How UNiDAYS Increased Personalization in Less Time with Iterable Catalog

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.