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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
