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.