Melbourne Football Club
Big Game Moments
By automating data ingestion with a streamlined process using Iterable and Smart Ingest, the marketing team can now fully access and utilise this data directly, saving 5 hours of time per week per person— compared to the prior manual process of onboarding new members.
Fully activating data enables deeper personalization and more effective engagement with fans, all while lowering resource costs by 12.5% (based on efficiency savings per week).
With Smart Ingest, the marketing team has seen a productivity improvement of up to 40%. It enhances the team’s overall agility and responsiveness without requiring reliance on engineering or other technical teams.
Melbourne Football Club, a historic team in the Australian Football League (AFL), stands out for its member-owned structure, which fosters a strong bond with its supporters. Traditionally, the club has been associated with an older fan base, influencing its engagement strategies. However, the club has seen significant growth in recent years, especially after winning recent premierships in both the men’s and women’s comps. This growth has been carefully managed by a dedicated team, including Libby Blampied, General Manager of Marketing & Digital, and Jimmie Martin, IT Manager. These leaders are pivotal in connecting the club with its fans, ensuring that both long-time and new supporters feel valued and engaged. The club’s dedication to understanding and meeting fan needs gives it a unique edge in the competitive AFL landscape.
Tackling Data Challenges to Enhance Competitiveness
Melbourne Football Club faced significant data challenges that limited its ability to fully engage with its fan base. The club’s marketing team was forced to rely on technical teams to access customer data from their data warehouse, and an outdated marketing platform further restricted their ability to deliver personalised and meaningful communications. Jimmie explained, “Previously, we couldn’t get the data into our customer engagement platform to achieve the outcomes we wanted. Now, we can ingest and activate our data at a much quicker rate, which has been game-changing.” This transformation was essential for the club, enabling them to better understand and retain their expanding membership. The club could finally integrate and utilize its data effectively by adopting a comprehensive consumer data strategy, including a transition to Iterable and Snowflake for data warehousing. This set the stage for improved fan engagement and sustained growth.
Seamless Data Ingestion and Activation With Smart Ingest
Leveraging Iterable’s Smart Ingest, co-developed with Hightouch, has transformed how Melbourne Football Club activates customer data from their Snowflake Data Warehouse directly within Iterable. With Smart Ingest, they can seamlessly ingest and activate relevant data in a no-code environment. This eliminates their reliance on technical teams, allowing their marketing team to take full control of data integration, ingestion, and activation.
The key benefits of this setup for the club include:
- Automation and personalisation unlocked: Smart Ingest enhances personalised fan communications by syncing data on memberships, ticket sales, and fan interactions, enabling prompt and effective engagement with their fans. This unlocks more relevant, timely outreach, boosting fan loyalty, satisfaction, and engagement, leading to a 66% unique open rate and a 7% unique click rate.
- Marketer-friendly tools to save time and reduce dependency on other teams: By automating data ingestion with a streamlined process, the marketing team can access and utilise this data directly, saving 5 hours of time per week per person— compared to the prior manual process of onboarding new members. Previously, creating audience segments required collaboration from three separate teams, leading to a minimum three-day turnaround to welcome a new member.
- Productivity improved: The shift to Iterable has transformed the marketing team’s productivity, enabling faster segmentation, experimentation, and execution of personalised campaigns. With these intuitive, marketer-friendly tools, the need for technical assistance has been greatly reduced, allowing the team to fully manage data syncing and activation. As a result, they can now respond to membership purchases within days instead of weeks, leading to a productivity improvement of up to 40% and enhancing overall agility and responsiveness without relying on engineering or other teams.
Now that Melbourne Football Club can fully activate its data, they are better positioned to drive deeper personalization and engage fans more effectively, all while lowering resource costs by 12.5% (based on efficiency savings per week) and streamlining operations.
Transforming Member Engagement Through Automation
Iterable has transformed how the club automates and manages customer communications by streamlining operations for more efficient and immediate member messaging. Jimmie explained, “We now have an automated process flowing into Iterable. Our marketing team is brimming with ideas because they can handle segmentation themselves within the system.” This capability has freed the team from manual tasks, allowing them to focus on creativity and innovation. “With Iterable, new membership purchases are processed overnight, allowing us to send communications immediately after purchase vs. having to wait several days with our previous solution,” said Jimmie.
The marketing team is now able to automate their AFL women’s confirmation journey, which is triggered by a membership purchase event. Based on data nested within the event, they send three distinct types of member communications, including targeted campaigns for non-access members, adults, and juniors. This prompt and personalised engagement has strengthened the club’s connection with new members and fans.
Non-Access Purchase: These are memberships that are not defined as adult or junior. The campaigns are focused on thanking them for their membership purchase and welcoming them with a membership guide.
Adult: When an adult purchases the membership, they focus on a “festival-type atmosphere” as a drawcard to drive game attendance from adults as a fun weekend activity.
Juniors: For new members that purchase tickets classified as juniors, communications spotlight star players like Kate Hore, the top goal kicker, and Paxy Paxman, their star defense. They also promote the Junior Membership pack, which includes merchandise available for purchase, encouraging fans to opt for delivery or pick-up on game day.
Fostering Creativity and Innovation
Freed from outdated, cumbersome processes, the team can now focus on its core mission. Jimmie emphasised, “The marketing team can now focus on being creative and doing what they’re supposed to do—marketing.” This shift has sparked enthusiasm and new ideas, empowering the team to explore innovative fan engagement strategies. Libby reflected, “Technology and resourcing are no longer pain points for us. Looking at how far we’ve come over the last 12 months is something we’re really proud of.” This transformation has not only enhanced their ability to connect with supporters but also laid the foundation for future growth and success. The club’s leadership is excited about the potential to explore new engagement and retention strategies, ensuring they remain at the forefront of the AFL landscape while continuing to build lasting relationships with their supporters.
Anyfin
Key Results
By using Iterable’s Smart Ingest, Anyfin marketers can activate customer data directly from their data warehouse—without relying on engineering resources.
By ingesting user attributes and custom event data with the help of Smart Ingest, Anyfin was able to send personalized messages at the right time to the right users, which has resulted in a 10x increase in conversion rate.
This direct sync saves Anyfin’s marketing team dozens of hours of manual work each month by pulling customer data into Iterable immediately and enabling them to update user fields themselves, rather than taking weeks of back-and-forth with technical teams. This allows for more strategizing and creativity with segmentation versus being stuck in the data weeds.
Anyfin, a financial technology company headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is on a mission to improve the financial well-being of its customers and revolutionize debt management. They help hard working people stuck in unhealthy financial situations with expensive debt gain more control over their future.
To execute on this mission, they focus on two pillars: lowering debt costs by refinancing their customer’s existing loans and helping their customers with better financial education. Central to this strategy is their ability to execute highly personalized customer communications while remaining compliant with the heightened regulatory requirements for financial institutions. In addition to this complexity is the need for their marketing team to share data engineering and product resources with the rest of the organization. This is why they decided to explore migrating to a new customer engagement platform that effortlessly connected to their existing tech stack, lowered their tech’s team level of effort, and empowered the marketing team to execute cross-channel customer communications quicker.
Choosing a Partner With the Right Data Capabilities
Anyfin needed an easy-to-use platform to reduce their reliance on shared technical resources, enabling their marketing team to execute personalized cross-channel communications faster. They required a solution that ensures trust through security and privacy certifications, and effectively manages user data with a privacy-centric approach. They also prioritized a platform that was quick to onboard, as well as one that felt more like a partner, rather than a vendor.
This is where Iterable’s ability to seamlessly integrate data from anywhere with predictable data costs and tools designed to reduce Anyfin’s tech lift came in. Combined with enterprise level security and privacy guardrails—which include regulatory compliance, data privacy, SSAE-18 SOC 2, and ISO 27001—data is immediately actionable to deliver intelligently orchestrated cross-channel communications in real time. Plus, Iterable’s support model is designed to align with customers’ goals. This all made choosing Iterable an easy decision for Anyfin.
Iterable matched our needs perfectly. And when it comes to the level of customer support we receive, it’s like a whole new world. We really feel like we got the perfect package with Iterable.
Iterable’s Smart Ingest Reduces Technical Lift
For Anyfin, simplicity is crucial to managing their marketing campaigns, which is why the team was excited to implement Iterable’s Smart Ingest solution. Smart Ingest allows Anyfin to activate customer data directly from their BigQuery data warehouse—without engineering needing to build custom data tables or data pipelines or having to worry about unpredictable data costs.
Co-developed by Iterable and Hightouch, Smart Ingest makes it easy for marketers to activate their data warehouses on Iterable. They can import any data they need via a drop-down menu, map that data to their Iterable schema, and manage these cloud data integrations directly on the Iterable web app.
Petrus Lempinen, Growth Team Lead at Anyfin, explains just how seamless getting onboarded with Smart Ingest was:
“Other tools we looked into seemed way more complex because they required coding skills. But that’s not the case with Iterable’s Smart Ingest. It was so easy to set up and get our customer data into Iterable within minutes. We’re now able to communicate to our customers as if we’re speaking to each of them one-on-one.”
Migration to Iterable Saves Weeks in Development Time
Anyfin’s migration to Iterable saved their team 3 weeks in development thanks to Iterable’s ability to seamlessly and easily integrate to their tech stack, including their BigQuery data warehouse. Anyfin’s marketing team was able to link, select data, import it, and monitor the connection form their data warehouse directly on Iterable’s UI without the need for custom data tables or data pipelines – significantly reducing their dependence on tech teams.
Once the data is ingested, it becomes immediately actionable for segmentation and cross-channel communication. The easy to use Segmentation tool helps Anyfin ideate on more personalized customer experiences and quantify how big the potential audience would be in microseconds and without the need for SQL or other complex processes.
Unlocking Deeper Personalization With Data Activation
Iterable has had the double effect of letting marketing teams own more of their data strategy and technical teams focus more on highly impactful product and system improvements. As a result, marketing teams no longer need to wait weeks for personalization data; they now have it in minutes. The product team was also freed up to invest in new experiences like a credit score tracker service to help users understand their credit rating.
Easily ingesting all of this data has empowered the marketing team to do more experiments and bring to market more impactful campaigns, including a 10x increase in conversion rate for new loans with a new abandoned cart journey. Thanks to Smart Ingest, Anyfin was able to quickly ingest behavioral signals for users who started but did not complete a new application. The journey uses this data to then fully personalize reminders and follow ups to increase loan application completion.
Anyfin’s marketing and product teams can now operate more efficiently and autonomously, driving rapid innovation and delivering personalized, data-driven experiences that significantly enhance user engagement and business growth.
Partner First Focus
Anyfin has a partner they can trust in Iterable. “Thanks to Iterable’s support team, who’s there to help whenever we need it, we’re now prepared to put our data to good use” said Petrus. Iterale’s partner-first focus helped Anyfin feel supported as they navigated taking more ownership of their data. The Iterable support team was there to answer questions and provide step-by-step guidance on Anyfin’s implementation and setting up their instance for future success.
Additionally, thanks to the predictable data costs, Anyfin feels like they are free to experiment and fully own their data strategies. They no longer have to worry about punitive data point costs and how each byte will bite them with overages.
What’s Next for Anyfin
Now that Anyfin is set up for success with Smart Ingest, the marketing team are now fully in control of the entire customer lifecycle and are focused on optimizing personalized journeys from onboarding to re-engagement. They also plan to add more channels, such as in-app messages, to reach their audiences more effectively wherever they are.
The Anyfin team is also excited to take advantage of Iterable’s AI Suite, including features like Send Time Optimization and Channel Optimization, which make it even easier to put their marketing campaigns on autopilot.
Automating when and how their messages are sent reduces overall decision fatigue and saves hours of valuable time. And when their time is freed from manual tasks, they can turn their attention to better serving their customers.
The Iterable Difference: Marketer Empowerment & True Partnership
- Efficient Tech Resourcing: Anyfin can directly integrate almost any data from their data warehouse, freeing up technical resources to pay down tech debt or focus on other system improvements.
- Enterprise Grade Security & Compliance: Data is processed securely with end-to-end encryption and no storage while in transit from Anyfin’s DWH to Iterable.
- Empowered Marketers: Intuitive segmentation, visual journey building, and cross-channel executing lets Anyfin communicate with their customers in highly personalized 1:1 communications.
Morning Brew Inc.
Morning Brew Inc. Boosts Marketing Efficiency and Engagement with Iterable
Morning Brew Inc. is a vibrant media company dedicated to empowering business leaders and professionals to make informed decisions about their careers, finances, and lives. Originally launched as a daily 6AM newsletter, Morning Brew Inc. quickly became a staple in many morning routines, offering concise updates on business and market trends. Over time, the company expanded its offerings to include podcasts and social media brands, enriching its content landscape. Erika Olsen, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Morning Brew Inc., plays a key role in shaping the company’s marketing strategies. Her work is vital in using the company’s extensive first-party data to enhance content delivery and audience engagement, ensuring Morning Brew Inc. remains a trusted resource.
Streamlining Marketing Operations with Iterable
Morning Brew Inc. encountered challenges in efficiently using its vast first-party data and needed a marketing automation platform to streamline operations. Erika explains how Iterable met these needs: “With Iterable, we consolidated our tools, allowing us to achieve all our daily goals within a single platform instead of using four different ones.” This consolidation improved the marketing team’s agility and reduced the need for constant collaboration with the product team for routine tasks. By integrating Iterable into their tech stack, Morning Brew Inc. optimized workflows, allowing the team to focus more on strategic initiatives and less on operational hurdles. This shift fostered a more cohesive and efficient marketing process.
User-Friendly Interface for All Team Members
Iterable’s intuitive user interface has been crucial in empowering the diverse team at Morning Brew Inc. Erika notes, “We chose Iterable because the user interface is incredibly intuitive, making it accessible for both experienced marketers and new team members.” It ensures seamless onboarding across the organization, even for those new to marketing, allowing everyone to efficiently find what they need. The platform’s straightforward nature enables team members to engage with it confidently, fostering a collaborative environment where marketing objectives are achieved without unnecessary complexity. By simplifying access to essential tools, Iterable supports Morning Brew Inc.’s goal of using first-party data to deliver tailored content and expand its media offerings.
Building a Collaborative Relationship
Morning Brew Inc.’s partnership with Iterable is marked by a strong collaborative spirit. Erika highlights, “The teams at Iterable have been fantastic, with seamless communication and a genuine eagerness to learn about our brand.” This mutual enthusiasm has led to a productive relationship where both parties work closely to align the platform’s capabilities with the unique needs of Morning Brew Inc. This dynamic partnership has enabled Morning Brew Inc. to refine its marketing strategies and develop new products that connect clients with targeted audiences, ensuring a cohesive user journey for subscribers.
Flipster
Key Results
Iterable migration was successfully completed in three phases over three months.
Implementing cross-channel onboarding journeys resulted in a 223% rise in the number of first depositors.
Flipster saw a 77% increase in trading volume driven by cross-channel customer engagement.
Flipster is one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchanges, offering both futures and spot trading to traders globally. The platform provides an intuitive all-in-one trading experience, featuring leverage of up to 100x on over 250 perpetual swap contracts, high liquidity, and zero trading fees on both the web and app. With a strong emphasis on innovative technology and user-centric design, Flipster supports traders with powerful tools, real-time insights, and data-driven solutions to optimize their trading strategies.
Flipster serves a thriving community of over 1 million users, processing transactions exceeding 10 billion USDT monthly. Iterable plays a crucial role in enhancing customer engagement and retention marketing efforts on the platform. The Flipster team relies on Iterable for all their marketing communications, including announcements, trading and system notifications, customer surveys, and product newsletters.
Unlocking Potential: Overcoming Challenges in Identity Verification
It’s essential, as a financial technology business, to get users to complete the Know Your Customer (KYC) procedure, which plays a vital role in preventing illicit activities, evaluating customer risk, and complying with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations.
Implementing the KYC protocol effectively means understanding a customer’s identity, monitoring their financial activities, and assessing the level of risk they might present. This adds a lot of friction to the onboarding process and financial companies often see a significant drop-off at this stage. As Flipster is a mobile-friendly company, adding push notifications to their onboarding journey was the top priority to move users through these requirements and complete their onboarding process.
However, Flipster lacked a cross-channel communication system, leading to reliance on ad-hoc emails sent manually through a previous ESP without segmentation. This hindered their ability to effectively engage users to complete their onboarding.
In search of a solution, Flipster identified Iterable as the ideal platform because it catered to their email and push messaging needs with ease of use and unparalleled data flexibility, enabling them to engage and activate users through cross-channel communications.
The Migration Process Carried Out with Confidence
The implementation was rolled out in three phases:
- The first phase focused on implementing push notifications, essential for their onboarding process, especially for users on-the-go. This would enable timely transactional and marketing push notifications, pushing users through the identity verification procedures so they can become traders. Within the first two months, both transactional and marketing push notifications were enabled.
- The second phase involved transitioning email marketing efforts from the previous ESP to Iterable, where a successful domain warm-up was completed within the first two months.
- The final phase involved ingesting user data into Iterable to unlock personalized messaging. This allowed Flipster to message users by name and showcase detailed user engagement metrics, such as their loyalty status, trading metrics and reward amount.
During and post-implementation, Christine Choo, Direct Marketing (CRM) Manager at Flipster praised the support they received, stating “Working with Iterable’s customer success team has been transformative. Their expert guidance and proactive support have been instrumental in helping us navigate our CRM implementation, optimize our strategies, and achieve significant growth. Their partnership has truly been a catalyst for our success.”
Success After Implementation: Key Milestones
The adoption of Iterable allowed Flipster to successfully reach many milestones throughout the customer lifecycle journey.
Activation Milestones
As part of a five-step activation journey, the first email welcomes new users, promotes app downloads, and introduces the identity verification process. However, despite these efforts, half of the new users who created accounts did not download the app and remained dormant. Since Flipster is a mobile-friendly platform, it is important for users to install the app to enjoy all offerings anytime, anywhere. To address this, the team created a separate onboarding journey for those who have not downloaded the app yet. This “install app” onboarding email campaign recorded over 45% click-through-rate on the download app button and motivated these users to go through the activation funnel.
Retention Milestones
Flipster’s recent commercial objective was to boost deposit values and enhance bottom-line profitability. The team successfully met this goal after the launch of the Earn Campaign. This initiative allows users to earn rewards by depositing various crypto assets, including BTC, ETH, and USDT, into their platform. With no lock-ins or complicated procedures, users receive daily earnings based on the amount of assets held in their wallets.
Within just three months of the campaign’s launch, the number of first-time depositors surged by 223%, total depositors increased by 243%, and the total deposit value saw a significant 243% rise.
With data-driven insights and a personalized approach, there was a significant impact in increasing engagement and retaining high-value users. From Q1 to Q2 in 2024, Flipster saw a 77% increase in trading volume driven by cross-channel customer engagement. Flipster hosted over 100+ promotions, giving away over $6.8M USDT worth of rewards to their customers.
Iterable’s advanced segmentation and personalization capabilities have been instrumental in boosting engagement and retaining our high-value users, with a positive impact on our bottom line.
Driving Fintech Excellence with the Right Partner
Flipster’s journey of overcoming challenges in data activation and user engagement demonstrates the power of leveraging the right technology to drive business growth. By adopting Iterable, they successfully transformed their customer lifecycle management, from onboarding through to retention, with impressive results. The ability to deliver personalized, data-driven messages across multiple channels not only streamlined the identity verification process but also boosted trading activity, and overall customer engagement.
Flipster’s success story is a testament to how innovative solutions and strategic partnerships can unlock a company’s full potential, enabling it to thrive in the competitive world of crypto derivatives trading.
Guild Education
Key Results
Within four and a half months, over 50 campaigns were seamlessly migrated to Iterable without any interruption in service for Guild’s members, all while they built a new data infrastructure.
Personalizing with Catalog resulted in a 3% uplift in application submissions and a 2x increase in click-to-open rate.
Send-time-optimization (STO) contributed to increased engagement across their survey campaigns, with Open Rates up by 2.25%, Click Rates by 0.7%, and Delivery Rates by 0.42% on average, just six weeks after activation.
Guild Education Doubles their CTOR with Iterable’s Catalog
Guild Education is committed to creating opportunities for America’s workforce through education, skill development, and career mobility. By collaborating with employers, Guild offers employees access to tuition-free learning programs, career development opportunities, and personalized coaching. With millions of members working towards their educational goals, Guild distinguishes itself by providing a comprehensive and supportive approach to workforce education. Payton Burger, the Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Guild, shared insights into how they use Iterable to enhance member experiences and achieve successful outcomes.
Decision to Switch
In early 2023, Guild’s leadership recognized that achieving their three-year engagement goals would require a major shift in how they connected with users. Their existing communications were siloed and inconsistent, with limited personalization. To address this, they set clear objectives: scaling their communications to double the current population size while also boosting conversion rates, specifically by increasing the number of members enrolling in and graduating from courses. To meet these goals, Guild prioritized investing in a centralized data infrastructure and a marketing automation platform to enable personalized communications without volume constraints. This strategic decision was designed to overcome the limitations of their previous system and enhance overall member engagement.
Overcoming Data and Personalization Challenges
Guild faced significant hurdles with their previous marketing automation platform, especially regarding data capabilities and personalization. The existing system had limitations that hindered their ability to tailor communications effectively for their large member base.
“We chose Iterable because it offered the flexibility to build a data schema tailored to our personalization needs,” Payton explained. With millions of members aiming to achieve their educational goals, Guild needed a robust tool capable of handling extensive data points and providing actionable insights. This requirement for a more dynamic and responsive platform led them to switch to Iterable, enabling them to improve their personalized communication strategies and better support their members’ educational journeys.
Smooth Transition to Iterable
Guild’s move to Iterable was efficient, ensuring uninterrupted service for its members. “Within just four and a half months, we transitioned over 50 automated campaigns to Iterable without any downtown for our members. This achievement was particularly impressive given that we were simultaneously building an entirely new data infrastructure, receiving new data points week over week to enhance and expand our campaigns,” Payton noted. This swift and effective migration was crucial for maintaining the continuity of its educational support services.
The ability to seamlessly transfer numerous campaigns without disruption highlights Iterable’s capacity to manage large-scale migrations while meeting tight deadlines. This smooth transition allowed Guild to hit the ground running with Iterable’s capabilities, paving the way for enhanced personalization and member engagement.
Responsive Support and Quick Issue Resolution
Throughout the migration and beyond, Guild has greatly benefited from Iterable’s attentive support team. “The Iterable support team is very responsive, answering our questions quickly via Slack and helping us navigate uncertainties,” Payton said.
This level of support has been crucial in ensuring that Guild can swiftly address any issues and continue to provide seamless service to its members. The ability to receive prompt assistance has allowed Guild to maintain the integrity of their campaigns and focus on their mission of unlocking opportunities for America’s workforce through education.
Improved Personalization and Engagement
Since implementing Iterable, Guild has seen significant improvements in personalization and engagement. By using Iterable’s Catalog, Guild was able to incorporate customized details about educational programs.
For example, their Application Deadline Reminder campaign encourages members to apply for programs they have started an application for, but haven’t yet submitted, and the enhanced personalization has yielded tangible results. “We’ve seen a 3% uplift in application submissions driven by our Application Deadline Reminder campaign by pulling in program details from Catalog into a card that resembles what is in our Guild product,” Payton noted. Additionally, the campaign achieved a click-to-open rate more than double that of their previous platform (14% versus 6.6%).What’s more, Iterable’s Send Time Optimization (STO) has contributed to increased engagement across their survey campaigns, with Open Rates up by 2.25%, Click Rates by 0.7%, and Delivery Rates by 0.42% on average, just six weeks after activation. These enhancements underscore Iterable’s capability to drive better member engagement and support Guild’s mission of facilitating educational and career advancement opportunities.
The Key to Unlocking New User Experiences
Guild’s partnership with Iterable has not only addressed their initial challenges but also unlocked new opportunities for member engagement and personalization. As Guild continues to innovate and expand its offerings, Iterable remains a vital partner in their mission to provide personalized educational opportunities for millions of members. Looking ahead, Guild plans to elevate their communication strategies through Embedded Messaging, enabling the delivery of targeted, timely messages directly within their product. This approach will complement their existing email communications, ensuring that crucial messages reach the right members, at the right time, and on the right channel, further strengthening their connection with users.
ClickUp
Key Results
Iterable’s extensive API endpoints have streamlined ClickUp’s marketing operations, from data retrieval to campaign management, saving at least 15 hours a week.
ClickUp’s reactivation program contributed to their Net Dollar Retention (NDR) improving by 2% in the first month and by 9% after five months.
Reactivation program resulted in a 5% uplift in reactivation rate.
ClickUp is a versatile productivity platform that simplifies team collaboration on tasks, documents, and chat. With a bold mission to consolidate multiple productivity tools into one app, ClickUp aims to boost user efficiency and engagement.
Operating in the competitive B2B sector, ClickUp serves diverse workspaces that need strong data management and personalized user experiences. The advanced marketing technologies experience of ClickUp’s Senior Email Marketing Manager, Aaron Hanson, is key for driving user adoption and ensuring clients get the most out of the platform.
Personalized Messaging Unlocked: ClickUp’s Transition to Iterable
ClickUp encountered significant limitations with their previous email service provider (ESP), Drip. Aaron noted, “We couldn’t build complex journeys with our previous ESP. Iterable enabled us to leverage our data and user activity to create more personalized messaging.”
The inability to manage intricate user journeys and utilize advanced data effectively hindered ClickUp’s efforts to drive user adoption and engagement. This was particularly challenging for a B2B company like ClickUp, which needed tailored communication strategies for different workspaces and user behaviors.
Switching to Iterable opened new possibilities for personalization and operational efficiency that were previously out of reach. The transition was seamless, with the Iterable team providing a detailed migration roadmap, outlining each step of the process. This included data extraction from Clickup’s old platform, data mapping, and integration planning. Aaron highlighted, “Their team ensured we had all the necessary resources and support, which made the migration smooth and stress-free.”
Efficiency Gains with Iterable’s API
Integrating Iterable’s API has brought significant efficiency gains to ClickUp’s growth marketing team. Aaron explained, “Iterable’s extensive API endpoints save us over 15 hours each week by enabling us to efficiently manage our campaigns and templates, while effortlessly pulling metrics.” This capability has streamlined various aspects of their marketing operations, from data retrieval to campaign management.
By leveraging these API endpoints, ClickUp can automate routine tasks, enabling the team to focus more on strategic initiatives rather than manual processes. This efficiency not only optimizes their workflow but also enhances their ability to deliver timely and relevant communications to their users.
Boosting Net Dollar Retention with Reactivation Program
One of ClickUp’s standout successes using Iterable was their reactivation program aimed at re-engaging dormant users—those who have not used the app for 30 days or more. By leveraging Iterable’s robust data handling capabilities, ClickUp implemented fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) tactics that delivered impressive results.
Aaron shared, “With the reactivation program, we improved our Net Dollar Retention (NDR) by 2% in the first month and by 9% after five months.” Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is the most important stage that occurs after someone becomes a customer. This is the experience that leads them to pay more for the product or service after receiving value or refer others (in this case to their account). As Dillon Nuanes, Director of Retention & Lifecycle at ClickUp explained at Activate Summit, “This program not only boosted user engagement, increasing reactivation rate by 5%, but also significantly contributed to revenue growth. The ability to craft and execute such targeted campaigns highlights the transformative impact Iterable has had on ClickUp’s marketing strategies.”
ClickUp’s journey with Iterable showcases how innovative tools can drive efficiency, personalization, and growth. Speaking of efficiency, ClickUp is excited about the possibilities of AI and looks forward to embracing Iterable’s AI Suite to continue pushing boundaries and shaping the future of productivity.
Cinemark
Cinemark Saves Over 200 Hours Annually with Iterable’s Catalog
Cinemark, a leader in the motion picture exhibition industry, operates over 500 theaters and 5,000 screens across the US and Latin America. As one of the world’s largest and most influential movie theater companies, Cinemark is focused on deepening its customer relationships and encouraging movie lovers to choose its theaters for an immersive, cinematic experience.
Data Inefficiencies and Stagnated Processes
With millions of movie-goers and over 500 movies showcased annually, Cinemark manages an abundance of data, including their extensive list of movie content. With each film, there’s a lot of information attached to it—the title, genre, theater showtimes, and more.
Cinemark didn’t have an efficient, easy, and scalable way to maintain and activate their data to send personalized movie recommendations. With multiple people setting up their campaigns—across channels like email and push—there was a lot of back and forth with different teams and feedback would often get lost in translation, resulting in a stagnant approval process.
Why Iterable
When evaluating cross-channel customer communication platforms, Cinemark was drawn to Iterable’s exceptional customer service, comprehensive documentation, and user-friendly tools specific to marketers. Unlike their previous experiences with other martech solutions, Cinemark felt heard and supported by Iterable, proving that it was the right choice to support them alongside their growth journey.
Reducing Friction with Iterable’s Catalog
Iterable’s Catalog has streamlined operations by preventing redundant updates and ensuring seamless content management, which has accelerated the campaign approval process with stakeholders. Plus, the Cinemark marketing team no longer needs to rely on engineers to store and manage their data to ensure accuracy and quality control.
Prior to Catalog, for every touchpoint of a movie, the Cinemark team would have to enter the same information across each template. Now, Catalog serves as a reference table, where all of this information is stored and managed directly in a content library in Iterable. If any information is updated within a catalog, all templates that point to that specific catalog entry are updated accordingly. This efficiency has given their marketing team more bandwidth to focus on strategic initiatives and other projects, saving over 200 hours annually.
Additionally, Catalog makes it easy to individualize campaigns at scale. Whether sending movie recommendations based on a customer’s favorite genre or sending trending movies to specific segments, Cinemark’s marketing team uses Collections, which looks at data stored on the user profile at send time to search for relevant catalog items (such as movie information or location specific theater details). These collections can be embedded in messages to provide engaging, relevant content to each recipient of a campaign.
Iterable has been instrumental in our growth over the last year. The robust support, flexibility, and ease of use has significantly enhanced operational efficiency and productivity.
Where Personalization Meets Productivity
Iterable’s Catalog has transformed Cinemark’s ability to efficiently manage and personalize movie content. With Iterable’s support, transparency, and marketer-friendly platform, Cinemark is more empowered than ever to deliver an enhanced moviegoing experience that keeps people coming back.
OneVision Resources
How OneVision Resources Transforms the Client Experience with Iterable
OneVision Resources is a technology solutions company that specializes in providing support and managed services for smart home technology and home automation systems. They partner with integrators and home technology professionals to deliver a comprehensive service experience for homeowners. This includes everything from remote monitoring, proactive maintenance, and 24/7 technical support to personalized assistance and education on using their smart home systems. Their aim is to simplify and enhance the user experience for homeowners by ensuring that their technology is always functioning optimally and that they have access to expert help whenever needed. Karen Euler, the marketing manager at OneVision Resources, plays a key role in creating and maintaining diverse marketing assets for their extensive partner base. Her responsibilities include managing email campaigns and journeys, which are crucial for the company’s growth and client acquisition strategies.
CRM Feed Prevents Real-Time Customer Insights and Targeted Messaging
Prior to Iterable, OneVision Resources faced a critical challenge with their proprietary CRM feed failing to communicate properly with their customer communication platform. This disconnect resulted in the company not having access to real-time information on their customers, preventing them from maintaining a comprehensive, up-to-date view of customer interactions and preferences. Without this crucial data, OneVision Resources struggled to deliver personalized, targeted messaging to their customers, which hindered their ability to effectively engage with clients and nurture relationships. This challenge threatened to undermine their commitment to providing a seamless, proactive service experience.
To address this challenge, OneVision Resources needed a more reliable and integrated communication platform. Iterable emerged as the ideal choice due to its robust capabilities in unifying customer data across multiple brands— they could synchronize real-time data across various touchpoints, ensuring that their customer information remained accurate and accessible. By implementing Iterable, they aimed to streamline their communication processes, enhance their ability to deliver personalized messages, and ultimately, strengthen their customer relationships and service delivery.
Streamlining Client Onboarding with Iterable
As OneVision Resources grows through strategic partnerships, they need an efficient onboarding process for new clients. Karen Euler highlighted the importance of their welcome series journey, which guides new clients through educational and consultative steps. “The power to replicate journeys and make slight adjustments quickly is made possible by Iterable,” Euler noted. This capability allows OneVision Resources to tailor onboarding experiences for different client segments efficiently, ensuring a smooth transition and consistent engagement from the start.
Unmatched Audience Segmentation
OneVision Resources has significantly benefited from Iterable’s advanced audience segmentation capabilities. Karen Euler emphasized, “Iterable’s audience segmentation capabilities are unlike anything I’ve seen in any other platforms.” This powerful feature allows OneVision Resources to filter and segment their client lists with unparalleled precision, enabling them to deliver highly targeted and relevant content to various audience segments. This level of segmentation is crucial for maintaining personalized communication with their diverse partner base, ensuring that each client receives the most pertinent information and updates tailored to their unique needs and decision-making timelines.
Dynamic Content and Personalization
OneVision Resources has harnessed the power of Iterable’s dynamic content and personalization features to elevate their marketing efforts. “Iterable’s ability to collect data, use dynamic content, and personalize effectively is why we use it,” stated Euler. By leveraging these capabilities, OneVision Resources can craft highly personalized and engaging email campaigns that resonate with their diverse client base. The use of dynamic content allows them to tailor messages based on zero and first-party data, ensuring each client receives information that is relevant and timely. This personalized approach not only enhances client engagement but also supports OneVision Resources’ mission to provide exceptional service and foster long-term relationships.
Delivering on their Mission of Driving Excellence
By implementing Iterable, OneVision Resources overcame their data disconnect, gaining real-time insights and a comprehensive view of client interactions. This transformation enabled them to deliver highly personalized and targeted messaging, significantly enhancing their client engagement and onboarding processes. With Iterable, OneVision Resources is well-equipped to drive growth, nurture client relationships, and deliver an unparalleled service experience in the smart home technology sector.
Sandboxx
Key Results
Since launching Iterable’s Embedded Messaging, Sandboxx has achieved 2.71 million impressions in their mobile app and an eye-popping 538% improvement in click rate compared to engaging via email only.
The team found that Embedded Messaging was easy to integrate and maintain thanks to Iterable. Even with custom components, it only took 1-2 days to implement on iOS and Android.
Having a single platform like Iterable to manage all personalization and content has empowered Sandboxx’s marketers and given them more control over their messaging, while increasing speed to delivery.
Sandboxx is a mobile app focused on connecting the military community through military mail, content, community, and news. The flagship feature, Sandboxx Letters, allows users to send physical letters to recruits in training where digital communication is not possible.
Sandboxx also delivers always-up-to-date content to guide and prepare military families for the journey ahead, alongside a community platform where users can connect and share experiences, fostering camaraderie and support.
To expand on their success connecting the military community, the Sandboxx team set out to deliver a more holistic, relevant, real-time experience to customers. Although they were already engaging via email, with 11.2 million unique sends in 2023 alone, they knew that email was not enough.
In their efforts to take ownership of all the channels available to them, the Sandboxx team decided to add Iterable’s Embedded Messaging to their cross-channel marketing strategy.
After looking at the data, we knew we could be doing more to engage our audience across all channels. Iterable’s Embedded Messaging honestly feels like a new best friend. It’s super easy to integrate, and it makes everything you’re already doing with Iterable just better.
What is Iterable’s Embedded Messaging?
In a nutshell, Iterable’s Embedded Messaging are messages that are displayed inline in mobile and web applications, alongside all other native content. These messages can range from hero banners and info boxes to scrolling carousels and feeds. They’re designed to fit seamlessly into an app experience—no overlays, pop-ups, or push notifications necessary.
Sandboxx Integrates Embedded Messaging for Enhanced Engagement
What appealed to Sandboxx’s marketing team about Embedded Messaging was the ability to populate personalized content directly into the product, targeting multiple locations within the app. And, because these messages are fully dynamic, they can be displayed or removed in real-time, based on their relevance to individual users.
When it came to integrating Embedded Messaging, Jeremiah used two words: “simple and seamless.” He said once the team decided to add the feature, the rest was smooth sailing.
“We already had everything we needed with our initial Iterable implementation, so handling things like actions and URLs was a piece of cake. Because Embedded Messaging is API-driven, all we have to do is ask for data, and then we get that data and render it however we want.” ~ Jeremiah Runser, Head of Marketing at Sandboxx
The Sandboxx engineering team was quick to agree with Jeremiah. They felt Iterable’s support team was extremely helpful throughout the entire implementation. It’s a common fear that onboarding a new product will require a fleet of technical resources, but the engineers at Sandboxx were surprised by how few people they needed and how little time it took to get up and running.
Iterable’s Embedded Messaging was easy to integrate with their existing product features. Implementing mobile embedded messaging with custom components took 1-2 days to implement by one iOS engineer and one Android engineer.
Putting Embedded Messaging Into Action
Once Embedded Messaging was implemented, Sandboxx began putting it into action with these four core use cases:
1. Onboarding and Activation. To encourage a user’s first purchase and optimize for a higher lifetime value in the long run, the team created educational content that explained how to get the most out of the Sandboxx app and shared the stories of existing customers. These messages were designed to expand product knowledge during onboarding and increase advocacy through social proof.
2. Sequential Content. Sandboxx hosts weekly training updates on the web, and Iterable data feeds enable them to be displayed across all devices in real-time. Anytime that changes are made to the user field {{letterRecipient.trainingWeek}}, those changes are reflected in the embedded weekly training updates.
3. Targeted Promotions. Sandboxx marketers aren’t interested in sending mass promotions in the hopes that only a small handful of recipients will actually make a purchase. Instead, the team uses Embedded Messaging to meet customers where they are with targeted and timely promos. Because users are already in the app, it’s easier for them to convert, allowing for more cross-sell and upsell opportunities with reduced friction.
4. Partner Advertising. In addition to enhancing Sandboxx’s content, Embedded Messaging has provided an opportunity to monetize promoted content from advertisers. The native delivery of these ads mimics the look and feel of the Sandboxx brand, helping partners meet their impression KPIs and offering a superior experience compared to traditional sponsored content. All the team has to do is set the display priority according to the specific campaign’s goals.
Regardless of the use case, with Embedded Messaging, Sandboxx marketers never have to wait to get information in front of customers. Whenever a message is updated on their website, that content is reflected in the app in real time thanks to data feeds.
And the results speak for themselves. Since adopting Embedded Messaging in early 2024, Sandboxx has achieved 5.7 million impressions and increased its click rate from 2.48% on average to 15.82%. That’s a jaw-dropping 538% improvement compared to engaging via email only.
The Path Ahead for Sandboxx
As Jeremiah put it, Embedded Messaging has been a way for Sandboxx to make everything they were already doing with Iterable “just better.” They now have a fully native, integrated messaging solution with robust segmentation to enhance their cross-channel marketing campaigns across both their website and app.
By embedding dynamic messages directly on web and mobile, the Sandboxx team has been able to deliver a superior user experience, reach customers with more personalized content, and dramatically improve their key metrics that impact the bottom line.
Messages mean everything for military families to stay connected. And now, with Iterable’s Embedded Messaging, Sandboxx can send better messages to achieve its mission.
If you’re interested in connecting more closely with your customers, reach out and schedule a demo of Iterable’s Embedded Messaging today.
Thirty Madison
Key Results
Adding SMS to their patient-intake process and purchase journey resulted in:
An increase in opt-in rate and more than 50% of leads were more likely to convert to subscription, helping Thirty Madison serve even more patients while providing more personalized and immediate care.
A double digit increase in consultation completion rate as more patients answered the questions needed to receive treatment and get started with Thirty Madison.
A/B testing enabled Thirty Madison to improve the payment process, ensuring patients don’t miss necessary treatments and stay on track with their doctor-recommended plans, by capturing payment information for 6% more patients with payment failure (i.e. expired credit cards).
With STO, they sent patients messages at the most beneficial times—when they were most likely to engage and take necessary actions—which resulted in a nearly 30% increase in open rate and a 7% lift in click-through-rate.
Thirty Madison, a virtual-first healthcare company—with brands Keeps, Nurx, Cove and Facet—supports its patients’ lifelong health conditions through an innovative care model that’s personalized, affordable, and accessible. They have treated over one million patients to date, with care offerings across more than 20 chronic conditions, and a team-based care approach provided by affiliated medical groups of specialized clinicians and medical advisors. Thirty Madison has built beloved brands through an emphasis on high-quality care, patient-first decision-making, and smart and personalized patient experiences.
Lead-to-Conversion Stalls: Marketing Seeks New Communications Lifeline
As a virtual-first company, Thirty Madison aims to optimize the digital, end-to-end patient experience to reach more new patients they can help and support in their health journeys. This often entails a new patient completing a consultation, connecting with a medical physician, and then receiving ongoing care and support. Thirty Madison saw potential in improving the patient journey and recognized that achieving an exceptionally tailored experience required rethinking engagement from a new angle.
Bringing SMS Into the Mix
First, they aimed to establish a more direct and personalized approach to engage with their leads, aiming to enhance overall acquisition. SMS was the ideal channel—with click rates typically 6-8X higher than email. However, when SMS opt-in was initially introduced at the end of the patient intake process, the second challenge was that only 6% of leads subscribed to the SMS channel. Thirty Madison hypothesized that if they could get more leads to opt-in to SMS, and then deliver personalized SMS and email communications in their patient journeys, conversions would increase.
We know that our CRM is integral for delivering superior care, so finding the right balance of SMS and email to reach and connect with each patient on a personal level is important.
By using Iterable—a solution that unlocks and maximizes cross-channel marketing for all of Thirty Madison’s brands—they saw stronger conversion and retention rates and higher revenue and, more importantly, a better patient experience. With a full suite of SMS tools native to Iterable, Thirty Madison is able to engage patients at the right moment, across a broad range of use cases—from lead-to-purchase to payment failure—in complete lockstep with email. And, with a multitude of AI and experimentation features as well as the ability to send deeply personalized cross-channel messages, they can now reach consumers on the right channel to forge stronger connections between health providers and patients.
Better First Impressions, Conversion Rates, and Revenue With Iterable’s A/B Testing, Cross-Channel Capabilities
Creating an account with a Thirty Madison brand involves an intake process where a patient completes a clinical consultation by answering questions about their lifestyle and medical history before a provider can review and recommend the most medically appropriate treatment. With some patients failing to complete this intake process, Thirty Madison’s marketing team hoped that by offering SMS opt-in earlier in this process, more people would ultimately complete the consultation. Thirty Madison also saw that they could leverage SMS communications to encourage completion of the intake for a treatment request and ongoing treatment.
To verify the impact of SMS communications, Thirty Madison used Iterable’s experiments to perform fast, comprehensive A/B testing where 50% of leads who opted in for SMS received a message in the lead-to-purchase flow and 50% of leads who opted in for SMS didn’t.
It was quick, easy testing, thanks to Iterable, and Thirty Madison’s marketing team felt reassured that the right messages were sent at the right time, and on the best channels. The results of their tests were:
- By shifting the SMS opt-in step to an earlier stage in the sign-up process, SMS opt-in rate increased. Consequently, more potential patients began receiving crucial updates, thereby enhancing their experience with Thirty Madison brands.
- Among those leads who opted-in to SMS, more than 50% were more likely to complete their intake form when compared to holdouts who didn’t receive SMS. This streamlined process enabled them to promptly commence the care they required from Thirty Madison, simplifying and expediting their patient journey.
- When adding SMS to the patient purchase experience—which includes potential patients who have completed their intake form, the consultation completion rate grew double digits allowing Thirty Madison to facilitate the necessary treatment to their patients faster.
Now, SMS opt-in appears early in the patient intake process for all Thirty Madison brands, and their marketing team uses cross-channel communications in other journeys as well.
AI-Powered Features Enable Worry-Free Patient Outreach
Thirty Madison uses Iterable’s AI Suite, which includes Send Time Optimization (STO)—a feature that applies machine learning to analyze historical engagement behavior and select an optimal, per-person send time for communications. STO, combined with custom event exit rules–which automatically remove users from a journey after they’ve completed a desired action or one of their user attribute changes—ensures that no patient will receive irrelevant messages or simultaneous emails or SMS when they’re in multiple journeys.
Lauren Gonzalez, Senior Manager, Lifecycle Marketing at Thirty Madison, shared how using STO “is a great way to have an improved patient experience as a brand. We used STO in transactional communications to ensure patients are receiving communications at times that are most convenient to enhance their interactions with our brands and take any necessary actions within their treatment plans (and, as a result, most likely to drive the highest engagement).” By using STO they saw a nearly 30% increase in open rate and a 7% lift in click-through-rate.
Another Iterable AI feature, Copy Assist, enhances and expedites campaign copy. “It’s personally my favorite feature; it reduces time for our team to make copy edits and helps identify ways to test copy based on real engagement learnings. There’s a direct relation to patient retention—it’s a win-win for everyone,” explained Lauren. Marketing knows that suggested copy for email subject lines or pre-headers and SMS messages is now informed by and accounts for performance data, too.
Tips to Experience Healthier Business and Marketing Results
With the outcomes achieved through its partnership with Iterable—improved communications, engagement, retention, revenue, time savings, and more—Thirty Madison is able to deliver a better experience to its patients. Based on personal experience, Lauren shared these three recommendations for other marketers:
- Consider the holistic patient experience when introducing a new communication channel.
- Combine email and SMS to maximize strategic communication at optimal moments and harness interest and engagement from existing patients and leads.
- Continue to optimize marketing efforts by conducting A/B tests on both content and communication frequency to boost email conversion rates, all while harnessing AI-driven tools that benefit your lifecycle marketing strategy, patient experience, and business outcomes.
IPRoyal
Key Results
With the help of Iterable’s marketing automation and advanced email capabilities, IPRoyal was able to increase the percentage of users who registered on its website and then made a purchase by an average of 75%.
By using Iterable to A/B test different subject lines, the team increased the open rates of their purchase journey emails to 20%.
Compared to their manual, inefficient internal system, Iterable’s drag-and-drop email builder saves IPRoyal about one hour for every campaign. Now, IPRoyal marketers no longer need developer assistance, becoming fully self-sufficient as a team.
In the modern digital era, internet access is just as important a utility as electricity and water— it’s difficult to imagine a life without it. IPRoyal, a leading global proxy service provider, understands this at its core with a mission to enable free internet access worldwide.
IPRoyal is committed to delivering privacy, speed, and efficiency with its premium solutions. Proxies, similar to VPNs, alter a user’s IP address, supporting various activities, such as SEO research, market research, data scraping, and travel fare aggregation. IPRoyal’s business model includes options to pay monthly per IP or per traffic in gigabytes.
The customer journey at IPRoyal involves a two-step process: first, users register for an account online, and then they can make a purchase. The marketing team’s primary goals are to increase both new and repeat purchases and to attract enterprise clients—a sector that they’re currently targeting with dedicated communications. And the platform they rely on to send those communications is Iterable.
Iterable is a very user-friendly platform with all the functionality we need to track the impact that our email marketing program has on our business growth and revenue.
IPRoyal Swaps Its Internal Email System for Iterable
Prior to adopting Iterable, IPRoyal was not able to correctly track conversion rates, as only a small percentage of its users completed a purchase after registering. Email marketing would be a core part of overcoming this challenge, but the team relied on an internal system that required developer intervention for each campaign, making the process cumbersome and inefficient.
Additionally, the system could only track basic email metrics—like open rates and click-through rates—providing little insight into the customer journey beyond those simple user interactions. The team knew which users received and opened their emails but couldn’t analyze whether those users actually took action or made a purchase.
IPRoyal needed a platform that could not only provide the best value at the most cost-efficient price but also deliver marketer-friendly automation and analytics across email and other channels. After the team’s evaluation, the winning selection was Iterable.
“Before Iterable, we didn’t have a proper email marketing tool to create segmentation and send personalized journeys. With our internal system, we needed the help of developers to send emails to customers, which was a manual process that didn’t even track outcomes properly. Now that we have optimized this channel through Iterable, we know so much more about our customers.” ~ Arnas Pelaitis, Retention & Analytics Manager at IPRoyal
Automating the Customer Journey to Maximize Conversions
To tackle its low purchase rates, IPRoyal implemented two strategic cross-channel messaging journeys using Iterable:
- Post-Registration, Pre-Purchase Journey: The first journey focused on converting registered users into first-time buyers through a series of emails designed to convert into purchases.
After a user makes a purchase, they receive a personalized welcome email from IPRoyal, which offers valuable resources to help them make the most of their mobile proxy.
2. Post-Purchase Onboarding Journey: The second journey aimed to build customer loyalty and drive repeat purchases, while also attracting new business by introducing a benefits referral program. The journey included email and web push reminders alerting users of their plan’s expiration date, as well as abandoned cart emails to encourage a second purchase. And, because IPRoyal offers five different proxy plans, each email is personalized based on which plan a user has purchased.
According to Arnas Pelaitis, Retention & Analytics Manager at IPRoyal, the results were staggering. He reports that by creating these messaging journeys with the help of Iterable, the percentage of people who registered and then made a purchase has increased by a whopping 75%.
And, most importantly, the team can directly see what percentage of revenue is coming from email marketing, as they had no way of tracking those metrics with their previous internal system.
“One factor that sets Iterable apart is the great documentation it provides. Whether it’s figuring out how to use handlebars or adding a new channel, I can easily find everything I need in Iterable’s user handbook.” ~ Arnas Pelaitis, Retention & Analytics Manager at IPRoyal
Going the Distance with A/B Testing
The journeys themselves are only the start of IPRoyal’s new marketing strategy. Iterable has also enabled the team to enhance its use of experimentation with robust A/B testing.
In one experiment, IPRoyal tested the effectiveness of various subject lines against a control pre-purchase email in its onboarding journey. The team discovered that a variation that used the word “discount” but didn’t reveal the exact percentage-off amount was the clear winner.
By using Iterable’s A/B testing capabilities to conduct their experiments, the team is now consistently seeing open rates of 20% or more with their pre-purchase emails.
“Now, A/B testing isn’t just a term we’re aware of but an actual practice we implement routinely, thanks to Iterable,” said Pelaitis.
What’s Next for IPRoyal
Looking ahead, IPRoyal plans to expand its marketing efforts to cover the entire customer lifecycle, including strategies to reactivate users with expired plans. The team also intends to integrate additional, Iterable-supported channels, such as In-Browser Messaging for more targeted promotional outreach.
By optimizing their email marketing strategy and setting themselves up for success with other communication channels, the IPRoyal team is well-positioned to continue its trajectory of gaining even deeper insights into their customer journey and achieving substantial growth.
gorjana
Key Results
By using Iterable’s AI-powered Send Time Optimization, gorjana’s average click rate for its email campaigns has grown by 12%—a dramatic increase given the company’s millions of users.
Delivering joy through personalized holiday campaigns has led to a 4x increase in gorjana’s Buy Online, Pickup In Store (BOPIS) orders.
gorjana’s gift card SMS campaign for Valentine’s Day saw a 17% increase in year-over-year conversions.
Additionally, the team’s customer testimonial SMS campaign has been wildly successful, leading to a whopping 337.5% increase in conversions year-over-year.
Few businesses understand the mission of delivering joy to customers as innately as gorjana, a jewelry brand based in Laguna Beach. Founded in 2004 by co-founders Gorjana and Jason Reidel, the company has since grown to over 65 retail stores, making jewelry intentionally designed to mix, match, layer, and have a whole lot of fun with.
gorjana’s ability to connect to its customers is critical. To get a 360-degree view of its customer engagement all in one platform, the company chose to partner with Iterable.
Having everything under one hood with Iterable has been a game-changer. To be able to orchestrate all our customer segments across SMS, email, and more made it very easy to make the switch.
gorjana Upgrades to Iterable for a Cohesive Customer View
Prior to Iterable, the gorjana marketing team had used two separate providers for email and SMS and, therefore, lacked the cross-channel orchestration they needed to build more advanced customer segmentation and journeys.
When searching for the right martech tool, they noticed that some vendors excel at providing certain features, but few were able to deliver the complete package: the centralized view of a customer data platform and robust, AI-powered capabilities of a cross-channel marketing platform.
After a thorough evaluation, gorjana selected Iterable as the top choice.
When we had disparate systems, SMS was doing one thing and email was doing another, and the two didn’t know how they were working together. Having it all in one place puts us in complete control of our cross-channel segmentation and orchestration.
Harnessing AI to Power Winning Cross-Channel Campaigns
The gorjana team leverages Iterable for many of their essential marketing campaigns, whether it’s welcoming new customers or triggering abandoned cart and browse reminders. But where the team has found huge success has been with its on-demand segmented campaign messages.
gorjana sends email and SMS communications about product launches multiple times each week, and the brand’s loyalists are usually over the moon to receive updates on new arrivals. But to ensure customers don’t experience message fatigue, the team uses several key features in Iterable’s AI Suite.
Frequency Capping and Optimization
With Iterable’s Frequency Capping, the marketers at gorjana can limit how many messages can be sent to specific users, whether it’s no more than three text messages per week or one email per day. And if a customer is expecting an order, transactional shipping or delivery notifications can be prioritized over marketing promotions.
But now with Iterable’s AI-powered Frequency Optimization, the team can go even further by automatically determining what frequency is right for each individual within a set range.
Nala Hanna, Retention Marketing Manager at gorjana, explained that their strategy is no longer one-size-fits-all:
“We’re able to pick and choose what days, what emails, and what content we want to go to which customer. We didn’t have those capabilities before, and it’s been such a big unlock for us in creating a more advanced program.”
Send Time Optimization
When it comes to sending the right message to the right person at the right time, marketers should be able to use AI to set their communications on autopilot. That’s where Iterable’s Send Time Optimization (STO) comes in.
Hanna reports that since the team enabled STO, their average click rate for their email campaigns has grown by 12%—a dramatic increase given the company’s large list size.
“We use Send Time Optimization for almost all of our campaigns, and it’s been great because it takes the guesswork out of when’s the best time to send an email. Not having to think about when a user will most likely open our messages has unlocked greater efficiencies for our small but mighty team, and as a result, we can focus our efforts on optimizing our cross-channel communication strategy.” ~ Nala Hanna, Retention Marketing Manager at gorjana
Giving BOPIS a Major Boost
One of the many ways that gorjana delivers joy to its customers is the quality of service the company provides, especially during important holidays, like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. To reduce the stress surrounding these special days, gorjana sends reminders via Iterable that customers can buy online and pick up in store (BOPIS).
What sets gorjana’s BOPIS campaigns apart is personalized messaging based on how customers prefer to shop. To appeal to people who enjoy visiting in person, gorjana’s store staff go the extra mile and provide complimentary gift-wrapping for items that are picked up at its 65+ locations.
In fact, this tailored messaging to both retail and e-commerce customers during the holidays has been so successful that this personalization has led to a 4x increase in BOPIS orders.
gorjana’s CMO Elton Graham says that the impact Iterable has been able to enable has been significant:
“It’s really important for us that we have a messaging system in place that can orchestrate these campaigns seamlessly. We know when we’re speaking to customers who prefer to shop in stores, and to those who prefer to shop online. Iterable allows us to properly segment our customers by shopping preferences, so we can come up with personalized messages that cater to each segment.”
Sealing the Deal With SMS
While BOPIS orders are a huge boon during the holidays, gorjana seeks to convert even the customers who save their gift-buying until the last minute. With SMS, the team can send timely suggestions to purchase a gift card before it’s too late.gorjana’s “You gift, they choose” SMS campaign converts last-minute shoppers during special holidays.
In the company’s big push for Valentine’s Day, SMS played a valuable role. gorjana saw a 55% increase in the total number of SMS messages delivered that February, and the growth led to a 17% increase in year-over-year conversions.
Of course, SMS doesn’t just drive orders around the holidays. The team also sends testimonials via text to prospective customers. These messages feature the jewelry styles that are most often a customer’s first purchase, and the added social proof can be just what a user needs before completing a checkout.gorjana uses Iterable SMS to share customer testimonials and drive first purchases.
This testimonial SMS campaign has been wildly successful, leading to a whopping 337.5% increase in conversions year-over-year. And no, that’s not a typo!
Graham explains how less can be more when it comes to mobile communications:
“Compared to our daily email campaigns, we send a lot less SMS, but it’s still driving high sessions and revenue for us. The overall role of SMS on our bottom line has been so impactful.”
The Growth Ahead of gorjana
As gorjana continues to accelerate its growth plans, the marketing team is confident it can maintain its level of personalization at a massive scale. Thanks to Iterable’s AI Suite, sophisticated segmentation, and centralized customer view, they can create cross-channel campaigns that shine.
Global66
Key Results
With a personalized post-application campaign, Global66 achieved a 40% increase in user engagement, compared to more general product campaigns.
Additionally, the campaign led to a 50% increase in the conversion rate of physical card requests and first transactions.
By using Iterable’s Brand Affinity to gauge user sentiment, Global66 was able to reallocate its resources to its most loyal customers and increase efficiency by 30%.
For much of the world, it’s commonplace to access basic financial services, such as banking and lending. But in Latin America, 70% of the population remains unbanked or underbanked, and nearly 6 in 10 point-of-sale purchases are still made in cash.
Founded in 2018 to empower this underserved region, Global66 is a global financial platform for individuals and small and medium-sized enterprises. It offers users a global account to make payments, send and receive money worldwide, and convert currencies, all from a single app. Users in Colombia, Chile, and Peru can also access a Global66 Mastercard to make purchases from anywhere in the world using their preferred currency.
With over 700,000 people served and more than $1 billion in transactions, Global66 needed a customer engagement platform that could scale with the business. So, the team turned to Iterable.
We grew significantly in both our audience and product offerings, so we needed a customer engagement platform that could grow with us. Iterable has allowed us the flexibility to adjust our communications and improve along the way.
Global66 Seeks Personalized Communications at Scale
As Global66’s user base grew rapidly, the team needed a platform that allowed them to manage both transactional and marketing communications from one place, so they could personalize their messages to users at a massive scale.
Vivian Rozo, a regional Growth CRM Manager at Global66, explained that the team had specific objectives for each part of their user journey:
- Activation: Increase the percentage of users who make their first transaction after registration
- Retention: Increase the percentage of users who continue to transact after the first three months of their registration
- Reactivation: Increase users’ purchase frequency in the long term
To achieve these objectives, Global66 sought a new solution to manage their customer engagement. Above all, however, they wanted a platform that was easy to use.
After evaluating many CRMs and communications platforms, they landed on Iterable as their top choice.
One of the best things about working with Iterable is the support they offer. Our customer success manager is always willing and available for any problem or question we have.
Compliant Commercial Campaigns With Iterable
As a financial services provider, Global66 must not only communicate to its customers with relevant, personalized content, but also adhere to the laws and regulations of the more than 70 countries it operates. Maintaining full visibility over their messaging to ensure compliance is why it’s mission-critical that the team send both transactional and marketing messages using the same platform.
Today, nearly all of Global66’s user communications come from Iterable, including payment and money transfer confirmations, notifications of terms and conditions, document requests, customer service surveys, and commercial campaigns for product launches.
Digital Card Post-Application Journey
One campaign that made it possible for Global66 to achieve its business goals was its post-application journey for a digital card. This journey included an educational communication flow designed to relay the value proposition of the card and tailor messages based on a user’s previous history.
For instance, the campaign was personalized by country, which was validated by other products customers had used. Content also varied whether users had used digital or physical cards to highlight specific benefits of the digital card for each customer.
The results were staggering. Compared to campaigns that talked about the product generically, this personalized post-application journey increased user engagement by a whopping 40%. The Global66 team also saw a 50% increase in the conversion rate of physical card requests and first transactions.
“In my experience managing other customer engagement platforms,” Rozo explained, “I can highlight that the Iterable platform is super intuitive when creating journeys. At Global66, we use personalization to impact each user at the right time, so they’re more likely to take a certain action or have a greater likelihood of using a certain product according to their interests.”
Using Iterable AI to Engage Users
The Global66 team is continually analyzing user data to better understand which products their customers are using, as well as determine the optimal send times and channels for customer communications.
What’s allowed Global66 to take its data-driven marketing to the next level is Iterable’s AI Suite. The team uses Brand Affinity to identify loyal customers, and, as a result, has increased the team’s efficiency by 30%. This allows them to allocate more time and resources to the users who are delivering the highest ROI.
And when their email subject lines could use more creativity, Iterable’s Copy Assist is there to save the day. Rozo explained, “Many times we run out of inspiration to create eye-catching copy that generates traction, but Copy Assist has allowed us to vary our subject lines and create much more dynamic content that increases email opens.”
The Real Impact of Iterable at Global66
Overall, by centralizing customer communications and providing the ability to activate customers based on their behaviors, Iterable has enabled Global66 to create more impactful marketing campaigns and become more efficient as a team.
But the real impact of using Iterable comes down to building a more joyful experience for Global66’s customers. “When you can move your money anywhere in the world without bureaucracy, when you can send a remittance to your family in their home country to help them, that’s what joy means to us. Iterable makes delivering that joy possible,” said Rozo.
As for what’s next for Global66, the team is looking forward to improving its cross-channel harmonization by activating in-app as another marketing channel. They also plan to integrate Iterable with AppsFlyer and Tableau for greater data attribution and visualization.
Global66 can rest easy that as the company grows and expands its global audience, Iterable will be the trusted partner to take the business to new heights.
Redbubble
Redbubble’s mission is to create the world’s largest marketplace for independent artists to sell their creations. Founded in 2006 in Melbourne, Australia, today Redbubble connects over 700,000 artists and designers across the planet with millions of passionate fans.
One would assume that a business at such a massive scale would require an equally sizable team to wrangle customer communications, and yet Josh Geiser, the senior manager of Redbubble’s CRM, lifecycle and mobile, refers to himself as a one-person email marketing team—with AI as his trusty sidekick.
“I’ve experienced firsthand how AI has revolutionized the way I work on a daily basis. AI technology, like the tools in Iterable’s AI Suite, has significantly improved my efficiency, effectiveness, and overall results in email marketing.” ~ Josh Geiser, Senior Manager – CRM, Lifecycle and Mobile at Redbubble.
On Iterable’s Activate tour, Josh revealed the Iterable AI advantage to Redbubble’s marketing strategy and shared his thoughts on the future of AI as we know it.
The AI Advantage for Small Teams
To Redbubble, AI stands for Assisted Inspiration because of the way the team embodies the idea of AI as a collaborator. For Josh, it’s like having a creative partner in the digital realm, boosting creativity, brainstorming, problem-solving, and facilitating learning.
In fact, this tiny—but mighty—Redbubble email marketing team has identified several key benefits to adopting AI technology, like ChatGPT and Iterable’s AI Suite.
1. Enhanced Audience Segmentation
Once Redbubble started using Iterable’s Brand Affinity to score customers based on their sentiment, the team has seen a 10% increase in open rate and a 12% increase in click rate since implementation.
This was accomplished by tailoring messaging according to how loyal a subscriber is to Redbubble. The brand’s most loyal fans receive certain promotions to reward them for frequent purchases, while newer users who are labeled as neutral or unscored are sent messaging that shares the value of Redbubble to improve engagement and incentivize a first purchase.
Not to mention, Iterable’s Brand Affinity scoring has also aided in email list hygiene, enabling easier identification of loyal and positive subscribers and improved confidence that Redbubble messages are reaching the right audiences.
2. Optimized Send Times
Redbubble’s use of AI isn’t limited to email, of course. As a global company, the team communicates with artists and their fans via multiple channels, so they needed a way to send messages to specific regions at the exact moment when users would interact the most. That’s when they turned to Iterable’s Send Time Optimization (STO).
With this AI-fueled feature, Redbubble can automatically determine when best to communicate with their customers, based on their individual engagement behavior. Since implementing STO in April 2023, Redbubble has achieved a 30% open rate increase for its promotional push notifications. Now the team’s cross-channel marketing campaigns can reach millions of users at the perfect time, giving them the confidence that their messages resonate 24/7.
3. Personalized Recommendations
Redbubble also leverages AI for email personalization by integrating automated feeds that pull in website content and product recommendations. With combining Iterable AI with its handlebars helpers and other logical operators, the team can not only achieve more dynamic personalization, but also cycle through a variety of creative imagery based on the time of send.
This is especially helpful for recurring sends, since content is automatically updated rather than requiring manual changes. This keeps campaigns fresh and shows more breadth and depth of all the products that Redbubble offers, substantially improving engagement and email effectiveness, including a whopping 28% increase in click-through rate.
4. Simplified Coding
In addition to enabling personalized recommendations, AI tools can provide clear and concise explanations of technical topics and offer code examples. This has allowed the Redbubble team to absorb more advanced information at different learning styles and paces.
For instance, Josh uses ChatGPT as a teaching assistant to explain how Iterable’s handlebars logic is working behind the scenes to deliver smart content and product suggestions. In the example below, ChatGPT breaks down each element of the code and details how it’s working within a campaign.
In cases like these, AI empowers teams with personalized learning, adaptive content, and practical skill development. It offers tailored and focused guidance, resource recommendations, and around-the-clock assistance. This way, even the smallest of marketing teams can produce big results, all on their own.
The Future of AI at Redbubble
At Redbubble, AI’s role has grown from assistance to a full-fledged partnership. The future of AI-driven personalization will become more refined, adapting content to individual preferences with unprecedented accuracy.
As for Josh’s personal AI wishlist, he looks forward to expanding Redbubble’s use of Iterable’s AI Suite for a variety of use cases, including creative content creation with Copy Assist, AI-assisted journey building based on user behaviors with Next Best Action, and much more.
The most exciting benefit of Iterable AI is giving us more time to daydream. When we can take a lot of that busy work away and let our minds wander, that’s when we come up with our best ideas.
Key Results
With Iterable’s Brand Affinity, Redbubble was able to score and segment its audience by customer sentiment, leading to a 10% increase in email open rate and a 12% increase in click rate.
Iterable’s Send Time Optimization contributed to a 30% open rate increase for all of Redbubble’s promotional push notifications.
Integrating automated feeds to deliver personalized content and product recommendations has substantially increased email effectiveness, including a 28% rise in click-through rate.
By using ChatGPT to explain Iterable’s handlebars logic, the Redbubble team has not only been able to improve their email personalization, but also teach themselves how the code is working within Iterable.
Care.com
How Care.com Saves Hours With a Modern Tech Stack
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:
- Invest in journey mapping its user experiences, replacing time-consuming manual processes with streamlined data and automated journeys.
- Test and analyze data quickly and use those insights to create and optimize new marketing programs
- 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.
“I now spend less than five minutes pulling the data for my sites on a weekly and monthly basis. The rest of the time, I focus on actually understanding the customer behavior. These tools save time in the long run and allow your team to create the best experiences for your customers.”
Results
Deeper understanding of customer behavior
Faster testing and optimization
Scaled operations without additional engineering support
Kabam Games
Kabam Games Levels Up With Iterable Experiments and Sees a 17% Lift in CTR
Kabam Games is a leader of developing entertaining, immersive, and highly social multiplayer games, enjoyed by millions around the world. Their mission is to entertain the world by bringing amazing games to the screen of your choice, like Marvel Contest of Champions and Disney Mirrorverse.
Prior to Iterable, scaling was one of Kabam’s biggest challenges. Providing games to millions around the world in over 15 languages meant hundreds of emails and mobile campaigns needed to be created, which was a near impossible task.
Betina Ng, Manager of Player Lifecycle Engagement at Kabam Games shares “in the past, we had to build 16 versions of a campaign and as you can imagine, that can certainly be a very manual process.”
To help automate the campaign creation process, Betina leverages Catalog to create no-code recommendations and dynamic content allowing one template to serve thousands of unique customers. As Betina shares, “we are now able to leverage Catalog and can eliminate the need to build multiple versions of one template. This has been a huge time saver for us.”
Betina also heavily uses Experiments to continuously test different messaging they’re sending at each stage of a player’s journey—from newcomer to avid gamer. “Our team uses Experiments to do a lot of creative or content testing. We just love that it’s so easy to use.”
As an example, Betina’s team recently did a CTA button creative test for their email and push reactivation campaigns, which contributed to an overall 17% increase in CTR. With the increase in click-through rate, Kabam also saw an increase in their daily active players, directly driving towards one of the team’s key KPIs. “The reporting in Iterable makes it so easy for us to just look at the results of these experiments and quickly optimize our campaigns”, shares Betina.
As Kabam Games looks ahead to the future, Betina is excited about the endless possibilities they have with Iterable to help them deliver unforgettable gameplay experiences to players everywhere.
I would recommend Iterable for brands looking to scale, especially for those where their lifecycle marketing team wants to improve their operational efficiencies. The icing on the cake for us is the support we receive from Iterable. We’ve built a strong relationship which feels like a true partnership.
Stanley Black & Decker
Whether you’re an expert in construction, an enthusiastic DIY-er, or the occasional user of a tape measure, you’ve heard of Stanley Black & Decker. The world leader in tools and outdoor equipment employs over 60,000 people and serves as a household name in 60 countries, providing jobsite and household essentials since 1843.
As a B2B2C company, Stanley Black & Decker’s core business is to generate demand for its distributors and retailers, such as Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Amazon, by acquiring and activating its end-user data.
This mission to better understand their customers is a challenging one: a tiny but mighty two-person team is responsible for managing over ten automated customer journeys across eight markets and four total brands, including DEWALT, BLACK+DECKER, IRWIN, and STANLEY TOOLS.
How does this team do it all for a global enterprise with such limited resources? Ana Mourão, the senior manager of Stanley Black & Decker’s global customer journey and CRM, explains that automation came to the rescue, specifically with the adoption of Iterable’s Catalog.
Iterable Catalog allows the Stanley Black & Decker customer journey team to be lean and remain agile while delivering on our promise to increase demand for our products on behalf of our distributors and retailers. When you consider how well we can optimize our campaigns for so many markets and brands, Iterable Catalog pays for itself.
At Iterable’s Activate conference, Ana explained how Stanley Black & Decker overcame its customer journey challenges in three steps: ensuring you have the right data, building a catalog with Iterable, and deploying a dynamic email template.
Step 1: Ensure You Have the Right Data
Most enterprises as massive as Stanley Black & Decker are already sitting atop a mountain of data, but how do they ensure they have the right data? In this step, it’s crucial to define which data would benefit the most from automation.
For Stanley Black & Decker, that meant collecting four types of data:
- SKU data
- Data from regional e-commerce partners
- First-party user attributes, such as occupation or hobbies
- First-party user behavior, such as email engagement or website visits
Collecting all this data and getting it set up for use in Iterable Catalog is a group effort. The e-commerce team is responsible for SKU and regional partner data, which is then uploaded via API by the data operations team. The brand team shares email template assets, like headers and hero images, and then the customer journey team combines that information together with the first-party user data they’ve collected in their CRM to move forward with the next step and manage the creation of the catalog itself.
Step 2: Build a Catalog With Iterable
Iterable’s Catalog feature stores all this data directly and uses it to personalize messages at enterprise scale. Catalog allows businesses like Stanley Black & Decker to match users with product recommendations based on their interests, preferences, and historical activity.
As Ana explained, their engineers love using Catalog because they can set up APIs for real-time updates, which allows marketers to send email communications across all their brands and markets without technical assistance. What starts off as a spreadsheet of SKU data from an e-commerce partner, for instance, is easily uploaded and automated with a user-friendly interface.
Step 3: Deploy a Dynamic Email Template
Once the right data has been identified and imported into Iterable Catalog, the final step is to create and deploy a dynamic message template, which can be sent via email, SMS, push, in-app notifications, and more.
With minimal coding, the customer journey team can customize countless variations of their emails with a single template that auto-populates with data from the catalog they’ve created. In the image below, not only are the SKUs personalized in this email for Stanley Black & Decker’s Spanish-speaking customers, but the imagery is too. The hero image is relevant to each individual customer’s occupation or hobby, whether they’re interested in woodworking or construction.
Moreover, because e-commerce partner data is also stored in Iterable Catalog, any SKUs that are low in stock are not displayed, avoiding any mishaps where customers are encouraged to buy items that aren’t available. This allows Stanley Black & Decker to send reliable communications that build trust with end users and increase their overall satisfaction.
Always Be Automating
By consolidating and automating their data into a single email template, the customer journey team at Stanley Black & Decker can now send individualized emails based on market, brand, and unique user activity.
No more time-wasting back-and-forth with external agencies across different countries. With 80% fewer templates, Stanley Black & Decker achieved higher email engagement and 7% more clicks to its e-commerce stores.
Now the team at Stanley Black & Decker can use the 5-10 hours saved on each template to discover more ways to automate away the busy work and make a more meaningful impact on their customers’ lives.
Iterable makes our work more nimble, which decreases our time to market. By automating the mundane work, you free up your team’s time to spend on strategic planning and analysis. We didn’t just build a better email template. We’re improving our entire business.
Key Results
With personalization enabled by Iterable Catalog, Stanley Black & Decker achieved a 7% increase in clicks to its e-commerce stores, when compared to non-customized emails.
In addition to increasing email engagement, Iterable’s automation decreased the team’s amount of busy work by reducing the number of email templates created by 80%.
By gaining back 5-10 hours spent on each template, the customer journey team can spend more time on messaging strategy.
Hours saved also equates to money saved as Stanley Black & Decker is now less dependent on external agencies to get their work done.
Powtoon
Launched in 2012, Powtoon is a video creation and visual communication platform with a mission to empower individuals, teams, and companies to create engaging, visual, result-generating presentations. What started as a tool for marketers and entrepreneurs is now used by a wider professional audience for business presentations, product launches, educational materials, and more.
Forty million licensed Powtoon users have created more than 100M presentations to date. Users can try the platform with a free trial, then choose from three subscription options, depending on their needs and budget. Or, with Powtoon’s enterprise solution, businesses can transform their communications into powerful visual experiences.
Wanting a unified solution for different segments—B2C and B2B (enterprise)—and striving to better personalize multi-audience communications at mass scale, Powtoon needed a no-code platform that could ingest and activate valuable customer data for improved brand engagement.
Digital-Era Success Requires Next-Level Support
Digital communication provides more opportunities for Powtoon to promote their solution with multiple audiences, upgrade existing members by converting “freemium” to subscribers, and grow its global footprint.
“As a SaaS platform, we knew that to stay competitive and relevant in the current environment, we must invest more in marketing technology,” explained Anna Levitin, Email and Marketing Operations Lead at Powtoon.
With a combined database that appeals to both B2C and B2B audiences, plus a massive send volume of 10 million emails per month, Powtoon’s marketing team of two knew their previous email service provider (ESP) couldn’t scale to harness the high volumes of data and personalization of email content.
They sought a long-lasting partner with a shared focus on innovation, differentiation, growth, and long-term success to support the following priorities:
- Unification + activation of B2C and B2B targeting: It was important to keep their B2C and B2B targeting initiatives under one umbrella since both were managed by one team—which wasn’t possible with their former ESP. Harmonious management facilitates a smooth transition from B2C users shifting to B2B while providing a combined picture of the multi-segment user database. Plus, avoiding multiple ESP contracts protects business costs and the bottom line.
- Integration with existing martech tools: When you consider time spent to adopt a new platform, the chosen solution must seamlessly integrate with the existing martech stack architecture, optimizing all information to elevate marketing planning, execution, and outcomes. Instead of jumping between many applications, Powtoon wanted one source of truth—a place where they and other business teams could manage all email campaign activity and find all data.
Iterable provides Powtoon that single source of truth, seamlessly integrating with their martech stack, and leveraging mass amounts of data to enhance marketing agility and create targeted communications. Now, Powtoon can dynamically personalize all subscriber emails—seasonal, new member, and brand-specific.
Plus, with their former ESP, support hours didn’t align with Powtoon’s business hours, which caused a delay in responses to questions or issues. Thanks to Iterable’s global presence and a comprehensive knowledge center, Powtoon’s small Email and Marketing Ops team now has round-the-clock, at-the-ready Iterable staff helping with unexpected challenges, problem solving, and facilitating on-the-fly adjustments, if needed.
It was an easy conversation with our CMO when discussing the cost of owning Iterable compared with our current ESP. We could easily spare a few hours of team time to migrate when looking at the benefits of having Iterable in the next two, three, and four years.
Iterable Journeys Give Power Back to Marketers
Previously, with the old ESP, when a new member attribute was added to the user profile, marketing relied on the R&D and Developer teams to make these updates, which could sometimes take up to a few weeks.
With Iterable, it’s easy for the marketing team to add new member attributes—using the User Profile tile—in a journey in a matter of minutes. For instance, when a new B2B user starts a trial with Powtoon, they know when the user started and how—whether they were invited by another user or registered directly online. This information comes into Iterable as event data that triggers the journey, which they can then easily add to a user’s profile for more personalized messaging.
Iterable and Snowflake Unlock Data for Better Enterprise Targeting and Closed Deals
Increasingly, Powtoon has discovered that B2C users don’t always know about their new enterprise solution, providing increased opportunities for conversion. 6sense is Powtoon’s account-based marketing (ABM) platform, and when B2C users register for Powtoon, marketing receives profile and intent data from 6sense. It’s basic profile information (e.g. company, department, and location), which is merged with more customer profile data in Snowflake, and signals to marketing what leads may benefit from the enterprise offering.
With the Iterable-Snowflake data sharing integration, Powtoon now optimizes the merged 6sense and Snowflake data in Iterable, and applying user attributes, further segments these B2C leads by departments—marketing, human resources, learning and development, and sales. Instead of joining the regular onboarding journey, this audience is added to a different journey with touchpoints and content applicable to their work, encouraging their transition to the enterprise subscription.
In the last four months, 6,000 B2C Powtoon users have entered this personalized journey, and subsequently, sales closed seven enterprise deals, with another eight in progress.
Personalized Promotions with Snippets Boost Powtoon Onboarding
Promotions play an important role in targeting and attracting users, and can elevate awareness in a noisy environment, especially with new members. On occasion, marketing needs to update new user welcome messages to feature promotions and with the goal of enhancing multi-audience subscriptions.
Before, it was difficult to update the onboarding flow and the team of two had to update each email manually. It took time and resources they didn’t have. Snippets in Iterable–reusable content blocks that can be added to a template—now make it easy and quick to create or modify welcome messages in bulk that feature a unique promotion. “Our snippet has the promotional banner with a combination of imagery and text that can be easily adjusted to change the onboarding flow and message,” Anna described during the Activate Amsterdam conference. With snippets, teams can:
- Manage frequently used message elements like email headers and footers
- Store complex logic blocks
- Update multiple templates at the same time
Knowing on some occasions that a promotional campaign needs quick revision—maybe there’s a grammatical error or the images need updating, for example, Anna shared, “in one click, marketing can adjust a snippet” to course correct all associated templates in real time and enhance results.
With a more favorable onboarding experience, supported by Iterable, Powtoon is adding more than 250,000 new registered users per month. Of the 250,000, 73% reflect multiple professional specialties—education, small and midsize business (SMB), and non-profit, and 27% use Powtoon for their personal video creations and presentations.
With continued partnership from Iterable, Snowflake, and 6sense, Powtoon is excited about the possibilities ahead to deepen their subscriber base. They plan to dig in further with segmentation in the onboarding journey and focus on user milestones that occur during a free trial. Marketing is also excited to increase paid user conversions by prioritizing feature adoption that supports subscription purchases and will concentrate on transitioning Powtoon Capture and Powtoon AI solution users to full-fledged enterprise subscribers.
Key Results
With Iterable’s marketer friendly platform, Powtoon saves up to a few weeks of time by no longer needing engineering resources to add new user attributes.
6,000 Powtoon B2C leads entered a targeted journey in the last 4 months, thanks to the Iterable-Snowflake data sharing integration, creating a stronger 2023 sales pipeline of closed and in-progress enterprise deals.
Snippets allow the Powtoon marketing team to bulk update their email templates within minutes.
A more favorable onboarding experience has prompted more than 250,000 new registered users to sign up for Powtoon per month; 185,000 are education, non-profit, and SMB professionals; and approximately 70,000 use it for personal video creations and presentations.
Wolt
Adrian Gray, Head of Marketing Automation at @ Wolt—a Finnish technology company that enables users to order food or merchandise directly to their home—shared how his team benefits from using Iterable.
Adrian shared, “One of the biggest challenges we had was trying to scale. We were then—when I joined—in 20 or 21 countries and trying to build workflows in all these countries and localize them, personalize them, make them relevant for that user in any given country was so hard to do previously.
The Iterable feature that me and my team use the most would be journeys because we are the automation team. Therefore, we’re looking at sending comms across the user’s lifecycle [and] looking at the data source of how they enter [the journey] and then customizing the journey along the way for that user.”
It’s been a very positive experience partnering with Iterable. We’re able to work with your product team very closely and that’s really important to us. It’s something that I haven’t seen on too many platforms, where we are a voice, and they show us workable demos that we can give feedback on or listen to our feature requests. The people that are behind it sometimes is more of the investment because they’re the ones that are going to help you continuously improve.
TodayTix
TodayTix Group is the premier digital gateway to shows, arts, and cultural experiences. Through its mobile-first, design-focused ticketing platform, TodayTix is the place for audiences to discover, explore and engage with the best entertainment their city has to offer.
With Iterable AI, TodayTix is able to create a fully automated cross-channel marketing program that allows them to spend more time on strategy and testing rather than the building and implementation of each campaign.
Learn how TodayTix is saving hours leveraging Iterable AI to drive more personalized customer experiences.
I would highly recommend switching to Iterable. I’ve had a fantastic experience. It’s so user friendly in a way that we’re able to utilize all of this highly complex data to do personalization and we don’t have to spend hours with our engineering team figuring out a way to implement it.
The Zebra
The Zebra is the nation’s leading insurance marketplace, specializing in comparing auto, home, and pet insurance to help users save money and lower their premiums. With hundreds of carriers, The Zebra’s state-of-the-art online comparison tool empowers users to pinpoint policies that match specific requirements. The platform also provides a rich repository of educational content to help shed light on the intricate world of insurance so buyers can make informed decisions.
The Challenge
The Zebra connects with 100+ insurance companies to deliver millions of quotes to individual users. To support this, one of the key initiatives is launching relevant campaigns across multiple marketing channels and touchpoints to improve the overall user experience and increase engagement. However, the marketing team struggled to access the data they needed to run these campaigns.
The marketing team faced four core challenges:
- Time-consuming development on custom integrations
- Unlocking self-serve data capabilities
- Personalizing marketing campaigns
- Improving ad match rates
To solve this problem, the marketing team turned to Iterable, Snowflake, and Hightouch to create a single view of the customer, unlock self-serve data access, and power data-driven campaigns across channels to drive engagement, optimize ad spend, and increase match rates.
“The Zebra makes money when we help our customers save money, so success for us is all about delivering relevancy to our users based on their specific needs and requirements. Hightouch gives us access to all our data to orchestrate and build personalized user journeys.” – Cynthia Caridad, Director of Lifecycle at The Zebra
The Solution
Powering 1000+ Data Models in Snowflake
The Zebra’s data infrastructure is built entirely around Snowflake, as the platform acts as the underpinning engine that powers the entire organization. Previously, the data team relied on a legacy data warehouse that was difficult to scale and support diverse workloads. Since adopting Snowflake, the data team has been able to work seamlessly, spinning up as many as 20+ warehouses.
Since adopting Snowflake, The Zebra has created one centralized view of the customer for analytics and marketing activation, and the data team is powering over 1,000 different dbt models.
Before Snowflake, we didn’t have a single view of our customers. Since adopting the platform, we can run near infinite workloads and power 1000+ dbt models that are the backbone of everything we do across the business.
Making Data Self-Serve with Hightouch
The number one blocker for the marketing team at The Zebra has always been data accessibility because the data team simply couldn’t keep up with demands. Moving data out of the warehouse meant writing custom scripts, downloading manual CSVs, or building custom integrations with various third-party APIs.
Anytime the marketing team needed a new attribute or data point, they were forced to submit a ticket and wait on the data team. Depending on the priorities of the data team, it could be up to six months before that data was made available.
Since adopting Hightouch, this bottleneck has been completely eliminated. The data team can now seamlessly and reliably sync data out of Snowflake to customer engagement platforms like Iterable and various ad platforms–and the marketing team can build self-serve audiences using all of the data available in Snowflake.
Access to the first-party data living inside Snowflake has unlocked huge benefits, not only from an audience creation perspective but also in terms of ad optimization. Using Hightouch to enrich conversion events with additional first-party data, match rates on Facebook have increased by 170%. Additionally, by syncing conversion events to the Facebook conversion API, The Zebra has been able to retarget and suppress audiences to further optimize return on ad spend and increase performance across all campaigns.
“We’ve gone from what could have been a six-month wait for data down to a matter of days, and that means we can run experiments and launch new campaigns immediately,” said Cynthia Caridad, Director of Lifecycle.
Orchestrating Complex User Journeys with Iterable
Before Iterable, the marketing team couldn’t orchestrate and launch campaigns from a single platform. Since implementing an all-in-one cross-channel marketing platform, The Zebra can now orchestrate user journeys across various channels–like email and SMS.
With Iterable, we’ve taken full command of every communication channel–from email to SMS notifications. It’s not just about sending messages but crafting tailored user journeys.
Using Hightouch audiences to complement Iterable’s capabilities, the marketing team has built more complex and targeted user journeys. Campaign creation time has dropped from months to a few days, and Zebra has launched over eight new lifecycle campaigns in Iterable.
Two of these campaigns have yielded transformative results. By sending personalized renewal emails with relevant information on current and previous policies and premiums at the time of renewal, the marketing team saw a 50% decrease in unsubscribes and a 70.6% increase in click-through rates. Additionally, the marketing team ran an email campaign targeting users on their birthdays to help them shop rates for even more savings, which saw a 58% increase in click-through rates.
What’s Next?
Now that The Zebra has unfettered access to their customer data, they can accelerate their experimentation. They can launch new campaigns within days of the idea’s origin and use customer data to personalize their cross-channel campaigns with relevant content. This transformational change has created a robust feedback loop between the data and marketing teams so they can collaborate better to drive outcomes that move the needle forward.
Results
Boosted ad match rates by 170% on Facebook.
Campaign creation time reduced from 3+ months to a couple of days.
Increased click-through rates on key email campaigns by 70% and lowered unsubscribes by 50%.
Improved data sync frequency from 6 months to ~ 1 day.
Increased return on ad spend (ROAS).
CoinStats
A decade ago, there were only seven cryptocurrencies, but the number of cryptocurrencies has since ballooned to over 23,000. This exponential growth was made possible by the decentralization of finance, enabled by distributed ledgers and blockchain technology.
For investors and advocates, crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) empower them to access peer-to-peer digital exchanges, allowing for greater accessibility and autonomy. However, the very nature of decentralization means it can be challenging to keep track of an investor’s digital assets and their performance. That’s where CoinStats comes in.
With over 1 million monthly active users and $100 billion in assets, CoinStats is one of the most popular cryptocurrency portfolio management platforms. CoinStats seamlessly and securely manages crypto and DeFi portfolios in one place, making buying, selling, swapping, and tracking assets easier.
For a bird’s eye view of their portfolios, CoinStats users get started by connecting popular crypto platforms, including Binance, Coinbase, MetaMask, and 400 other options. However, the key for the CoinStats marketing team is ensuring users make it to the finish line and complete their integrations.
“With its unmatched personalization and experimentation capabilities, Iterable is core to our cross-channel customer experience. With its data flexibility and direct, bidirectional integration with Amplitude, Iterable has made it possible to keep users engaged throughout their entire journey, dramatically improving retention and loyalty.” ~ Vahe Baghdasaryan, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at CoinStats
CoinStats Battles the Inertia of Abandonment
Signing up for any type of financial service is more arduous than online shopping, and that’s true for traditional bank accounts or crypto exchanges. It takes time to fill out important information, verify a person’s identity, and integrate all relevant financial platforms.
Because of the inherent friction involved, CoinStats experienced high abandonment rates as a significant percentage of their new users dropped off before they could connect their portfolios. In a webinar hosted by Iterable, Vahe Baghdasaryan, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at CoinStats, explained the complexity of the CoinStats new user journey—which requires multiple onboarding steps that can lead to hesitation about getting started. Not to mention, many users had reservations about the security of their highly sensitive data and assets.
To fight the friction and re-engage users who abandoned the portfolio connection process, CoinStats implemented personalized CRM campaigns through Iterable.
Iterable Enables Immediate and Relevant Re-Engagement
Reducing dropoffs takes a real-time response so, to address their high abandonment rates, the CoinStats lifecycle marketing team initiated a re-engagement campaign that is triggered only a few minutes after abandonment occurs.
Powered by Iterable, this campaign utilizes snippets to incorporate each user’s portfolio names in push notifications, making the communication more tailored and relevant. These messages also leverage deep linking to redirect users precisely to the point in the journey where they had previously dropped off, ensuring a seamless continuation.
In addition to personalized push, follow-up communications are sent via email and in-app message, as a way to highlight the various value propositions of connecting to CoinStats. This cross-channel orchestration demonstrates how real-time re-engagement can be impactful without being complicated.
Implementing Powerful A/B Testing With Iterable and Amplitude
Data-driven testing is essential to CoinStats’ re-engagement strategy, starting from the first message. Using Iterable Experiments, the team conducts A/B testing, keeping 20% of users in a control group and 80% in the test group. Each email, mobile push, or in-app message is tested with different value propositions to determine which converts users more successfully.
The CoinStats team then carries this experimentation further with data analytics platform and Iterable partner, Amplitude. Through a bidirectional integration, Amplitude automatically ingests Iterable’s campaign metrics to better understand how personalized messaging affects usage down-funnel within an app or website.
Because the control group and test group each have their own specific email list ID in Iterable, Amplitude can apply this segmentation in its data visualization, where CoinStats can easily analyze the performance of each group.
Amplitude can also show whether an experiment was statistically significant and what the improvement was over the baseline. And while campaigns are automated, the CoinStats team is regularly checking in: the integration with Amplitude allows them to determine how their Iterable messages are performing over a period of time. This allows the team to make changes to continually optimize their campaign metrics.
“Even a slight touch of personalization in your content can significantly enhance your open and click rates,” says Vahe. Notably, using snippets in Iterable to personalize push notifications increased Coinstats’ push open rates from 5.91% to 10.38%—a 2x improvement just by adding the name of a user’s crypto wallet!
Vahe notes that CoinStats achieved better performance if the tone of their communications was more transactional than promotional. For example, a promotional push message that read, “Grow your crypto with CoinStats. Tap to pick up where you left off & connect your portfolio!” had a 5.61% open rate, but a more personalized, transactional push like, “Tap to connect & see your MetaMask portfolio analytics on CoinStats,” resulted in an 8.43% open rate—a nearly 50% increase.
Influencing User Behavior is a Science
Using behavioral science, the CoinStats team was able to expand on the personalization made possible by Iterable and significantly reduce abandonment. One such approach was applying the Forced Choice Principle to present users with a clear in-app message that prompted them to either “accept” or “decline” the connection of their portfolio to CoinStats. This message showed users a list of benefits, compelling them to make an immediate decision and significantly increasing the rate of portfolio linkages.
Another powerful tool in the toolbelt of behavioral science is Positive Reinforcement, which CoinStats deployed in its “Welcome Back” in-app message series. Not only were these messages personalized to users’ specific portfolios, but they also greeted returning users with a celebratory confetti animation. Using positive reinforcement in their Iterable campaigns allows CoinStats to create a more joyful user experience.
CoinStats is proof that financial services can be fun and doesn’t have to be all dollars and cents. By creating personalized messages packed with personality, the team has tapped into relationship-building moments that elevate user satisfaction and get them coming back for more.
Key Results
With a tailored, cross-channel re-engagement campaign, CoinStats achieved a 35% decrease in abandonment rates and a 20% increase in user activity.
Personalized push notifications resulted in a 2x increase in open rates compared to their non-personalized counterparts.
Shifting the tone of their communications from promotional to transactional increased push open rates by nearly 50%.
Integrating Iterable with Amplitude provided unparalleled visibility into A/B testing, down-funnel analytics, and campaign performance.
Glassdoor
Glassdoor Uses Iterable and Snowflake to Create User-Centric Communications For More Jobs Found and Loved
Since 2007 Glassdoor, a champion for workplace transparency, has supported people’s searches for jobs with companies they love.
Initially, they shared anonymous reviews from current or former employees which helped people understand if a job and company were the right fit. As the jobs landscape evolved, Glassdoor partnered with other workplace-related brands to build B2C and B2B products that reach across 20 countries and attract 50M+ unique monthly site visitors, including millions of professionals and employers trying to find the perfect employee-employer match.
For example, Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl, a social networking app for the workplace, and now can encourage interaction between job seekers and company employees who offer their candid, inside insights to prospects. Additionally, in partnership with Indeed, Glassdoor facilitates employer branding, giving companies forums to be transparent, share their stories, and offer perspectives on culture, salary, and more.
These partnerships, and others, create a win-win for all—greater workplace transparency ensuring prospects find and land in the right place, fewer employee-employer communication barriers that can create workplace risks (e.g., discrimination, pay gaps, and a toxic environment), and stronger employee recruitment and retention.
Multiple Marketing Technologies Impede User-Driven Communications
To increase its user base and overall engagement, Glassdoor wants to attract employees, employers, and job-seekers who contribute content. For example, an employer can register their company to showcase their brand and post company updates, as well as respond to reviews. An employee or candidate who’s looking for a new opportunity can contribute content by posting in forums to discuss workplace topics, get advice, and search for or post their own reviews, including their experience working for a company and current salary. “The more content employees contribute, the more information Glassdoor has, and the more data we can make available for consumption, creating value for employers and job seekers,” shared David Tjen, Director of Marketing Analytics at Glassdoor.
Previously, they relied on two customer communication platforms: one for email communications and one for sending push notifications. Without a single platform facilitating their communications across multiple channels—from email to mobile—Glassdoor couldn’t reach users when and where their messages would be most impactful.
They also couldn’t access critical user-centric data in a secure, centralized system, which prevented them from successfully reporting on the effectiveness of their campaigns. “We couldn’t track and manage the key data and what users did after they opened or clicked on an email or push, drilling into specifics like the actions they take on our site or within our app,” explained Tjen. This meant missed opportunities to personalize marketing campaigns and gauge what communications successfully or unsuccessfully drove customer engagement, and subsequent conversions.
They needed one user-centric, marketing automation solution to reach and engage all users across multiple touchpoints—for both contributors and job seekers. With the Iterable-Snowflake data sharing integration, Glassdoor found a holistic way to combine campaign, business, and customer data in a secure place, track it in a way that protects any personally identifiable information (PII), and leverage it to better understand users’ activities across their internal systems. With this data, Glassdoor can create more personalized, timely communications to help job-seekers decide if an opportunity is suitable, if they want to apply or keep looking, and then act to secure the right job before it’s filled.
With access to data playing a key role for Glassdoor and the customer experiences they create, Iterable and Snowflake empower marketers with unified data, plus the capabilities and flexibility to unlock the data’s full potential.
Say a Glassdoor professional looking for a new job opportunity receives an email or push notification for a job alert and opens it. Afterward, they may decide to apply for several jobs or further explore the company and available positions. Other communications may include requests for users to write company reviews or share their perspectives in community forums. Thanks to the Iterable and Snowflake partnership, Glassdoor can securely centralize and rationalize the campaign data from Iterable with its user, account, and system event data, as well as behavioral data across their internal systems. This makes it possible for them to see who opened the emails, and if they subsequently contributed content—whether adding in their salary or sharing their work life experience—to Glassdoor. And this gives marketing a deeper understanding of users, their activities, campaign effectiveness, and the overall impact to the business.
Once we could integrate the data, and use a common identifier—our user ID—combined with the activity on our site and seen in our internal systems, that’s when we gained a lot of value in measuring and optimizing our marketing campaigns and programs.
Glassdoor Gains Perspective for Improved User Communications and Satisfaction, Data Compliance, and Reporting
Glassdoor has leveraged the Iterable and Snowflake partnership in different use cases and, as a result, is seeing users gain more value from its products.
Problem-Free Notifications Equal Useful Job Tips
Glassdoor launched a new feature in its app where people can join different communities and forums to discuss the personal side of professional life. When a new post or reactions and comments on posts are added, Glassdoor will send push notifications to inform users of this. However, before Iterable and Snowflake, this wasn’t possible as they lacked clear visibility into notification delivery and the technical issues preventing a successful delivery.
By having access to their raw data from Iterable, and then accessing it via Snowflake, they now understand which users are receiving what messages and how many are sent, and if there are duplicates. These insights, reflecting a 360-degree customer view, are integrated in a comprehensive reporting model that allows Glassdoor to quickly diagnose and get to the root of technical issues, and ensure users receive the notifications that aid their job exploration journey.
Tracking Data Compliantly to Maintain User Protection and Satisfaction
Glassdoor has stringent rules about who can access users’ personally identifiable information (PII) and only identifies users by a user ID. When they wanted to move the user ID data out of Iterable in a secure way, and then combine it with data from other systems such as the Glassdoor app, they turned to Snowflake.
All of the Iterable data sits in Snowflake, and the Glassdoor Data Engineering team brings that data into a secure Snowflake area where a few engineers can access it and map the email to the user ID. By combining this information with the activity that happens on Glassdoor or in their internal systems, they know what’s working well or what isn’t, and can share insights with the business to make adjustments that will maintain customer satisfaction and privacy while also protecting employers’ brand perceptions.
Having Iterable and Snowflake to engage employers, employees, and job-seekers, and securely capture and manage data, Glassdoor can support the ever-changing needs of its large community as they seek employment, recruit talent, and use their voices to enhance workplace experiences and transparency. With the power of data in hand, the Glassdoor Marketing and Data Engineering teams, company leaders, and partnering brands are also excited about the new opportunities that will equate to revenue streams, better matches for companies and professionals, and a more successful jobs outlook.
We now take a user-centric approach to all our communications. And data is fueling these communications, our business strategies, and marketing campaigns to help people to find their match—a company and job that suits their skills, interest, experience, and future aspirations.
Key Results
The Iterable and Snowflake data sharing integration has given Glassdoor secure, unified access to all raw data, which wasn’t possible before. And better manipulation of that data means optimized and personalized user communications that lead to successful engagement and campaign outcomes.
With all user, account, campaign, and behavior data in the Data Cloud, marketing can complete more robust analysis and reporting for stakeholders.
Increased clarity in what emails and notifications are sent and the subsequent activities they generate, which drives better reporting and action by the business, plus more authentic and exceptional customer experiences.
Redfin
Home buying and selling are major life milestones that involve many steps, emotions, and variables. As one of the largest investments people can make, trends in home prices, interest rates, inventory, reasons for the move—like job relocation—and preferred locations are all factors in the decision making.
Redfin, recognizing the weight of these kinds of decisions, seeks to make home buying and selling transparent, easy, and favorable to consumers. Buyers can easily search for houses according to specific criteria—like sales price and location—all from the comfort of their home. To sell, homeowners can list their property with a Redfin agent to save thousands in real estate commissions.
Redfin currently operates in over 100 markets across the United States and Canada and they are the #1 real estate brokerage site in the U.S. Since 2006, they’ve saved customers more than $1.5 billion in commissions, and grown to attract more than 50 million average monthly users.
We’re hyper customer-focused, trying to make buying and selling homes better for people, less hassle, and giving them more resources, access to our agents, and providing the online tools needed to find your dream home.
But real estate is tricky. Not only does Redfin face serious competition, but the economy is also creating an unpredictable dynamic where people either want to sell homes to leverage their equity, buy if interest rates are favorable, or wait for things to stabilize. Redfin is challenged with trying to nurture buyers and sellers through a journey and effectively reach them at the right time, on the right channel, when they’re most likely to need Redfin’s services.
Until recently, the retention marketing team focused on their active users, but they needed to shift that focus to engage more inactive users—a considerable portion of their overall customer base. Making this pivot, they could increase the probability of more customers exploring and using Redfin services.
Redfin Gets Their Foot in the Door With Inactive Users
While there are millions of Redfin users in North America, only a small percentage are active. Redfin defines active users as someone who engaged with an email or visited Redfin.com in the last 30 days, and those actions are usually early indicators that someone is ready to buy or sell.
The emails sent to active users had performed well—with Iterable helping the team unlock their customer data to drive more personalized communications. “With Iterable, the sky’s the limit in terms of our segmentation and personalization with the massive amounts of data we can capture from a user profile,” explained Lisa. But, not knowing which inactive users to send conversion-oriented emails to—because they couldn’t predict who is likely to convert and lacked developer or engineering support to help figure it out—the marketing team needed help.
They needed a solution to assess where their millions of users were in the lifecycle, narrow them down to a segment of the highest converting targets, and then unlock and activate that data—for example, what homes people search for or own, where they live, if they sold or bought before—with email.
Iterable offers Redfin powerful tools such as advanced segmentation to send targeted, personalized communications, a flexible data model to maximize their rich user information, and AI-driven features such as Predictive Goals to inform messaging strategy and convert their millions of inactive users.
Iterable’s Predictive Goals Increases Customer Retention: More Active Buyers and Sellers
Iterable offers several AI-driven features that have helped Redfin achieve their goals of nurturing, attracting, and retaining customers and staying top of mind when they decide to buy or sell a home. For instance, they leverage Send Time Optimization (STO) with all emails, which uses machine learning to analyze historical engagement behavior and select an optimal, per-person send time for communications.
Predictive Goals, also part of Iterable’s AI Suite, is the newest feature the retention marketing team has tested, taking the guesswork and manual labor out of predicting the highest converting users so they can move them from inactive to active.
Predictive Goals has been an absolute game-changer for our team, maximizing our efficiencies and accelerating time to value. We’ve seen the tangible benefits of AI on our business, and look forward to seeing the impact of Iterable’s new AI innovations.
To start converting their inactive users to active, the marketing team took a group from the seller and buyer side of the business—identified by Predictive Goals—and sent them conversion-oriented emails. For buyers, emails provided local market details, linked to a map of recent homes listed or sold, and encouraged them to review their home’s value. For sellers, the first email nudged them to check out their home on Redfin, a second mentioned data about potential buyers, and they were encouraged to schedule a consultation with an agent who knows the market extensively.
To assess if Predictive Goals made an incremental difference in conversions, Redfin experimented with hold out groups in Iterable. They took their group of inactive users, identified by Predictive Goals, and held off on sending emails to 50% of them on the buyer side and 10% on the seller side. It only took sending a few of the conversion-oriented emails to both Predictive Goals buyers and sellers before Redfin saw encouraging results:
- A 72% lift in converting inactive sellers to an active state.
- There was also a 9% lift in conversion (meeting with an agent) after the seller emails.
- A 15% lift in converting inactive buyers to an active state.
- Redfin also observed a directionally positive lift in seller consultations and tours booked by buyers.
Marketing Team Curb Appeal: Testing, Creativity, and Insights Benefit Brand Engagement and Redfin Teams
With Iterable’s more predictive insights, marketing has the information to act quickly and easily to determine when and which inactive users to email, with minimal-to-no support from engineering. “We did it on our own. It was very, very flexible; we could add or delete Predictive Goals, pivot, and try ideas. It allows us to be creative, which is hard to do with data,” shared Lisa. In fact, the Iterable team was so transparent about the data used to build predictions, marketing started offering insights from Predictive Goals to other teams, which Lisa said “Is incredible when we’re not analysts or developers, but can deliver insights to help them get better at signaling, targeting, and engaging.”
After initial success, with encouragement of Redfin leadership, and putting their minds together with other teams, retention marketing is excited about the possibility of applying Predictive Goals in more use cases that benefit customer engagement and retention. They believe the sky’s the limit by having Iterable and Predictive Goals to relieve pressure from engineering, putting more control, flexibility, and creativity into marketing’s hands, and producing weeks of time saving.
On the horizon, they intend to use Predictive Goals to get more granular with segmentation to convert lapsed users and go bigger and smaller with conversion-oriented emails. They are also looking to activate push notifications and SMS messages to enhance engagement with all customers—buyer or seller, active or inactive.
Key Results
- A 15% lift in converting buyers to an active state.
- A 72% lift in converting sellers to an active state.
- They also saw a 9% lift in conversion (meeting with an agent) after the seller email.
- Achieved a directionally positive lift in seller consultations and tours booked by buyers.
Iterable’s flexible data integration drives marketing agility and creates more data-application possibilities like richer, insight-driven communications so Redfin sees better customer engagement, retention, and lifetime value (LTV).
Reduced dependencies on engineering to execute marketing communications, improving team creativity, nimbleness, and driving weeks of time savings to enhance the customer experience.
Tava Health
Tava Health is an online mental healthcare provider that helps employers and their employees quickly and affordably access licensed therapists.
Since choosing Iterable as their cross-channel customer communication platform, Tava Health has relieved their engineering team from having to do a lot of the configuration and maintenance work, putting the power back in the hands of their marketers. As a result, their marketing team has become more sophisticated with how they communicate and engage with their users. They’re now able to easily:
- Use Iterable to determine what channel preferences users have—whether it’s a SMS or email—and solicit feedback about what types of messages are resonating and what isn’t.
- Send harmonious customer communications on the right channel, with the right message, at the right time.
- Create highly personalized, cross-channel user experiences, while remaining sensitive and compliant to the confidential information they collect.
Iterable is perfect for us because it provides a multi-channel experience where we establish what our users preferred channels and messaging types are. This allows us to deliver a 360 degree experience for our clients around how they interact with us and enables them to dictate the best way for us to deliver the content that they need.
The Body Coach
Founded by personal trainer Joe Wicks ten years ago, The Body Coach aims to get people moving and help them fall in love with fitness. Joe Wicks has one of the largest YouTube fitness channels in Europe, an award-winning podcast, a social media following of over nine million people, sold millions of cookbooks, and helped 100 million people of all ages, by offering free, live daily workouts during and following the pandemic.
While connecting with people and transforming their lives through these different avenues, The Body Coach underwent a digital transformation of its own. Once a personalized food and fitness PDF, it’s now one of the fastest growing mobile fitness apps and was selected as Apple’s Editor’s choice and Google’s 2022 Best App of the Year. Looking ahead, the team is increasingly focused on combining marketing technologies, like Iterable, with their decade of learnings to enhance mobile app experiences and strengthen customer connections to fully support their health and fitness journeys.
Differentiation in a Crowded Market Requires Unique, Timely Communications
As one of several mobile-based, subscription fitness apps available today, The Body Coach recognized it must move fast and use clever, personalized communications to attract and retain customers. “We need to engage effectively and then get users to do something—whether it’s smashing a workout, cooking a balanced meal, drinking more water, better planning for the week ahead, or all of the above,” said Alicia Gillard, Product Marketing Manager at The Body Coach.
Previously, they relied on two customer communication platforms: one for email and one for push notifications. These different platforms, used by different stakeholder groups, including the product, product marketing, and brand marketing teams, created a variety of challenges that prevented The Body Coach from creating and sending timely, targeted, cross-channel messages tied to each customer’s fitness and health goals, choices and behaviors, how and when they like to be reached. These challenges also made it increasingly difficult to foster strong, lasting connections with new as well as existing members. The challenges included:
- A siloed customer view: With two communication solutions, if product marketing wanted to know how customers engaged with a particular push notification or campaign, they couldn’t see that in the same place they saw email reporting, for example. “It was simple stuff that slowed us down and created uncertainty around how engaged our audience were in our communications,” explained Saagar Bains, Head of Product at The Body Coach.
- Reliance on engineering to create and update communications: If marketing created a new push notification, they could send a one-off campaign, but automating distribution or creating an event-based push required engineering support. Depending on the engineering team’s workload, this could take several weeks or more. That lag prevented the marketing and product teams from quickly reacting, creating, and automating their campaign messages—especially any event-based communications.
- Inability to operate at the speed of business, customers, and social media: Born on social media, The Body Coach could easily gauge customer interactions and sentiment, and quickly react using the best channel and message for the situation. To replicate that same social strategy with their mobile app wasn’t feasible—the different platforms made it impossible to see that 360-degree customer view and delayed the production process for marketing communications, with their dependency on engineering.
They needed one, consolidated communications solution that uses customer data to personalize engagement and supports timely, cross-channel messaging through an intuitive interface with easy-to-use features that foster stronger customer connections. Embracing Iterable, the Body Coach is now delivering individualized, automated, cr0ss-channel customer communications that attract new members, keep them in the renewal cycle to reduce acquisition costs, and help all members meet or exceed their near- and long-term health and fitness goals.
Iterable’s Cross-Channel Capabilities Helps New Customers HIIT the Ground Running
Easy Start, an activation feature launched in September 2022, helps new Body Coach subscribers—and especially fitness beginners—start their first workout. Having observed a common, but unfavorable behavior with beginners, the product team wanted to address it. “We saw them sign up, give us their details, go through the paywall, pay for the first month, but not complete a workout in the product,” said Saagar Bains during a recent Iterable webinar. This lack of engagement led to decreased activation and ultimately less success with the product. Additionally it made it more challenging for The Body Coach to grow its membership base.
Their plan was to soften the onboarding ramp with Easy Start and make it less intimidating for someone going from no-to-low activity to several weekly hiit workouts. “Our brand resonates with people new to fitness, new to their health journey, or trying to get back on the bandwagon, so it was important for us to target them using Easy Start,” stated Bains. A cross-discipline team including product, design and product marketing implemented the Easy Start in-app feature and used Iterable Studio to develop the complementary communication series—in-app, push notifications, and email messages—with a goal to reduce the % of beginners who are inactive during their first 30 days using the app.
All communications in this Easy Start journey begin when someone new signs up. Then, subsequent communications are conditional upon their behavior or certain events, and automatically sent using a cross-channel approach to maximize exposure of the Easy Start messages. For example, if someone joins Easy Start, they immediately receive a motivational message in an email and push notification that prompts their physical movement. If they join the program, but don’t complete a workout soon after, an email and push message will encourage them to take that first step and congratulate them when they do. It’s all based on where, when, and how beginners choose to engage with Easy Start, and the steps they take—or don’t take—after receiving the first message.
After launching the Easy Start campaign and communication series in Q3 2022, Body Coach reduced the number of inactive beginners by 10% in one quarter. “This is a big step forward for us because that number is a proxy to our 30-day retention as members go into renewal, and we can increase the chance of retaining them at renewal,” explained Saagar. Now, more beginners better understand the value of exercise, the positive impact it has on their overall health, and how Body Coach supports their journey, start to finish.
Personalized Voice Messages from Joe
Seeing how effectively Iterable supported the Easy Start feature, The Body Coach also used Iterable in an in-app feature called Voice Notes from Joe. It taps into the brand’s success on social media, bringing more of Joe’s personality into the app through inspirational messages to prompt moments of surprise and delight for users.
The Body Coach records personal voice messages from Joe and can launch an Iterable campaign for each recording in less than an hour using an in-app template. The audio file is hosted on their Content Management System (CMS), added to the in-app template, and is sent via a push notification to create member excitement and suspense. “It feels like you just received a DM from Joe, it’s quick and easy to use, there’s no engineering input needed, and gives us the flexibility to be proactive and reactive,” said Gillard.
Getting a message out—on whatever we want and whenever—supports our mission and values of inclusivity, fun, and keeping things simple. And Iterable takes things a step further with sophisticated segmentation and unified reporting to reveal key audience insights so we can send tailor-made, special, and measurable messages to certain groups.
As a newly-implemented feature, metrics and learnings are still in-progress. However, a recent Voice Note with a motivational Monday message created positive engagement—60% of users who interacted with the message completed a workout within three days. The Body Coach is excited to use Voice Notes and Iterable to influence an upward trend of members feeling inspired, excited, and choosing to get fit and healthy. Plus, by leveraging other Iterable features to enhance the success of this campaign and others—specifically Iterable’s experiment builder and Send Time Optimization—The Body Coach is confident they’ll produce more high-touch, gratifying experiences for members in the future.
Driving Brand Outcomes With Iterable
Considering how other fitness brands share similar goals—they want to move fast, deliver clever, engaging customer experiences, and drive impact without certain key dependencies—The Body Coach has the following recommendations.
- Plan marketing and communications events and iterate: It’s helpful during the implementation phase to spend time as a collective team mapping out the user lifecycle, brainstorm at what moments communications should be triggered, and concurrently implement analytics. This produces a clear plan and by completing testing with Iterable’s experiment builder, a brand can feel confident about delivering the right messages, at the right time, through optimal channels. For The Body Coach, early and thoughtful brainstorming of the user lifecycle, and which moments will initiate customer communication, meant faster, smoother execution post-implementation. Now, as they build communications or a journey in Iterable, almost all events are there, ready to go.
- Leverage multi-channel messages: It’s key to take advantage of different channels, bearing in mind a user’s journey to create stronger connections. The mix of Iterable’s sophisticated segmentation, advanced journey capabilities, integrated data, and message template library means brands can easily adapt to any communication variables, customer needs and preferences, and external, timely events that arise.
- Use and build brand authenticity: Make sure how you communicate with customers, inside and outside of your product, uses consistent tone, copy, and imagery. As Saagar Bains shared, “This was key, and led us to build the Voice Notes feature.” Seeing the effective engagement between Joe and customers on social media, The Body Coach wanted to bring the same engagement into the platform with every push, email, voice note, and in-app message delivered.
Our app is completely tailored to you—from the workouts chosen to macros in the recipes suggested based on your profile. With Iterable, all of our communications are now tailored to every member, too, and our unique brand values shine through, in every customer experience.
Results
Stronger campaign performance from leveraging various Iterable features: Experiment Builder, segmentation, and drag-and-drop template editor, to name a few.
- A 10% reduction in the total number of inactive Body Coach beginners, within one business quarter.
- 60% of users who interact with personal voice messages from Joe, delivered through push notifications, complete a workout in three days.
- Improved customer engagement that increases the likelihood of 30-day retention and member renewal.
More consistent, cross-channel branding from an improved digital ecosystem of Iterable’s marketing automation platform, the CMS, and social media. This strengthens members’ journeys and their overall emotional connection to the brand and Joe as the face of The Body Coach.
Automated, nimble communications create operational efficiencies and support both reactive and proactive customer engagement to match the brand’s quick, effective, personal social strategy.
Lovepop
When Lovepop blossomed from a greeting-card maker sharing the intricate paper artistry of Japanese kirigami into an omnichannel design powerhouse, it needed more than a garden-variety email platform to carry out its mission: to create “1 billion magical moments.”
Founded in 2015 by best friends Wombi Rose and John Wise, Lovepop introduced the duo’s own creation: Slicegami™️, a pop-up paper design that marries kirigami’s cutting and folding with the mathematical precision of sliceform structure used in ship design.
To achieve its “North Star” goal of driving profitable growth while improving customer happiness, Lovepop calls on a marketing stack whose elements work together as smoothly as the pieces in their intricate designs.
Harnessing the Power of Individualization
Lovepop connects with customers in both traditional direct mail—a 20-page seasonal catalog sent five times a year—and a powerful combination of social and email marketing. This helps Lovepop reach a wider audience, beyond its greeting-card enthusiasts.
“Email has been part of the Lovepop strategy since Day One,” Ally Chapman, Lovepop’s Retention Marketing Manager, says. “It’s definitely our biggest channel for driving repeat purchases and getting customers back to the website.”
As part of its “customer happiness” goal, Lovepop relies on segmentation and 1:1 real time personalization to send meaningful messages, especially as it expands its product lines and designs to appeal to new customer segments.
Using an integration with tech partner Lytics in the Iterable platform, Lovepop adds dynamic content modules populated with individualized product recommendations to broadcast campaigns introducing seasonal designs and product lines.
“The segmentation tool is fantastic,” Ally says. “On some platforms it can be hard to get segmented customer lists, but it’s so easy in Iterable and saves us at least 2 hours per week. For example, we can pull customers identified by our integration with Tealium AudienceStream, our customer data platform (CDP), who have ordered specific product types or who bought from a collection in the last six months.”
“With Tealium’s AudienceStream providing a unified view of the customer, we have been able to launch campaigns that are complementary to those running in Iterable across all other marketing channels. We also have developed a journey in Iterable that runs through our list segmentations daily and updates our Custom Audiences automatically.”
A Bit of Love in Every Message With Brand Affinity
The marketing team segments its audience based on everything from acquisition source to product interests. By layering Iterable’s Brand Affinity™ onto their segmentation strategy, the Lovepop team can tailor messaging even further based on customer sentiment (loyal, neutral, negative, etc.). Lovepop loyalists are communicated with differently than first-time subscribers.
For example, Lovepop can suppress customers with negative brand affinity from certain campaigns, which reduces unsubscribes and helps maintain high click rates and revenue capture.
“With Iterable, we can give customers with higher Brand Affinity more options for cadence and content while not entirely ignoring customers with lower Brand Affinity,” Ally says. “This enables us to continue giving lower-affinity customers a chance to re-engage with our brand without going overboard on send volume and creating a negative customer experience. “
Closing the Gap With Shopify
Lovepop has also solved another perennial problem: triggering cart abandonment campaigns for shoppers who have not yet been identified (i.e. shoppers who are not logged into an account or have not yet entered their email at checkout).
“We are built on top of Shopify for checkout,” Ally said. “Our order confirmations go out through Iterable, but the information comes from Shopify. Historically, we could send cart-abandonment emails only to customers who had logged in via Shopify.”
Working with Tealium, Lovepop can capture the first-party data in the customer data profiles. This helps identify more abandoners’ e-mail addresses by tracking across multiple browser sessions and devices, allowing Iterable to trigger more abandonment emails. Sending more abandoned-cart reminders results in higher conversion rates.
“Closing that gap was very impactful,” Ally says.
Enabling Data as the Thermostat in an “Always Be Testing” Framework
Another game-changer for the Lovepop team has been being able to ramp up its testing program.
“Everyone should always be testing,” Ally says. “For us, subject line testing has been the most valuable, because finding the right one can really move the needle on performance. “
Lovepop was able to solve a major weakness of subject line testing: capturing the improved engagement and monetization in real time instead of waiting for the next similar campaign to deploy the “winning strategy.”
Using Iterable’s Experiments tool, Lovepop can test several subject lines on small segments of a broadcast audience for two hours after deployment. At the two-hour mark, the winning subject line automatically goes out to the remaining 70% of the audience.
“We have been able to get a 20%+ lift in our click-through rate each time with the right subject line,” Ally says. “This allows us to maximize the revenue we can earn from our broadcast campaigns.”
Everything Leads Back to Customer Happiness
Maintaining a performance-driven, data-driven marketing program allows Lovepop to continually optimize. “Iterable’s key features have enabled us to maximize revenue from our customer base,” Ally says. “At the end of the day, revenue is a proxy for our mission of creating one billion magical moments—every additional order we drive from improved email performance represents another happy customer who helps bring more Lovepops into the world.”
Results
Reduced churn while maintaining higher engagement and maximizing revenue leveraging Iterable’s Brand Affinity™.
Using Iterable Experiments, Lovepop consistently saw a +20% lift in click-through rate.
Individualized product recommendations with Iterable and Lytics.
More effective use of first-party data with Iterable and Tealium.
Saves at least 2 hours per week with the easy usability of Iterable segmentation.
Rocksbox
Download PDFSpotting 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?
- New members take the Style Survey to indicate style preferences. They can also select pieces directly from the Wish List.
- Rocksbox Stylists send members a curated, 3-piece jewelry set to wear on loan.
- 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!
Iterable is our key platform for driving customer growth and engagement at Rocksbox. We can run and optimize all our campaigns just using the Iterable tools.
Key Takeaways
Rocksbox uses Iterable for all customer engagement campaigns and messaging, eliminating the need for separate systems.
Iterable enables Rocksbox to easily run sophisticated journeys that maximize customer engagement.
Rocksbox has A/B tested every single message sent via Iterable and has achieved significant lift in metrics and ROI.
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.
Iterable has made it extremely easy for us to execute and optimize sophisticated engagement campaigns with minimal engineering engagement.
Headway
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.
As we encountered many positive reviews on Iterable from other high-growth startups, we were encouraged to learn more, delighted to try it, and saw it offers the features, functionality, and cross-channel experience to support our business goals of monetization and retention.
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:
- Let your growth begin 💪
- Learn in less time with Headway! ⏰
- 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.
Iterable is a well-crafted solution. We can test and implement multiple options from simple to complex, whether it’s an email headline, send time, or the featured content. And we can engage with a number of audiences to understand the actions they take in the app, good and bad, then chart a clear, successful path forward.
Key Results
The OR with emails sent to freemium and premium users increased by 12%, on average, and nearly doubled with push notifications.
Steady increases with OR (14%), CTOR (2.7%) and conversion to purchase (2.3%) with welcome communication.
Conversions to purchase from clicks in personalized emails for freemium users increased by 2.4%, on average.
Easy-to-execute testing and more data-driven intelligence created stronger, more personal communications as people onboard and start to use Headway, more app purchases from freemium users, and better OR, CTR, and CTOR.
Nimble communications create efficiencies and support both reactive and proactive customer targeting that aligns with individual behaviors and activities in Headway.
Memories
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.
With Iterable, we found a communications partner who shares our excitement and mission to personalize customer messages at a human level regardless of the distribution channel. We are able to test, learn, and continuously improve our communication strategy which drives trust and loyalty with our customers in times of loss.
Results
Easy-to-execute testing and more data-driven intelligence created stronger direct and reseller engagement from users, more product consumption, and a larger, global customer base to increase revenue streams.
More personalized communications after reseller introduction improved the open rates of “welcome” emails by 50%, which also prompted more customers to create their first memory.
The performance of cross-channel communications in Iterable has directly influenced revenue growth for Memories, as it’s doubled year-over-year.
Omnia Fishing
Omnia Fishing, an online retailer for fishing tackle, is the first to offer tools to help anglers discover the gear that works on a particular body of water. They compile information from thousands of fishing reports and tens of thousands of bodies of water to deliver product recommendations tailored to each customer’s goals.
They serve the U.S. market and promise that anglers will find useful products, content, and guidance to hit the water with confidence and a tackle box full of the right gear.
Fishing for a New, Data-Driven Partner to Support Scale and Rapid Growth
According to the American Sportfishing Association, recreational fishing is a booming business. There are 49 million anglers in the US and growing, they’re a connected community, and a formidable economic force. As the industry and angler community continues to grow, Omnia Fishing has scaled rapidly, and staying on this path remains their key focus.
“We’re offering customers a new way to shop for fishing gear: accessing a huge selection while easily locating just the right picks for their lake. It’s a huge opportunity but a real challenge to execute,” said Matt Hamilton, Head of Marketing at Omnia Fishing.
Omnia Fishing recognized the value of personalization and how it could make the consumer shopping experience more enjoyable. As Matt added, “we needed to find the right partner with a flexible data model to ingest the mass amounts of data we collect so we could send personalized email and push communications at scale.”
Prior to switching to Iterable, they relied on different tools to send their customer communications—a basic email service provider (ESP) for newsletter delivery and a homegrown solution for transactional emails—but there were challenges with both.
- Their previous ESP limited personalization across customer communications because it didn’t tap into their large database of user, product, and event information. It also couldn’t facilitate the creation and preview of templates to test and iterate before sending.
- Their homegrown model was cumbersome and labor-intensive as there wasn’t a user-friendly way for their marketing team to make edits in their template builder without the aid of the engineering team. This made it costly and time-consuming to execute campaigns.
They needed one intuitive, feature-rich, data-driven solution built for a marketer. Iterable was the answer. It has a flexible data model that accelerates agility, an easy to use interface to support testing, ideation, execution of journeys that maximize and scale for impact, and more advanced features which ensure individualized experiences for each customer.
Iterable’s Data Flexibility Helps Omnia Fishing Reel in Customers
Omnia Fishing was excited by how seamlessly Iterable integrates with their existing technology tool stack, including Twilio Segment, their customer data platform (CDP). “Iterable’s data flexibility allows us to pull in all of our data, across multiple sources, for better targeting, which is the main reason we chose it over other solutions,” explained Mark Prondzinski, Head of Product at Omnia Fishing. Having their data feed into Iterable, which features an easy-to-use segmentation tool, journeys, and editable template builder, means Omnia Fishing is more agile and can adapt to communication variables and external events as they arise.
Deeper Personalization, More Automation in Communications with Catalog
Iterable’s Catalog is an out-of-the-box recommendation engine for marketers to automatically populate personalized dynamic content, without help from the engineering team.
This comes in handy because Omnia Fishing works with a lot of data. For example, they sell a wide range of fishing gear and apparel, they share fishing reports and media content like articles and videos provided by other anglers, and provide maps to explore local bodies of water popular to anglers. As users with different needs and interests engage with the brand, they’ll want to see different product information, media, or fishing reports tailor-made to their fishing interests and needs. “Before Catalog, if we wanted to send, let’s say 125,000 emails to 125,000 users, it was too taxing to make these API calls to our server for up-to-date, user profile data to personalize our content,” Mark said.
With Iterable’s Catalog, Omnia Fishing can now host all of their data directly within Iterable to personalize content, offers, and product recommendations in their communications For example, they store which products each of their customers are interested in on their user profiles in Iterable, based on browsing history, past purchases, and the content they’re reading. They use that profile data to query through Collections, and their associated Catalog data, to pull in details about each product—like the specific product image, URL, and description.
The same approach is taken for their Catalogs of fishing reports and media content. Storing all of this data in Catalog allows Omnia Fishing to avoid making daily bulk API calls and overrunning their servers to access external user data. Additionally, Catalog allows them to keep their user profile data clean, as they don’t need to store entire product record details on each user profile.
In the future, they hope to build another Catalog with data about their content creators, referred to as their “Ambassadors,” including what they contribute, such as fishing reports or videos with useful tips or product insights. This community-curated content helps foster even stronger customer connections and increases brand value, too.
Catalog’s Impact on Subscriber Growth, Conversions & Revenue
Since using Catalog for email and push messages, these campaigns and their performance have seen a high return-on-investment (ROI) for subscriber growth, improving Omnia Fishing’s bottom line.
Historically, customers find Omnia Fishing while searching for a certain fishing item. They can quickly check out and have a good transactional experience, but don’t experience Omnia Fishing’s other unique resources that complement a purchase or help them find more necessary gear. Now, Omnia Fishing sends a post-order email shortly after a completed in-store or online purchase. For instance, if someone buys a fishing reel for a specific technique, the post-order email features multi-media content tied to the technique or fishing reports that mention the reel. “Catalog helps us serve up the content based on the product purchased. We deliver the post-order email and while someone waits on their product delivery, they can explore, learn, and come into contact with more of our learning tools,” stated Matt.
Marketing can also iterate on the post-order email journey, modifying messages, subject line, or the call-to-action (CTA), too. “We’re building out this really personalized, sophisticated, visually attractive email … can iterate and tweak things, and never could have done that with our previous ESP or our homegrown solution,” Mark added. The open rate (OR) for the post-order email is 75% and click-through rate (CTR) is approximately 14%—which is a 50% increase in OR and more than 2x increase in CTR compared to Omnia Fishing’s other transactional emails.
Their season change email, which also involves a higher degree of personalization, has benefited from Catalog as well. Before Catalog, it took nearly a week to prepare and send, and sometimes required developers to modify the journey or content since Omnia Fishing’s homegrown solution lacked a user-friendly template builder. Without Catalog, Omnia Fishing needed to rely on developers to create custom code driving the personalized content, such as the ability to sort and order the top five products a user expressed interest in. Developers have competing priorities and aren’t always readily available to help the marketing team. But, with Iterable and Catalog, “We can do a high degree of personalization, and if a communication or campaign is a high priority, we can make progress in minutes without affecting the prioritization of our tech roadmap,” said Matt.
Having these personalized, data-driven emails has increased the number of Omnia Fishing’s subscribers. Before Iterable, and implementing Catalog, there were 55,000 engaged subscribers—those who read and click through emails. In late 2022, there were 85,000 subscribers, a nearly 55 percent increase in six months. These subscribers are also engaging more with emails influenced by Iterable and Catalog, creating a nearly 18% increase in click-through rate to the online retail site.
Looking ahead, Omnia Fishing plans to use Iterable for expanding their push notification strategy and executing in-app and SMS messages. There’s excitement about these additional avenues to personalize communications so both core and new users have the right products, content, and information at their fingertips. With Iterable’s support, Omnia Fishing knows it will seize market opportunities, attract more users, and attain growth, scale, and more financial success.
Key Results
Flexible data integration with Iterable drives agility and creates more advanced data-application possibilities like richer insights or product refinement so Omnia Fishing achieves better customer engagement.
Before Catalog, it took nearly a week to prepare and send, and sometimes required developer’ help to create the campaign content. Now, they can send deeply personalized communications in a matter of minutes.
Post-order email: The OR of this email is 75% and CTR is 14%— a 50% increase in OR and more than 2x increase in CTR compared to Omnia Fishing’s other transactional emails.
The number of Omnia Fishing subscribers increased by 55%, growing from 55,000 to 85,000 in six months.
Comparing more personalized emails containing Omnia Fishing’s product recommendation widget influenced by Iterable and Catalog with those that don’t, there has been a nearly 18% increase in click-through rate.
Butternut Box
Secret Escapes
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:
- They use a ‘parent snippet’ that matches relevant holiday deals with a user’s recent search event data.
- They send that list to an internal server, which captures and stores the data, then returns it to Iterable in array format.
- 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.
As a critical business partner, Iterable meets all our global and local communications and campaign needs. Our customer data is now more scalable, powerful, and accurate as Iterable enhances customer engagement and our connections with each member.
Results
Increased accuracy, scale, and influence with Secret Escape’s impressions data, enabling seamless, real-time tracking of all deals that members see.
Stronger campaign performance from deeper user segmentation, targeted communications, and more data-driven intelligence tied to travel spending.
More personalized keyword search email campaigns driving strong open and click-through rates—45% and 8.3%, respectively.
Improved automation of customer marketing and communications processes increases marketing effectiveness, globally and locally.
dgtl fundraising
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.
“We’ve been trying to get this right for a long time. We know engagement is a key indicator of someone’s propensity to donate, but using our own analysis and segmentation, we’ve struggled to find the right interpretation to turn that indicator into a conversion.”
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.
Results
2x increase in conversion by targeting their loyal cohort
70% open rates by targeting their loyal cohort
Housfy
Rover
Rover Fetches Improved Efficiencies of More Than 40% With Iterable
Started in 2011, the Rover app and website connects animal parents with loving pet sitters, dog walkers, and trainers in more than 24,000 neighborhoods around the world. They want everyone to experience pet ownership and the unconditional love that comes with it, but still feel comfortable juggling their everyday life and responsibilities that take them away from home.
With millions of services booked through Rover, and people relying on them to keep their animals happy, healthy, and safe, it’s critical to provide strong customer experiences—from research to introductions and bookings—matched with excellent customer service informed by data. Before Iterable, Rover struggled with these areas. To execute email campaigns in different markets, for instance, they had more than 80 transactional emails to update across 10 markets. It was labor and time-intensive when updates were needed and meant more than 800 emails to individually refresh.
By embracing Iterable, Rover felt fully supported in its marketing endeavors. It gained marketing efficiencies of more than 40%, which came from improved data integration, more sophisticated customer segmentation (with owners and sitters), and more comprehensive, automated journeys that encompass cross-channel communications and unique messaging. Iterable is a dependable partner that Rover trusts to problem-solve and innovate to address their new or shifting business goals, priorities, or needs.
Iterable gives us the opportunity to use our data and individualize experiences for all of our cohorts, and all the different products we offer, but intertwine them as well for a more cohesive, end-to-end experience for everyone.
Georgia Aquarium
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.
To ensure a guest’s experience is consistent, and we are present when and where they want to engage with Georgia Aquarium, means we can deliver a high-level experience every time, and we’ll hopefully experience a massive increase in engagement.
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.
The power of providing an SMS channel for our guests is immense. It allows us to engage the guests when and how they would like to receive information, while providing a seamless experience for them to enjoy the aquarium without having to navigate through multiple channels.
Results
SMS ticket delivery elevates guest transactions: Georgia Aquarium sees a nearly 4% increase in customer ticket purchases and ~3% increase in the dollar amount of each order.
Customer joy is on the rise as issues tracked in the aquarium’s call center and on social media decrease by 96% and the Net Promoter Score increases by 96%.
A 200+% increase in revenue from enhancements to the aquarium’s ticketing and inventory system through data-driven customer knowledge and more personal, direct, timely communications.
More consistent, cross-channel branding from an improved digital ecosystem of Iterable’s marketing automation platform, the backend ticketing solution, and CMS website. This has strengthened guests’ journeys and relationships with the aquarium noted by increases in page views, customer transactions, and average order value.
Automated marketing campaign journeys have created operational efficiencies for the aquarium, especially the marketing staff.
The Athletic
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 sophisticated segmentation features, comprehensive journey capabilities, and an ability to integrate various data feeds in our marketing communications, Iterable allows us to effectively scale our campaigns through automation and personalization, helping us develop stronger, 1:1 connections with subscribers and a seamless cross-channel user experience.
Key Results
Greater marketing efficiencies from improved data collection, analysis, and more automated campaign workflows means The Athletic is activating 10 new user journeys in 2022.
Easy-to-execute campaign testing and creative capabilities support more personal, targeted user communications that increase click-through and conversion rates.
- 2x click-through rates with personalized vs. non-personalized campaigns
- +127% lift in subscriber click rate
- 70% higher click rate between the welcome email and the next best performing email
Stronger campaign performance from deeper user segmentation, communication scheduling tied to key moments, and more data-driven intelligence.
A+E Networks
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.
Results
With Iterable’s help, production was significantly optimized with major time savings. In fact, from 2019 to 2022, A+E Networks saw a nearly 50% increase in monthly email send volume.
Iterable’s technology allowed the team to turn around emails in 75% less time compared to previous years.
A+E Networks saw an increase in linear tune-in impressions and were able to attribute this increase to email by verifying through testing that subscribers who received an email in their inbox are more likely to tune into a show.
RealSelf
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.
Moving from relying on data engineering to build our in-house AI model to putting all our trust in the Iterable AI was a huge step. Because we had Iterable’s support and expertise, the whole process went very smoothly and our team feels 100% confident in making data driven decisions.
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.
Key Results
Within the first month of launching Brand Affinity, RealSelf has seen sessions and contacts increase by 30% and click-through rate has increased by 13%.
Comparing one month before versus one month after Brand Affinity, RealSelf has seen a +39% increase in website traffic and +44% increase in conversion.
With the help of Brand Affinity, RealSelf saves their data engineers about two hours each week when downloading their user engagement to their data warehouse.
Within one month, the team saw a 33% decrease in opt outs with their neutral Brand Affinity group.
OBRIO
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.
Iterable’s A/B testing tool is very useful. It allows you to test various parts of a message with a user-friendly interface—and can automatically calculate the test’s results and determine the winner. It’s a potent tool to boost campaign performance.
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.
Key Takeaways
A 24x increase in revenue compared to a similar global campaign they’ve launched in the past, prior to Iterable.
A 9x higher subscription conversion on iOS and 5x higher on Android using their “special offer” variations across push and in-app. Subscription conversion from push grew 38x on iOS and 7x on Android.
Conversion for the replenishment of a user’s live chat balance from push grew 6x on iOS and 14x on Android.
With Iterable’s automation capabilities, the Nebula team has been able to save at least 8 hours per week.
Joybird
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
- a data warehouse that houses profile and modeling data.
- 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:
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- 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.
We decided to take a big swing and swap out both our ESP and event tracking platforms at the same time, since we needed clean, structured data throughout the customer journey but also a modern ESP that could trigger those flows. We really couldn’t do one without the other!
Results: Faster Activation, Less Down Time
Joybird’s new tech stack delivered measurable business value almost immediately:
The company saved 79 hours of campaign creation time switching from Bronto to Iterable.
Marketing team is now able to spin up new campaigns in an hour, down from 2 weeks.
Engineering time fell 93 percent now that the back-end team no longer needs to build singular connections anymore. A marketing team request that might have required two weeks of back-end work can now take about an hour because the data is already in models in its data warehouse.
We definitely have more visibility into understanding where challenges are and we can tackle them versus just not even knowing they exist.
UNiDAYS
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.
Results
- Nearly 200 hours/year saved with Iterable Catalog
- Deep personalization across email and push notifications (a must for its Gen-Z audience)
- Time saved is now spent further optimizing UNiDAYS CRM program
CreativeLive
CreativeLive empowers and inspires over 10 million students worldwide. With more than 1,500 curated classes and over 10,000 hours of video, CreativeLive hosts the world’s largest premium online creative education platform.
New York Times best-selling authors, Grammy, Pulitzer, Oscar winners, thought leaders and legendary entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, and Mark Cuban—over 1,000 of the world’s top experts—teach the CreativeLive community.
Iterable’s Impact at CreativeLive
By using Iterable’s growth marketing platform, CreativeLive has been able to vastly reduce the time that marketers spend developing emails, while creating more personalized and optimized messaging that doubled click-through rates in two months.
Every action a user makes on the CreativeLive website—from enrolling in a course, to saving or marking a class as interesting—is added to their Iterable user profile. This builds dynamic, accurate and up-to-the-minute lists.
Instead of targeting people in broad categories, such as photography, the growth marketing team can now target focused sub-categories, such as outdoor photography, leading to increased open rates from 15% to 25%.
Normally we segment by the channel our users are interested in, but now we are able to be much more granular than that. The customer is more engaged because whatever we’re sending them is highly relevant.
Streamlined Email Management for Focused Execution
CreativeLive was looking for a modern, user-friendly platform that could handle both transactional and marketing emails.
The API calls with their legacy email provider were constantly breaking and the team was getting mired in support delays.
“The system we were replacing seemed very old-school and everything was pretty cumbersome,” says email marketing manager Silva Yousefian.
There were data silos between departments and systems. “Our product team is in charge of transactional emails, and previously they were on a different ESP than the marketing team,” explains email marketing manager Karen Lee.
“One of the big things that was really challenging was managing unsubscribes, syncing them between the two systems. Now, with Iterable, we really like how easy it is to track people’s email preferences all in one place. It’s cutting down on the manual work of executing campaigns and lets the marketing team focus on increasing engagement and ROI.”
Email at Every Customer Engagement Touchpoint
- Welcome series
- Post-purchase series
- Transactional order confirmations
- Enrollment reminders Cart abandonment series
- 20-30 touch user acquisition campaigns
- Wishlist campaign based on customers’ class favorites
- Cross-sell campaigns based on previous purchases
Because it is so much easier to feed data into Iterable than into our legacy ESP, we have been segmenting based on more personalized, granular customer attributes. We’ve seen our click-through rates double.
Studio Spotlight
CreativeLive’s mission is to inspire people and help them make progress with their artistic goals.
Iterable helps CreativeLive accomplish this mission by enabling the marketing team to create personalized, razor-sharp content that aligns with customer behavior and interests.
Once a customer has purchased a class, the “Post-Purchase Stream” launches to curate additional information that the user may be interested in.
This is how the email journey is deployed:
- A confirmation email is triggered when the user makes a purchase.
- A follow-up email is sent two days later to suggest related courses to purchase.
- A reminder requesting a review of the class goes out three days later.
- An upsell email is sent after three additional days, encouraging users to purchase additional courses at higher price points.
“We are encouraging people to move forward with their passions and dive in deeper,” explains Silva. “By creating personalized streams, it gets them there a little quicker.”
The team’s newest project is to build on this further with dynamic footers—content that is curated automatically into each individual email.
Iterable has helped CreativeLive become more strategic in its mission of inspiring and educating a rapidly growing, global cohort of creatives.
By synthesizing multiple data streams into one, intuitive and easy-to-use platform, the marketing team has found more hours in the day to craft the personalized content that converts.
Key Takeaways
Massive time savings: Email setup and testing times have been cut by 50%.
Hyper-personalized campaigns: User profiles take in individual behavioral events, enabling targeted content across all channels.
On-call support: Real-time customer support chats allow efficiency and accelerated learning.
Scribd
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.’”
Jersey Mike's
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 implemented Segment, Amplitude and Iterable, which work seamlessly together and allow us to send the right data to Iterable and speak to our customers as individuals.
“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.”
Results
13% lift in conversion leveraging Amplitude Predictive Cohort
38% non-member to member conversion rate
Increased agility as a mobile-forward business
Hipcamp
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.
“With such a small team handling a bunch of different focus areas like marketing, supply acquisition, business analytics, and process improvement, we needed to invest in tools to reduce the manual journeys. Fast experimentation allows us to break down large goals into smaller bits of progress.”
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.
Results
4.5X more operations-driven experiments
Reduced dependence on engineering with Iterable’s flexible data structure.
Realtors Property Resource®
Realtors Property Resource® (RPR®), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), is a data platform and member benefit funded through NAR dues. It aggregates data from Multiple Listing Service (MLS) systems nationwide to give REALTORS® on-the-go access to the largest database of residential and commercial properties to help them wow clients and close deals.
“A REALTORS® ability to quickly access and share property data directly influences their ability to effectively advise clients. We’re committed to making sure all REALTORS® are aware of the platform, and know how to use this valuable member benefit,“ explained Reggie Nicolay, Vice President of Marketing and Social Media at RPR. “In minutes, REALTORS® can create an RPR account, download the mobile app or use the desktop version and perform property searches to discover more about on and off market properties.”
RPR also provides PDF templates to help agents and brokers create custom reports with key information—a biography, client testimonials, market statistics, their marketing methods, etc.—to better inform, engage, and impress clients. RPR also creates educational resources, from webinars to ebooks, to help REALTORS® understand how to use and maximize the RPR platform potential.
While more than 1.5 million NAR members can access RPR, there’s a large percentage that don’t at all, that have only used it once, or that haven’t for some time. They are bombarded by real estate technology, and struggle to understand the purpose of each platform and what value they bring to their client work. REALTORS® also frequently enter and exit the profession with market fluctuations, which makes it increasingly difficult to find and reach them.
RPR has dealt with these challenges, struggling to nurture audience awareness and understanding. Targeted, cross-channel, and timely marketing is growing more essential to engage with a vast audience, in a noisy market, but wasn’t easy with the solutions RPR used.
From “Bulletin Board” to Cross-Channel, Personalized Marketing
As RPR’s need for more dynamic, timely, personalized communications grew, they wanted to execute campaigns with different audience segments that their legacy ESP couldn’t scale to support. “We were basically doing bulletin board marketing, putting a big message out and hoping that people would see it,” shared Aaron Flatt, Director of Growth Marketing. It became cost-prohibitive given the scale and volume of RPR’s communications program.
To successfully shift to more event-based, cross-channel marketing and demonstrate their value to more than 1.5M agents, RPR needed a modern ESP to complement and integrate with the other applications in its martech stack. This includes Appcues, which helps produce guided tours for users to better understand RPR’s business-building features and Zapier, which prompts communications based on user activity (e.g. webinar signups, taking surveys and providing feedback that’s positive or negative, or running certain RPR reports).
Iterable was a perfect solution: an easy-to-use, data-driven platform with open integrations to the RPR Mobile™ app. The flexible data model accelerates agility and the straightforward interface, combined with a robust feature set, supports multi-journey execution with different audiences. With Iterable, RPR can readily create individualized communications to deliver the right message, on the right channels, at the right time so agents know what it does, how it will benefit their work, and choose to regularly use it for nurturing client relationships and closing deals.
Iterable stood out as the right platform, in the sense that it met all of our needs, it was straightforward even as a technical tool, and we could see our raw JSON data in the user interface, which was important for maintaining quality assurance in our campaigns, and with our message.
RPR’s Winback Journey Reduces Churn & Creates Record-Breaking Usership
After onboarding with Iterable, the RPR marketing team embarked on executing a daily winback campaign with two audiences identified by the Operations team:
- The once-and-done user who created an RPR account, but activity shows they bounced after signup and didn’t return.
- The unengaged user who was active with RPR, but their last activity was at least six months ago or as far back as two years.
RPR wanted both audiences to get reacquainted with their platform so they created a single dynamic communication journey in Iterable Studio to accommodate both audiences. Once a user qualifies as either a once-and-done or an unengaged user, they are added to the winback journey and the paths split based on if they’re a commercial or residential agent.
For example, if there’s a residential agent that hasn’t used RPR in the last 180 days, the first email they receive includes content about Shareable Market Trends, a newer RPR feature. If there’s no immediate activity with RPR after that first email, users receive another email prompting them to download the mobile app. If they act within the next 180 days, they’re taken out of the journey and receive different communications with personalized messages and content to support their work and RPR engagement. If they do not engage, they’re added to a winback churn list.
Taking this approach to better connect with their audience, RPR has experienced stronger conversion rates. Agents are more consistently using the app, and platform usage is maintained, even after the highest utilization peak for the year, which normally sustains through summer. Before, RPR typically saw usage dips as low as three or four percent after that peak.
“Iterable allows us to keep stronger usage than we’ve ever experienced this late in the summer. We have 10 years to look at where we can say that over and over. But this year, we’re consistently above the bar because we’re bringing agent’s in through this campaign,” explained Reggie. The more REALTORS® in, the better, so RPR can help them gain client trust and connection that leads to closed deals.
Social Ad Retargeting is Key to Enhancing Agent Conversion
Meeting users where they are, including social media, is key to improving engagement. RPR strategically tapped into Meta as one avenue to enhance call-to-actions in its winback emails and created a complimentary retargeting journey.
Users who are not engaging with the winback emails, meaning they opt not to open it, will see a retargeting ad in Meta, personalized based on whether they’re an agent who works in residential or commercial real estate. For example, if you’re an agent that stopped using RPR six months ago, and you opt not to open a winback email, the Iterable journey checks weekly to see if you’ve done any of the three events in the RPR market trends tool.
If you do one event, you’re removed from the audience, taken out of the ad set, and added into a new set that waits for another activity to be performed. If you don’t act, then you’ll stay on a hold tile and continue to receive the same ads.
On top of using social media ad retargeting as a means to enhance the winback journey and user onboarding—with initial engagement success thanks to Iterable—RPR now has sights on leveraging more channels like SMS to amplify its messages, attract and retain users, and deliver more personalized experiences for all 1.5M NAR members.
Key Results
Thanks to Iterable, and after sending nearly 1M emails for the winback journey, RPR experienced the following results:
The overall program brought back approximately 90,000 users at a 13.15% winback rate.
- ~15,000 once-and-done users converted at a 5.53% winback rate.
- ~75,000 unengaged users converted at a 18.23% winback rate.
They experienced the highest 30-and 90-day usership ever for the company.
Churn was drastically reduced with Iterable: After their highest utilization peak, usually experienced during the summer for the last five years, the user dip that averages 3-4% was only 0.6% this year.
Compared to the beginning of the winback campaign where 1,200 users converted per week, 3,200 people now convert weekly, an increase of more than 165%.
Blockchain.com
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.
When users become disengaged or are identified as being at-risk of churning, they trigger a re-engagement flow. By personalizing the subject line to say “It’s been [X] days since we’ve seen you” instead of “It’s been a while since we’ve seen you,” Blockchain.com saw a 32.4% relative increase in engagement.
Using Data to Personalize Email Content
Even small data-driven tactics, like mentioning when a user was last active, or greeting users by name, can have a significant impact on performance. Blockchain.com tested first name personalization on a Cyber Security Awareness campaign and saw an 8.8% relative increase in engagement.
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 custom