99designs, the world’s largest on-demand design marketplace, makes it easy and affordable for people to connect with designers – whether it’s an entrepreneur looking for a logo design, a business owner redoing a website or a writer searching for a book cover illustration.

Before implementing Iterable, 99designs marketers were struggling with a legacy marketing tool that wasn’t marketer-friendly and required extensive engineering support. Creating small, highly targeted customer lists was just not practical considering the amount of technical assistance required. With Iterable’s rich feature set and intuitive user experience, the 99designs growth team can now easily segment customers and personalise content without extensive engineering support.

“One of the big advantages of Iterable is the integration with Segment, which gives us easier access to customer data and allows us to build our own lists,” Inglis explains. “We’re able to customise our targeted campaigns based on such factors as previous purchases and not completing a purchase. Our abandonment campaign is now delivering better results because the message content refers to the design category under consideration and speaks directly to what the prospect is looking to buy.”

With Iterable, the team spends less time on the back-and-forth between marketing and development. Consequently, team members have more time to focus on strategic activities such as finding innovative ways to make campaigns more engaging and more profitable. The focus on strategy is paying off:

• Personalising the post-purchase campaign series based on industry has increased open and click-through rates and, ultimately, helped double conversion for the entire series.
• A revamped email newsletter is increasing engagement with highly relevant content that people are excited to see in their inboxes.
• A design contest follow-on campaign invites customers to “work with your winning designer on another design project”.
• Messages include the winning designer’s name, a link to the designer’s profile and other elements related to the contest.

With the implementation of Iterable, 99designs marketers have more visibility and control over their campaigns. Because Iterable is so easy to use, channel managers now have full ownership of their campaigns.

The improved campaign performance is validated by quantifiable results, as the post-purchase series clearly demonstrates. Improvements in that campaign include an 11% increase in open rates and a 36% rise in click-throughs resulting from the incorporation of industry-specific campaigns. Industry-specific personalisation also ultimately helped double conversion rates for the entire series.