Small Business Audience, Big Business Impact: HoneyBook Sees Time to Value in 15 Days With Iterable

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

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

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

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

HoneyBook’s previous marketing system could not keep pace with the company’s rapid growth. Dynamic personalization, multichannel capabilities, and robust A/B testing were just a few of the features missing. Marketing and Growth managers could not get a full picture of the communications that customers received, so they could not track a lead’s progress from initial contact through conversion and beyond. 

Consequently, they lacked the visibility to create a cohesive lifecycle strategy. “We chose Iterable over other tools for several key reasons,” Loren says. “ We liked Iterable’s functionality, which makes it easier to personalize content for specific customer segments. Our engineering and data teams were impressed with Iterable’s APIs and documentation and convinced that Iterable would be the easiest and fastest solution to implement.”

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

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

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

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

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

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