Growing Pains? Not for Babylist: Iterable’s MCP Server Results in 50% Faster Execution

Babylist is the leading registry, e-commerce, and content platform for millions of growing families. Their platform simplifies the experience for both gift-givers and registrants by allowing parents to add items from any retailer—from major chains like Walmart and Target to smaller retailers like Etsy—into a single, unified registry. With a mission to help families feel confident and connected, Babylist serves a massive audience through expert editorial guides, a robust e-commerce presence, and experiential showrooms in Beverly Hills and New York (opening late summer 2026).

Today, Babylist attracts 10 million unique visitors a month. Managing that scale is Natasha Flynn, Senior Manager of CRM, who leads a lean team responsible for a program that has seen explosive growth.

The Challenge: Scaling a Multi-Channel CRM Program With a Lean Team

When Natasha joined Babylist in 2022, the CRM program looked nothing like it does today. Babylist was an email-only company at the time, sending editorial-style emails, like batch-and-blast newsletters. “Since 2022, we have grown 21,000%. That’s not a typo. We sent 5 million emails in 2022. We sent 1 billion emails last year (2025)”, said Natasha.

But volume was only part of the story. To support this growth, Babylist modernized its tech stack, leveraging Snowflake as its centralized data warehouse and Amplitude for deep behavioral analytics. This allowed the team to understand the parent journey with high precision. As their data ecosystem evolved, so did their understanding of the customer journey; it became clear that reaching parents at every milestone required moving beyond just email.

In 2023, they saw an opportunity to support families beyond email. “We wanted to make sure we were reaching families with the most important messages at the right time. Not everybody is subscribed to emails, so we started sending push notifications, which have grown 220% in send volume since launch. A year later, we launched SMS, message center, and targeted placements.”  In just two years, Babylist expanded from one channel to six (with the addition of Web Push and Transactional), all managed by a small team using Iterable as its customer engagement platform. 

Babylist’s rapid growth created a new challenge: how to keep pace without proportionally scaling headcount. They needed to find efficiency gains that didn’t compromise quality. Natasha said the team wanted to prepare itself to scale while being smart about where they focus. “We really wanted to challenge ourselves: how can we use AI to automate the manual, repetitive tasks in our production workflows so we can reinvest that time into strategy, innovation, and improving the customer experience?”

The Solution: Agentic Innovation with Iterable’s MCP

Babylist turned to Iterable’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, part of Iterable’s Nova Intelligence, to bridge the gap between insight and execution. By connecting Claude to Iterable, Babylist was able to execute tasks in Iterable in plain language through the MCP server, streamlining manual workflows like message personalization, campaign building, and automated error reviews. As a result, automating repetitive setup tasks has effectively eliminated the heavy lifting, freeing up bandwidth to focus on strategy, testing, and personalization. 

MCP Use Case 1: Automated Email Template Creation

To eliminate manual template creation, Babylist leverages Iterable’s MCP to transform creative building blocks into launch-ready campaigns in seconds.

• The Result: In seconds, the AI generates a fully populated, launch-ready campaign within the Iterable UI. This includes all copy, images, and audience logic—already assembled and assigned a unique Template ID, ready for a final human review.
• The Build: Babylist uses Notion, a collaborative workspace, to store all their template assets, like the target audience, subject line, hero image, and copy.
• The Prompt: They simply upload the Notion file containing the template assets into Claude and provide a natural-language instruction: “Build this email for me.”
• What Happens: This is where the Iterable MCP Server acts as the bridge. It “reads” the Notion file, finds the correct master design template in Iterable, and automatically plugs in all the text and images. It even maps the specific target audience to the campaign—all without a human having to click a single button.

MCP Use Case 2: Autonomous AI Quality Assurance (QA)

To move fast without risking brand reputation, Babylist taught Claude a “QA Skill” to review campaigns against an enterprise checklist.

• The Build: They uploaded an Excel “playbook” containing all their brand criteria and technical requirements for building a send-ready campaign to provide the AI with a definitive set of rules.
• The Prompt: The team provides Claude a Campaign ID and asks, “QA this campaign”.
• What Happens: The AI acts as an Auditing Agent. It scans the campaign in Iterable to catch broken links, typos, and personalization logic errors (like missing Handlebars brackets). 
• The Result: A full report detailing exactly what passed and what needs review, ensuring human-level oversight at machine speed.

While Babylist pioneered this workflow using Iterable’s MCP Server, this capability is now even more accessible. With our 2026 Spring Product Release, customers can now perform these autonomous audits directly within Iterable’s platform using the Nova Review Agent, further eliminating technical drag by keeping the entire QA process native to your workspace.

Moving at the Speed of Intent With 50% Faster Production Time

The results have been immediate and measurable. Natasha shared that they have reduced production time for marketing emails by 50%. “This is allowing us to do way more. By doing less of that manual work, we’re able to get more of our roadmap items done. Instead of telling our product team we can build this workflow out for you in two months, we can tell them we can do this for you in two or three days.”

This shift—accelerating production time from months to days—has fundamentally redefined how Babylist’s CRM team operates. Rather than spending the bulk of their time on repetitive campaign assembly, Natasha’s team now dedicates more hours to testing, optimization, and the strategic thinking that drives better experiences for expecting parents, new families, and gift givers alike. For a company adding channels and audience at the pace BabyList has, the ability to move faster without growing the team has made AI adoption not just worthwhile but essential.

“Iterable’s Nova intelligence has fundamentally shifted our role from campaign manufacturers to strategic architects. By offloading the manual campaign setup and QA to specialized AI agents, we’ve reclaimed 50% of our bandwidth to focus on what actually moves the needle: creating deeper, more personalized connections for the millions of families we serve.” ~ Natasha Flynn, Senior Manager of CRM, Babylist

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