accessible campground information beyond official websites and word of mouth.

And then The Dyrt came along—a community-driven hub for outdoor enthusiasts to share their camping stories and tips for making the most of campgrounds. As their founder, Sarah Smith says, “Looking at review platforms like Yelp or TripAdvisor, we thought: Why can’t this exist for the outdoors?”

If ever there were a group of people who felt a sense of community, it’s the campers in all of us. The only question became how The Dyrt would connect with such a widespread group of people.

Driving Recommendations Through Catalog

The Dyrt’s recommendation engine is driven by user behavior and the filters they apply. This information is then added to a collection in Iterable’s Catalog to create personalized recommendations. 

Relevancy is the key. No one wants to learn about a campsite that is unable to accommodate their wants and needs. And so, the Dyrt is using Iterable’s data management capabilities to identify user preferences and provide hyper-personalized recommendations. 

With Catalog in use, campers are now receiving messages with the best campsites based on their specific preferences, such as location and type of campground. 

To increase the effectiveness of the recommendations, the company has broken through the common problem of data silos between channels and has begun using Catalog insights to inform both email and mobile messaging.

The Perfect Push per Person

Campers are always on the go—or at least looking for the next adventure. The Dyrt understands this and built a comprehensive mobile app, which includes mobile marketing strategies and gamification to ensure campers never miss out. 

In order for each user to receive the perfect set of recommendations on their mobile device, The Dyrt worked closely with Iterable to ensure the right message found the right person. Tapping into Iterable’s data flexibility and depth of API capabilities, the company built a use case that is best suited for their business needs, as well as those of its customers. 

As mentioned, the Dyrt utilizes the information for Catalog to build out its recommendations for push notification campaigns. From there, the company works with react native libraries to identify the activity types for each push notification, such as if the message has been received versus if it has been opened. Iterable then sends a JSON payload allowing for customization of the push with rich push features like imagery.  

The Dyrt then tracks push open rates through easy-to-use APIs. With this flow of data in place, the company is able to more closely monitor user behavior at each stage to inform the success of future campaigns.

The Results

Providing relevant recommendations shows users you’re paying attention. The Dyrt has built a trusting relationship with its users through this process, ensuring users can easily find their dream campsite. And the results have shown this level of care and understanding leads to loyal, longer-term users.

UpHabit has been called a CRM by some, but as Founder and CEO Neil Wainwright puts it, “UpHabit is about helping you build personal relationships.” The company leans heavily on the “R” of CRM, focusing exclusively on you and your relationships.

Any type. Personal. Professional. Acquaintance. Friend of a friend. Anyone in your contacts list. UpHabit makes it easier to maintain these connections through customizable reminders and follow-up prompts. In the age of endless games of phone/text/message tag, UpHabit keeps the world a little more connected…one relationship at a time.

“We don’t tell you what to say. We just say now’s a good time to talk to that person,” adds Wainwright. With decades of product and customer experience, it only makes sense that Wainwright chose such a common obstacle to tackle.

It’s such a simple thing, but those are how we make good habits.

Using Iterable for a Streamlined Customer Experience

A modern relationship is inherently cross-channel. From texts to social media direct messages to emails to the good old phone call, there are seemingly endless ways to get in contact with someone. It’s about finding the right method that works for each relationship. Much in the same manner, UpHabit worked with Iterable to find the best cross-channel strategy to streamline the customer experience. With consistent messaging reaching across mobile and email, UpHabit is able to sustain a relevant conversation with users. In particular, UpHabit set its sights on in-app messaging as a core piece of its marketing strategy. After all, a message directly in the app is likely to promote further usage and interaction with the product.

While many in-app functions take over the whole screen and cover the app itself, Wainwright knew there had to be a better way. “I wanted a more immersive experience with our app than you’d normally get.” After talking with Iterable, he found it. Using Iterable’s platform flexibility, UpHabit customized their in-app messaging using their own JSON payloads to incorporate their design and create a more dynamic experience. From there, with behavioral data, the company encouraged users to interact with the app.

Small efficiencies like these—in conjunction with the strength and functionality of Iterable’s Studio—have helped UpHabit build their own direct relationships with users. For new users that have completed the onboarding process, UpHabit utilizes a comprehensive cross-channel welcome campaign to ensure users are aware of the platform’s breadth of capabilities—even providing tips and tricks on how to best utilize important features and functions. Based on dozens of event triggers and behavioral data, UpHabit built a detailed, 90-node journey within Iterable to contact users via multiple channels—email, push notification, and in-app—to cultivate a strong foundation from which customers can build their relationships. In this journey, UpHabit even sends a survey directly from Wainwright. His goal is to keep an open conversation with users for an enhanced customer experience. The cross-channel welcome campaign does just that. “Customers often freak out how quickly I reply!”

Building Meaningful Relationships

The UpHabit-Iterable partnership makes valuable connections easier. These connections are not linear either; they create a network. By incorporating Iterable into their latest product enhancements, UpHabit has seen this network grow with a 718% increase in subscriber conversion and, perhaps more importantly, maintain its size, seeing a 42% drop in subscriber churn.

With Iterable’s technology and expertise simplifying the customer journey, UpHabit has helped users create more meaningful relationships while simultaneously building a more meaningful relationship between the company and its customers.

Tackling the Complexity of Selling Tickets for Live Events

It takes innovation and creativity to take market share from well-known, high-visibility incumbents that have been in the ticket business for decades. Increasing brand awareness, however, is just one of the challenges SeatGeek marketers face. Selling tickets for live events is complicated. At any given time, hundreds of thousands of events are happening and the majority of sales for any given event occur close to the event date.

Taking a Consolidated, Personalized Approach

Since implementing Iterable two years ago, the marketing team have consolidated all types of email as well as push notifications onto the Iterable platform, including:

• Transactional messages triggered by purchases—for example, purchase confirmations and ticket deliveries— as well as routine transactional messages for such requests as password resets.
• A completely automated weekly newsletter with content personalized based on customer purchases, location, and website behavior combined with suggestions derived by SeatGeek’s recommendation engine.
• A welcome journey that builds engagement with customers who open an account with SeatGeek.

Driving Revenue Increases

“We’re very close to achieving our vision of maturity for email as a channel. We’re also making great progress with push and we’re using Iterable to experiment with artificial intelligence, SMS and in-app messaging to better understand what kind of metrics we can achieve in each channel. With that information, we can make a case to the business and justify spending in other channels,” Ben says.

Zillow is the leading real estate and rental marketplace dedicated to empowering consumers with data, inspiration and knowledge around the place they call home, and connecting them with the best local professionals who can help. Zillow serves the full lifecycle of owning and living in a home: buying, selling, renting, financing, remodeling and more. Zillow’s living database of more than 110 million U.S. homes includes homes for sale and rent, as well as those not currently on the market.

Iterable’s Impact at Zillow

By using Iterable’s growth marketing platform, Zillow has evolved its email strategy from weekly batch-sends to a data-driven nurture and drip program.

This program includes Zillow’s welcome series and recurring lifecycle campaigns, both of which are triggered by users’ web behavior.

Users are segmented by lifecycle stage in order to receive targeted messages that support their Zillow on-site experience.By running experiments and A/B testing in Iterable, Zillow can dynamically tailor its messaging to each customer segment. This allows Zillow to better engage its audience and provide valuable upselling opportunities, such as mortgage loans.

Massive Scalability for Agile Marketing Campaigns

Scalability was a major concern for Zillow, which had found itself outgrowing the capabilities of its legacy email service provider.

It was simply taking too long to segment users and manage campaigns for this fast-moving business.

After evaluating several alternatives, Zillow selected Iterable for its ease of use and ability to scale, giving the company a long runway for growth.

Now Zillow’s agile email marketing team can spend less time setting up campaigns and focus instead on the work that matters.

“Iterable makes it so easy to accomplish my work. I don’t need to swap between tabs or different UIs. Unlike other tools I’ve used, Iterable is not another hurdle to jump over. It helps me do my job,” said Jamie Plankenhorn, Sr. Manager, Email Marketing at Zillow.

Zillow also pointed to Iterable’s responsive customer success team as key to its growth marketing efforts.

Plankenhorn explained, “One of the things I love about working with Iterable is how much they do on our behalf. Everybody there is working toward the common goal of making our email marketing successful.”

Journey Spotlight

Zillow’s marketing mission is to map highly relevant content to a customer’s journey in finding a new home.

This strategy effectively maintains user engagement across the entire customer lifecycle.

To engage pre-existing users during their home shopping experience, Zillow sends a nurture email campaign with targeted content.

This campaign is more effective than large-scale batch sends, because it delivers content to users in digestible bites when it is most relevant to them.

Here is how it works:

• The campaign is triggered when someone takes an identified home shopping action on the site.
• The campaign includes as many as ten emails over 40 days dependent on email engagement.
• Once users move to the next step of their homeownership journey, they enter into a new lifecycle journey for more relevant content.

This re-engagement email series has paid off for Zillow, achieving an increase of 161% in open rates in the first quarter of 2017 after implementing Iterable’s solution.

Anu Verma, head of marketing, says that the emphasis on personalizing interactions based on customers’ interests, health goals, and the combination of vitamins and supplements they take is a major reason the company selected Iterable as its growth marketing solution.

Iterable’s omni-channel marketing platform enables Care/ of to segment customers based on their health goals and deliver elegant and highly relevant content across email, social, SMS, and other channels.

Encouraging a Sense of Community

The post-purchase journey also provides a means for encouraging participation in the Care/of community. Anu says that getting customers to share workout routines, healthy eating tips, and successes helps strengthen a sense of belonging. “One way we do that is by featuring user-generated content, such as Instagram posts, in email messages to our customer base. With Iterable, marketers can move user content into a message with a few simple edits.”

Care/of also circulates information about trending health topics, articles, and riddles in its monthly newsletter, providing engaging, often educational, health content with a dose of fun and creativity. In setting out to dedicate an editorial and creative voice to a topic with real depth— health and wellness—Care/of makes use of a broad tool set available within Iterable, including A/B testing content and copy, segmenting users based on interest area, and journey functionality.

99designs, the world’s largest on-demand design marketplace, makes it easy and affordable for people to connect with designers—whether it’s an entrepreneur looking for a logo design, a business owner redoing a website, or a writer searching for a book cover illustration.

Targeting and Personalization Improve Campaign Results

Before implementing Iterable, 99designs marketers were struggling with a legacy marketing tool that wasn’t marketer friendly and required extensive engineering support. Creating small, highly targeted customer lists was just not practical considering the amount of technical assistance required. With Iterable’s rich feature set and intuitive user experience, the 99designs growth team can now easily segment customers and personalize content without extensive engineering support.

Innovation Drives Engagement

With Iterable, the team spends less time on the back-and-forth between marketing and development. Consequently, team members have more time to focus on strategic activities such as finding innovative ways to make campaigns more engaging and more profitable. The focus on strategy is paying off:

• Personalizing the post-purchase campaign series based on industry has increased open and click-through rates and, ultimately, helped double conversion for the entire series.
• A revamped email newsletter is increasing engagement with highly relevant content that people are excited to see in their inboxes.
• A design contest follow-on campaign invites customers to “work with your winning designer on another design project.” Messages include the winning designer’s name, a link to the designer’s profile, and other elements related to the contest.

Business Results

With the implementation of Iterable, 99designs marketers have more visibility into and control over their campaigns. Because Iterable is so easy to use, channel managers now have full ownership of their campaigns.

The improved campaign performance is validated by quantifiable results, as the post-purchase series clearly demonstrates. Improvements in that campaign include an 11% increase in open rates and a 36% rise in clickthroughs resulting from the incorporation of industry-specific campaigns. Industry-specific personalization also ultimately helped double conversion rates for the entire series.

Fender was founded in 1946 by Leo Fender, a radio repairman whose experiments with Hawaiian lap steel guitars grew into the world’s leading guitar manufacturer. Over 70 plus years, Fender has produced some of the most iconic guitars and amps in the history of American music: Princeton Reverb® amplifiers, the Telecaster®, the Precision Bass®, and of course, the Stratocaster®. These instruments have been played by legends like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and can be found on every festival and rock or jazz club stage.

Fender Play is a digital learning subscription app that helps people pick up skills and start a lifelong relationship with guitar, bass or ukulele; Fender Tune is an intuitive digital guitar tuner with several added features for pros/advanced players; and Fender Tone works hand-in-hand with the brand’s Mustang GT digital modeling amps to help players explore guitar tones from their favorite artists and create their own

With these digital properties, Fender wanted to do more than sell guitars—it wanted to become a mentor that provided customers with the education, information, and support they needed to pursue their passion for music. Beyond subscription revenue, Fender aimed to develop the lifetime value potential of any given guitar player and create a customer journey that would last for decades. To accomplish that goal, Fender needed holistic insight into the customer journey.

However, because Fender started out as a manufacturer of physical products and because it’s digital ecosystem was built quickly, the company had a siloed tech stack with user data spread across many disparate locations. Its old email provider, for example, didn’t integrate with its data layer. When someone signed up for Fender Play, the system didn’t know what instrument or genre they were playing, or if they were even playing at all.

Fender also had a separate solution for pushing in-app messaging that didn’t know what was happening on the website or in the other Fender apps, because they were all in separate locations. All the disparate silos meant the data could not be made actionable to create a more meaningful, engaging, personalized customer experience that drove retention.

Solution

Fender wanted to own its relationships with customers and evolve how it thought about LTV to encompass instrument sales, app subscriptions and engagement, and in-app purchases. The marketing team set out to map the customer journey and identify opportunities for engagement and potential drop-off points. By working with Iterable, Fender was able to consolidate all customer information across all digital sources into one unified customer profile. If a customer is watching a video in Fender Play or buying something on (Fender.com) or connected to their digital amplifier, the company can use that data to deliver a more personalized experience. Collectively, all these data points provide insight into a customer’s offline behavior with their guitar, such as how often they play, and make it actionable, creating a feedback loop.

Fender uses Iterable as a growth marketing platform for email and mobile messaging. This enables Fender to deliver cross-channel campaigns that drive offline behavior with online engagement. Take onboarding, for example. Fender uses Iterable’s Studio to onboard new customers in Fender Play. A customer comes in—either from iOS, Android, or the web—and chooses to start a free trial. Then Fender activates their messaging journey. Based on what instrument they’re playing, what genre they’re playing, how much they’re playing, and what platform they’re on, Fender’s marketers make decisions around the types of messages to send them.

Results

Fender has seen improvements in retention of a month-to-month paying user because of engagement with videos. 89% of users watch a video on their first day. Through a personalized onboarding experience, Fender has seen an increase in engagement, encouraging people to watch more videos, learn more guitar, and then stick around as a paying member.

To make those interactions possible, the company replaced its cumbersome and limited marketing solution with Iterable. This innovative growth marketing platform is enabling the team to create engaging campaigns that reach people through the web, email, SMS, direct mail, and other channels. The results speak for themselves: The upgrade-to-subscription conversion rate for Iterable campaigns is 45% higher than that of a control group. Moreover, the team found that adding direct mail to the journey yielded an incremental 3% lift in upgrades.

Achieving a Seamless Path to Value

Marketers and engineers alike were excited about the move to Iterable. Iterable’s flexible data model, modern APIs, and universal webhooks saved engineering time by simplifying integrations with other platforms. For example, Madison Reed leverages integrations with Segment, for customer data, and Lob, for direct mail.

Because of Iterable’s straightforward, intuitive interface, marketers were able to quickly leverage these integrations. Today, Segment events trigger campaigns based on customer purchases and other behaviors. Delivery of a customer’s first order, for example, triggers a series of messages containing how-to videos and custom tutorials to set customers up for success, thereby increasing the likelihood of subsequent orders.

“We’ve created some cool dynamic lists and journeys that leverage integrations to automatically trigger campaigns,” Julia says. “Through the integrations, we can automatically synchronize Iterable with the customer database and create messages including instructional materials that are personalized based on an online hair color survey completed by each customer. The messages include relevant images and descriptions from our product catalog. It’s super exciting.”

Cross-Channel Reactivation Campaigns Reduce Early Drop-Off

Marketers have leveraged Iterable to create a reactivation campaign that is reducing customer drop-off after the first purchase. Because the hair color survey asks how often customers color their hair, marketing can determine expected reorder dates. The campaign journey uses that information to generate lists of people who didn’t reorder at the expected times and put their names in the reactivation journey.

“Through testing, we found that the best reactivation sequence is an email message followed by a direct mail postcard, which is then followed by another email message,” Julia notes. “The win-back content is consistent across all interactions. It’s easy to include webhook integrations in our journeys to trigger interactions in real time—for example, the direct mail postcards. That’s key in a business where highly personalized timing is everything. We’ve put an SMS webhook in the journey so that customers who have opted into SMS receive an SMS nudge if they don’t engage with the email messages or postcard.”

Building Customer Lifetime Value With Online and Offline Interactions

Today, Madison Reed marketers use Iterable across the full range of customer interactions, from transactional communications and onboarding campaigns to reorder and reactivation campaigns that drive engagement and build lasting relationships. The ability to track online and offline interactions provides a 360° view of each customer, sharpening personalization and relevance. And ongoing testing of content, timing, channel, and other campaign components provides the insights marketers need to continually optimize email, postcard, and SMS campaigns to gain lifts in engagement and overall business KPIs. 

Box Scales to Millions While Achieving Seamless Customer Engagement With Iterable

More than 90,000 businesses globally use the Box cloud content management platform to enhance collaboration among their employees and partners. End users in these enterprises leverage Box capabilities for tasks ranging from file sharing and access on mobile devices to sophisticated business processes such as data governance and retention.

Two years prior to implementing, Box created a customer engagement function to expand the company’s reach beyond administrators to the people who use Box every day. The new team’s purpose: Ensure that end users get maximum value from Box’s offering.

The expansion required scaling up Box’s customer communications capability from tens of thousands of administrators to tens of millions of end users.

Highly Tailored Onboarding Drives Usage

Nora and her colleagues are focused on growing adoption to increase the value of the Box platform to enterprise customers, ultimately promoting customer loyalty and retention. To achieve this mission, the team is developing and executing campaigns that talk directly to the end-user community.

“We’re constantly working with our business analytics team to understand the next action a given user is likely to take based on previous actions taken or not taken,” Nora explains. “We use those insights to fine tune the welcome series and build out new journeys that shorten the time it takes to move people to the next level of usage. We used Iterable’s A/B testing to compare the results of the new welcome series with our previous approach and were able to show an 10% increase in user adoption,” Nora says.

Lifecycle Campaign Composition Enables Personalization at Scale

Nora attributes the success of the welcome series and other campaigns to the ability to gather and combine many different types of data for segmentation and personalization. The team takes advantage of Iterable’s modern APIs and flexible data integration to access data from Salesforce.com and other sources and combine it with Iterable data. Iterable’s Studio pulls external data into the platform and triggers tailored messages as users reach specific milestones. Message content is based on such factors as lifecycle stage, Box components downloaded, and usage data.

With over $17 million in funding and a business that has grown by over 500 percent in the past year, Curology is on a mission to provide personalized prescription skincare for acne and anti-aging directly to tens of thousands of subscribers

Curology sets itself apart from other skincare companies by offering their patients customized combination treatments and one-to-one interactions with licensed dermatology providers.

To achieve this personal touch, its team of marketers need a growth marketing platform that can deliver highly personalized content and relevance at scale.

Iterable’s Impact at Curology

In the past, the growth marketing team at Curology used two separate platforms to manage email and SMS campaigns. Data silos hindered the company’s ability to build robust subscriber profiles and deliver personalized messages in real time.

“When two communication channels don’t talk to each other, you can’t execute cohesive user engagement campaigns. With Iterable’s true omni-channel platform, we know we can provide the seamless experience that our patients expect,” says Fabian Seelbach, VP of Marketing at Curology.

Now, by partnering with Iterable, Curology has eliminated its data silos and increased its treatment plan compliance by 14 percent by incentivizing its customers with highly relevant messages.

For example, members receive a daily SMS reminder to apply their acne treatment. Those that do are rewarded with a funny gif, encouraging patients to stick with their prescribed treatment regimen.

Using Iterable’s visual, drag-and-drop Studio, Curology can now identify which members aren’t engaging via SMS, and reach these individuals with targeted email follow-ups, tracking email and site metrics to ensure that they’re achieving relevance across all marketing channels.

This true omni-channel approach to supporting patients throughout their journey has improved Curology’s customer engagement by 26 percent, increasing revenue by 10 percent.

Targeted Text Messaging to Teens

At Curology, licensed dermatology providers create treatment plans and customized formulas; to ensure their patients’ success, they need to know if patients are following through on those plans and what the improvement looks like.

“It sounds simple, but getting teenage patients to apply their medication every night is difficult,” says Seelbach. Sending a daily email reminder fell short as a solution, which led the Curology team to add SMS messaging to their campaigns.

Now, thanks to Iterable’s flexible data model, Curology can create custom events for any customer data point, including whether members have uploaded a recent photo of their skin’s progress.

Those who haven’t are segmented and sent a targeted SMS, reminding them to send a photo update and explaining why it matters. Most importantly, members are able to snap a selfie and respond directly to the text—dramatically reducing the friction in patient-to-provider response rates.

Curology’s segmentation becomes even more sophisticated during the customer journey. Email follow-ups are triggered automatically if members haven’t shared a photo in a designated number of days.

These dynamic segments are leveraged in other email campaigns as well, creating a cohesive customer experience that directly results in higher engagement.

How Does Curology Work?

Curology’s mission is to connect customers with highly customized prescription skincare for acne and anti-aging—and that sense of connection and customization needs to shine through its marketing messaging as well.

To keep its young user base engaged with the product and in dialogue with the team of dermatology providers, Curology has mapped several highly specific communication touch points.

But there’s no one-size-fits-all to how—or where—members interact with the brand, so flexibility is paramount.

Here is how it works:

• The onboarding campaign is triggered by Iterable when someone signs up for a Curology subscription.
• Habit forming is paramount to Curology’s growth rate, so users are invited to participate in a 21-day challenge, receiving daily SMS reminders to apply their customized formula as prescribed.
• Based on the individual’s behavior, personalized emails may also be sent to increase their engagement.

This measured approach to SMS and email messaging is part of an in-depth process to drive relevance at every stage of Curology’s customer experience.

The company uses Iterable to ensure that members are following their skincare regimens and achieving better outcomes. And as Curology’s marketers can attest, the more satisfied customers become, the greater the impact on top-line growth.

SingleCare offers savings on out-of-pocket prescription, dental, vision and telehealth costs. Members save up to 80 percent on prescriptions and have access to SingleCare’s national dental and vision networks.

Whether it’s a life-saving drug, routine dental cleaning, or just an eye test, SingleCare believes that consumers should be able to compare costs for healthcare services and receive care without worrying about networks, coverage limitations, or deductibles.

Iterable’s Impact at SingleCare

SingleCare uses Iterable’s Growth Marketing Platform for all email messaging, including transactional emails, marketing blasts and behaviorally triggered emails.

Once a user signs up for an account, Iterable enables SingleCare to trigger journeys based on website interactions.

SingleCare can send personalized emails related to customers’ specific needs, whether they are interested in discounts on prescriptions or booking a dental or vision appointment.

Marketer-Focused for Highly Effective Campaigns

As a rapidly growing startup, the marketers at SingleCare found themselves frustrated with the slow support response times and outdated user interface from their legacy email service provider.

They needed technology that offered a more organized, streamlined process to build their programs without depending on their engineering team.

After evaluating several alternatives, SingleCare selected Iterable for its modern functionality and ease of use.

Elisha Singh, Marketing Coordinator at SingleCare, can also trust that emails sent through Iterable end up in the inbox where they belong, not blocked by internet service providers or tossed in spam folders.

In addition to appreciating its marketer-friendly UX and reliable, robust technology, SingleCare benefits from Iterable’s dedicated customer support.

“Iterable’s customer success team is incredibly knowledgeable, quick and helpful. Everyone is so nice and pays such great attention to any issues I reach out to them with,” said Singh.
By freeing up resources and increasing efficiency, SingleCare now spends more time testing email messaging and deploying targeted campaigns with Iterable.

By 2025, digital sales are projected to account for over 50% of all restaurant sales (source). Yet, many local and independent restaurants lack the resources to capitalize on the rise of digital ordering. 

ChowNow, an online food ordering service, empowers independent restaurants to get online—reducing their dependence on third-party marketplaces, and helping them thrive in the hyper-competitive pickup and food delivery space. ChowNow’s digital ordering tools, custom-built mobile apps,  and premium print and email marketing services allow restaurants to build direct relationships with their diners. 

To power their email marketing services, ChowNow relies on Iterable’s cross-channel automation capabilities. Early on, they delivered simple, custom-branded monthly promotional emails for each individual restaurant (aptly named, the Monthly Taste). These emails promoted any services available at each restaurant (for example, curbside pickup, delivery or dine-in options). Today, ChowNow offers lifecycle marketing campaigns designed to encourage repeat ordering and grow revenue for over 1,500 restaurant partners. Restaurants who participate in ChowNow’s premium email marketing services see an average ROI of 26 to 1. (Source)

Automated Personalization at Scale

With Iterable’s Studio and audience segmentation tools, the ChowNow team can power restaurant-to-diner (B2B2C) communications for the 1,500+ restaurants in it’s email marketing program, in addition to powering the lifecycle program for ChowNow’s B2C marketplace app. 

To customize their email content at scale for each restaurant’s unique brand, ChowNow uses a combination of handlebar logic and snippets. Handlebar logic dynamically populates data stored on the user profile or in event data, while snippets make it easy to reuse content across multiple templates. In concert with Iterable’s robust data foundation, ChowNow is able to deliver personalized communications to diners on behalf of their 1,500+ restaurant partners.

Helping Restaurants Thrive in Spite of COVID-19

When the COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through the industry, ChowNow jumped in to provide the critical technology and marketing support their restaurant partners needed—informing diners of updates to restaurant hours, services offerings, and more. Within days of widespread closures, ChowNow was able to segment and communicate with over 2.6 million diners with updates on their favorite local restaurants.

In the first four months, ChowNow drove one million additional orders  for ChowNow’s restaurant partners. 

ChowNow also introduced a loyalty program, Loyal Local Memberships, that allowed diners to purchase a yearly membership in exchange for discounts at their favorite restaurants. This new offering provided the immediate revenue independent restaurants needed as they grappled with the impact and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, while also building diner loyalty. Today one-third of Loyal Local Memberships purchased are driven by ChowNow’s B2B2C email program.