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.

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:

1. SKU data
2. Data from regional e-commerce partners
3. First-party user attributes, such as occupation or hobbies
4. 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.

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.” 

Rocksbox is an interactive, hyper-personalised discovery and shopping service for fashion jewellery. For a monthly subscription fee, members gain access to rent unlimited jewellery from premium designers and brands. Stylists rely on in-house technology and customer-provided feedback to personalise each box shipped directly to the customer’s door.

How does Rocksbox work?

1. New members take the Style Survey to indicate style preferences.
2. They can also select pieces directly from the Wish List.
4. Rocksbox Stylists send members a curated, three-piece jewellery set to wear on loan.
6. When they’re ready for a refresh, members can swap at any time for a new set of jewellery.
7. Members communicate with their Stylist by leaving feedback, ensuring an even more personalised box next time.

In addition, Rocksbox members can purchase jewellery right out of their box using member rewards and discounts.

Growth Marketing

Member engagement is inherent in Rocksbox’s business model, with personalisation at the core of the experience. Growth marketing at Rocksbox combines user acquisition and member engagement, optimising all points of communication to maximise ROI. The team is highly experimental and data-driven, always exploring new ways to engage their members and implementing workflows 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 contrasts with 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!

Sophisticated Campaigns and A/B Testing

Rocksbox has taken advantage of Iterable’s tremendous flexibility to create sophisticated workflows and to optimise all aspects of their campaigns.

A simple example of a workflow in action is Rocksbox’s feedback request workflow:

• 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 customised 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 workflow.
• 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 has 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 standardised on Iterable as their key platform for managing and optimising all ongoing customer engagement.

In our increasingly digital world, brands that thrive build strong, personalised relationships with their customers. For many non-profit organisations, 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 non-profits, helps charitable organisations 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 organisations to help them adapt and become truly digital.” (Source)

Partnering with organisations like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund, dgtl fundraising helps acquire and nurture potential donors through highly-personalised, 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 personalisation 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 personalising 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 optimise for conversions, minimise 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.

Converting loyalists into donors

dgtl fundraising leverages Brand Affinity in a workflow 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 workflow 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 workflow 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 behaviour (similar to their approach with “hyperactive” users).

After seeing the lift in conversion from introducing Brand Affinity to their workflow 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 non-profit customers

With a deeper understanding of customer sentiment, dgtl fundraising is now able to deliver a customer experience that is optimised for conversion, minimises 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 non-profit customers.

For Zoopla, one of the UK’s leading property marketplaces, increasing digital engagement is the key to delivering ROI to their partners and hitting its long-term growth targets.

With over 55 million visits across their mobile apps and websites, and coverage of over 70% of UK property listings, Zoopla collects a massive amount of consumer data. That data can then be used to match homehunters to their dream property and connect Zoopla customers (estate agents and developers) to relevant consumer cohorts.

With their legacy tech stack, however, Zoopla was handcuffed to manual data queries, batch data imports and fragmented views of customer engagement. Knowing data-driven strategies based on geo-intent and Segment Personas were critical to recognising rapid growth in their business, the Zoopla team knew they needed to modernise their tech stack.

Choosing data-first to fuel growth

With their legacy ESP, Zoopla was reliant on manual SQL queries, batch data imports and best-guess segmentation.

“Our previous ESP could not handle the scale of our business. We weren’t leveraging the rich data we have, and segmentation was inconsistent or inaccessible across our tech stack. Any change we needed to make required at least two weeks of engineering effort,” said Chris Frost, Senior Product Manager at Zoopla.

Beyond native cross-channel and segmentation capabilities, Zoopla needed a provider with the data foundation, scalable APIs and rich partner integrations to activate their latent customer data.

“This evaluation wasn’t ever about a jazzy UI. The central thing for me as a marketer is, ironically, not the marketing functionality. Those elements, if you choose wisely, feel like table stakes to me,” said Adam Knight, Director of Engagement at Zoopla. “It’s all about how it enables the engineering function of our business to support us as marketers so we can accelerate the pace of testing and iteration.”

After completing an extensive evaluation, the Zoopla team chose Iterable’s data-first approach to customer experience to supercharge their growth.

“After workshopping our use cases and mapping our data architecture – one of the most helpful phases of our review process – it became quite clear that Iterable was the best partner for us,” said Knight.

Rich customer experiences with Iterable

By introducing Iterable to their tech stack, previously complicated (or altogether unreachable) use cases are now accessible.

Geo-intent, or understanding which locations a consumer might be interested in, is foundational to connecting homehunters with the right properties. For example, someone currently located in London may be looking to move to specific postcodes in Manchester. Zoopla looks to browse data, lead data, saved searches and more to determine and score consumer intent. That score is then used to deliver relevant content and recommendations tailored to the locations a consumer is interested in.

Prior to Iterable, data silos prevented Zoopla from having a clear understanding of geo-intent. Data housed in their ESP was not unified in real time to data housed in segment, or the rest of their tech stack. This disconnect gave a fragmented view of customer behaviour and limited Zoopla’s ability to effectively action on geo-intent.

In addition, Zoopla launched a new programme ‘Zooploma’ in early 2020 with the intent of supporting and educating first-time home buyers.

“First-time buyers are a significant proportion of the market, accounting for almost 40% of all property transactions. Understanding their challenges and helping to support and guide them through the process is central to our ethos,” said Knight. (Source)

With Iterable’s deep integration with segment, Zoopla can now quickly identify target Zooploma participants based on a variety of attributes.

Platform and partnership for the long haul

For Zoopla, modernising its tech stack meant finding both a platform and a partnership that would unlock growth. With Iterable in place, the Zoopla team can now deploy the strategies necessary to increase engagement and build the consumer preference that is integral to Zoopla’s long-term success.

When three friends joined forces in 2017 with a mission of making the world’s best fitness classes accessible to everyone, it’s doubtful they could foresee the massive shift the fitness industry would experience in 2020. As the world shuttered physical gyms and boutique fitness studios, Fiit.tv was uniquely positioned to step in and fill the void for fitness enthusiasts and newbies alike.

As a UK-based subscription fitness app, available in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, Fiit provides on-demand classes, group workouts and tailored training plans to support every stage of the fitness journey.

While Fiit had seen healthy year-over-year (YoY) growth, nothing could have prepared them for the massive influx of new users trading in-person workouts for virtual, resulting in 300% YoY growth in 2020.

To effectively capitalise on their expanded addressable market and deliver an experience that would retain those users for the long haul, the Fiit team began testing their cross-channel onboarding sequence to optimise for conversions and retention.

Getting Smarter About Onboarding

In early 2020, Fiit introduced a 14-day free trial for all new user sign-ups. The trial period provided a finite runway for Fiit to educate new users on the various features within the app and prove enough value to encourage a conversion from free trial to paid subscription.

Fiit’s existing onboarding sequence lacked clear objectives and left new users unclear on how to best get started.

“Fiit is quite a complex business, and frankly we were giving too much information to our users upfront. We included information on how to take classes, how to get started in the app, and we also included upsell information on our wearable technology,” said Jimmy Davis, Head of Retention.

With too much information and not enough clear direction, trial-to-paid conversion rates dropped to just over 56% from a previous average of 60%. Given their influx of new users, Fiit knew even incremental gains in conversion would have long-term implications for their business.

But before they started testing their onboarding workflow, the Fiit team did extensive research to identify trends in their customer base and clearly define the steps a user needed to take within the trial period to increase the likelihood of converting to a paid subscription. What they found were two actionable insights.

First, users who complete a class within the first five days of the trial have a higher propensity to convert to a paid subscription. Second, Fiit was being introduced to a new type of customer they had previously struggled to capture. This new persona, “Alli”, saw fitness as part of their lifestyle, held memberships of boutique gyms and had discretionary income to spend on fitness.

Knowing the optimal timeframe to engage with new users, and having a better understanding of the personas they were seeking to engage with, gave Fiit the direction they needed to experiment with their onboarding workflow.

Optimising for Peak Performance

The Fiit team already knew that Iterable’s email and push notifications were the right channels to employ during onboarding, leaning on in-app messaging to engage with users once they are active in the app. Leveraging Iterable Experiments, Fiit tested both content and timing of touchpoints to determine what drove users to complete their first class within the first five days, and ultimately provide the highest trial-to-paid conversion performance.

First, Fiit A/B tested sending new users a single, recommended class against encouraging them to join a more structured training programme. They hypothesised that encouraging users to join a training programme would result in lower engagement rates, but initial results actually indicated slightly higher engagement – 63% activation within the first five days, compared to 60% activation from users who were sent a single-class recommendation.

Second, Fiit tested increasing the number of touchpoints (both email and push) on the very first day a user joins. They were concerned that the number of communications might increase unsubscribes and churn, but by capitalising on user intent, which is highest when a user first downloads the app, Fiit saw first-day activations jump from 58% to 70%.

In addition to experimenting with content and timing, Fiit added a number of filters to the workflow to identify key customer personas and ensure each user received the most relevant content. By checking the number of classes a user has completed, whether they’ve purchased a Fiit health monitor, what their referral source was and more, Fiit personalised every step of the onboarding experience.

Building Strength for the Long Haul

Having the right tech stack in place enabled Fiit to optimise their new user onboarding experience and capitalise on an astounding year of growth.

Prior to leveraging Iterable’s cross-channel Experiments and Workflow Studio to improve new user onboarding, Fiit’s overall trial-to-paid conversion rate hovered around 56%. After testing and optimisation, trial-to-paid conversions increased to 65%.

As the Fiit team looks to the future, they’re focused on establishing their platform not as a replacement for in-person fitness, but a complement to it.

“There’s an interactivity between physical spaces and community that will be critical for us to tap into in order to retain this wave of new users. Fiit really is a platform we see being used everywhere – whether you’re in a gym, at home or outdoors.”

In the late ‘90s, elite triathlon and cycling coach Joe Friel started to recognise the limitations of traditional coach-to-athlete communication – handwritten training logs, email and fax machines weren’t efficient enough to keep up with the needs of elite athletes and coaches.

In partnering with his son Dirk and family friend Gear Fisher, Joe and team built TrainingPeaks, the world’s first online training log that enables coaches to connect with their athletes over the web.

Today, TrainingPeaks creates endurance training apps and solutions that help athletes and coaches prepare the right way to reach their goals.

Expanding in Audience and Channels

As TrainingPeaks grew, so did the diversity of its audience and the channels they used to engage each member. For example, coaches typically engage with TrainingPeaks on desktop, while roughly 90% of athletes prefer to engage on the mobile app.

Michelle Hiland, CRM Marketing Manager, knew that interacting with their audience in the right channel with the right content at the right time was key to increasing upsells and maximising retention, but she was limited by the functionality of their legacy tech stack.

“We couldn’t use our data the way we wanted to, and the API was a lot harder for our engineers to use. We were basically limited to profile data only,” said Hiland.

In addition, TrainingPeaks was leveraging two separate tools to manage its email and in-app experience. The disconnect between tools created a disjointed customer experience and crippled TrainingPeaks’ retention and upsell efforts.

In order to continue growing their international network of coaches and athletes and optimise their mobile app experience, TrainingPeaks knew it was time to reassess their tech stack.

Unifying Channels for a Seamless Customer Experience

After evaluating a handful of automation platforms, TrainingPeaks chose to unify their inbox and in-app experiences with Iterable’s growth marketing platform.

“Choosing a platform our engineers approved of was a big sticking point for us,” said Hiland. “The fact that everything is in JSON makes Iterable really easy for them to work with.”

The ability to easily get data into (and out of) Iterable enabled TrainingPeaks to build workflows that support their multi-channel customer experience, and deliver personalised content based on the events and training programmes athletes are interested in. Across their lifecycle campaigns, TrainingPeaks is now able to trigger channel-specific messages based on web, desktop and mobile app engagement.

In planning for 2020, TrainingPeaks recognised that many athletes were adding events to their calendar, but not purchasing a training plan to help them prepare. Because they had access to all relevant customer behaviour, TrainingPeaks was able to create a workflow that triggers when someone adds an event, but does not purchase a training plan. Without Iterable’s flexible data integration, TrainingPeaks wouldn’t have been able to capitalise on this key upsell opportunity.

Stronger Performance for the Long Haul

Unifying their inbox and in-app experiences with Iterable has enabled TrainingPeaks to engage with its users at critical moments in the customer journey. In-app click rates have increased to nearly 70% with an average conversion rate of 6%, and the email click-to-open rate averages nearly 12%.

TrainingPeaks has also seen a drastic decrease in time spent building their weekly newsletters – what previously took 10 hours a week to create now takes less than 20 minutes, leaving the TrainingPeaks team more time to continually optimise and find incremental gains in their behaviour-based automations.

Having access to the data and the channels to deliver a cohesive customer experience has been critical for TrainingPeaks to effectively support their elite athletes and coaches. Bringing disparate data and channels into a single platform enables personalised touchpoints that consistently increase conversion rates and drive the long-term retention TrainingPeaks depends on for growth.

From backpackers to glampers, everyone camps in their own way. Some prefer multi-day hikes. Some don’t even leave their campsites, opting for the serenity of just being away from it all. For years, campers struggled to find readily accessible campsite information beyond official websites and word of mouth.

And then The Dyrt came along – a community-driven hub for outdoor enthusiasts to share their camping stories and tips for making the most of campsites. As their founder, Sarah Smith, says, “Looking at review platforms like Yelp or TripAdvisor, we thought: Why can’t this exist for the outdoors?”

If ever there were a group of people who felt a sense of community, it’s the campers in all of us. The only question became how The Dyrt would connect with such a widespread group of people.

Driving Recommendations Through Catalog

The Dyrt’s recommendation engine is driven by user behaviour and the filters they apply. This information is then added to a collection in Iterable’s Catalog to create personalised recommendations.

Relevance is the key. No one wants to learn about a campsite that is unable to accommodate their wants and needs. And so, the Dyrt is using Iterable’s data management capabilities to identify user preferences and provide hyper-personalised recommendations.

With Catalog in use, campers are now receiving messages with the best campsites based on their specific preferences, such as location and type of campsite.

To increase the effectiveness of the recommendations, the company has broken through the common problem of data silos between channels and has begun using Catalog insights to inform both email and mobile messaging.

The Perfect Push per Person

Campers are always on the go – or at least looking for the next adventure. The Dyrt understands this and has built a comprehensive mobile app, which includes mobile marketing strategies and gamification to ensure campers never miss out.

In order for each user to receive the perfect set of recommendations on their mobile device, The Dyrt worked closely with Iterable to ensure the right message found the right person. Tapping into Iterable’s data flexibility and depth of API capabilities, the company built a use case that is best suited for its business needs, as well as those of its customers.

As mentioned, the Dyrt utilises the information for Catalog to build out its recommendations for push notification campaigns. From there, the company works with react native libraries to identify the activity types for each push notification, such as if the message has been received versus if it has been opened. Iterable then sends a JSON payload allowing for customisation of the push with rich push features like imagery.

The Dyrt then tracks push open rates through easy-to-use APIs. With this flow of data in place, the company is able to more closely monitor user behaviour at each stage to inform the success of future campaigns.

The Results

Providing relevant recommendations shows users you’re paying attention. The Dyrt has built a trusting relationship with its users through this process, ensuring users can easily find their dream campsite. And the results have shown that this level of care and understanding leads to loyal, longer-term users.

*Note: Any business subject to HIPAA compliance requiring a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) should contact the Iterable team to learn more about Iterable HIPAA requirements and exclusions.

It’s no secret – the healthcare system is complex. As patients, navigating a web of providers and specialities is not only frustrating, but also creates a disconnected view of our medical history.

For PicnicHealth co-founder and CEO, Noga Leviner, being diagnosed with a chronic illness and lacking a single, comprehensive view of her medical history was just the “aha!” moment she needed. Started in 2014, PicnicHealth is a platform that combines patient medical records into a single, easy-to-understand timeline and allows users to share that history for anonymised medical research.

Early on, PicnicHealth’s homegrown marketing solution was enough to support their nascent email and automation needs. But as their platform and research programmes grew, they recognised that the engineering effort spent maintaining their marketing tools could be better spent on the PicnicHealth platform.

With the security and privacy of sensitive patient data top-of-mind, the PicnicHealth engineering team (the marketing team didn’t even exist yet!) set out to find a solution that would minimise their time spent coding email logic while also allowing them to deliver a more seamless user experience.

Recognising the Opportunity of Personalisation

Helping tens of thousands of patients better navigate their unique medical history requires personalised touchpoints that put the patient first. From new user onboarding to updating user profiles as additional medical history became available, the PicnicHealth team was spending tens of hours a week manually segmenting their users and building emails in their homegrown marketing tool.

As part of onboarding, one of the most critical milestones in the user journey is signing the consent form that enables PicnicHealth to collect a patient’s medical records. While many users opt for a one-time collection of their records, the customer experience and PicnicHealth’s research programmes benefit greatly when users subscribe to recurring record updates. For the user, their PicnicHealth record stays up-to-date with a comprehensive view of their history, while PicnicHealth’s research programmes gain valuable real-world data with patient-reported outcomes – insight not included in traditional clinical research.

With their homegrown marketing tool, nurturing users to sign up for ongoing medical record collection required the PicnicHealth team to manually segment users who had not opted in to recurring updates and send an additional consent form. This manual process was inconsistent and wasn’t producing the results they hoped to see.

Recognising the extent of their limitations in segmentation, automation and analytics capabilities, as well as the burden of their homegrown solution on their engineering teams, PicnicHealth upgraded their tech stack to include Iterable.

Tailoring the Customer Experience with Iterable

With Iterable, PicnicHealth nurtures each user differently based on their medical condition, the types of doctors they’ve added and the opportunities to improve the quality of their medical history. For example, some research programmes offer compensation, while others request additional surveys to be completed to gather patient-reported outcomes.

“We evaluated other marketing tools, but they didn’t have the advanced segmentation logic we needed for our diverse customer base,” said Justin Maslin, Software Engineer at PicnicHealth.

Since making the switch to Iterable, the process of identifying and nurturing users to complete the ongoing medical history consent form is now fully automated, with a nearly 90% conversion rate.

Prior to Iterable, 25–50% of an engineer’s bandwidth was dedicated to building and managing email logic in their homegrown solution. Today, PicnicHealth’s marketing team is largely self-sufficient and able to easily support the continued expansion of PicnicHealth’s research programmes.

UpHabit has been called a CRM by some, but as Founder and CEO Neil Wainwright puts it, “UpHabit is about helping you build personal relationships.” The company leans heavily on the “R” of CRM, focusing exclusively on you and your relationships.

Any type. Personal. Professional. Acquaintance. Friend of a friend. Anyone in your contacts list. UpHabit makes it easier to maintain these connections through customisable reminders and follow-up prompts. In the age of endless games of phone/text/message tag, UpHabit keeps the world a little more connected… one relationship at a time.

“We don’t tell you what to say. We just say now’s a good time to talk to that person,” adds Wainwright. With decades of product and customer experience, it only makes sense that Wainwright chose such a common obstacle to tackle.

It’s such a simple thing, but those are how we make good habits.

Using Iterable for a Streamlined Customer Experience

A modern relationship is inherently cross-channel. From texts to social media direct messages to emails to the good old phone call, there are seemingly endless ways to get in contact with someone. It’s about finding the right method that works for each relationship. Much in the same manner, UpHabit worked with Iterable to find the best cross-channel strategy to streamline the customer experience. With consistent messaging reaching across mobile and email, UpHabit is able to sustain a relevant conversation with users. In particular, UpHabit set its sights on in-app messaging as a core piece of its marketing strategy. After all, a message directly in the app is likely to promote further usage and interaction with the product.

While many in-app functions take over the whole screen and cover the app itself, Wainwright knew there had to be a better way. “I wanted a more immersive experience with our app than you’d normally get.” After talking with Iterable, he found it. Using Iterable’s platform flexibility, UpHabit customised their in-app messaging using their own JSON payloads to incorporate their design and create a more dynamic experience. From there, with behavioural data, the company encouraged users to interact with the app.

Small efficiencies like these – in conjunction with the strength and functionality of Iterable’s Workflow Builder – have helped UpHabit build their own direct relationships with users. For new users that have completed the onboarding process, UpHabit utilises a comprehensive cross-channel welcome campaign to ensure users are aware of the platform’s breadth of capabilities – even providing tips and tricks on how to best utilise important features and functions. Based on dozens of event triggers and behavioural data, UpHabit built a detailed, 90-node workflow within Iterable to contact users via multiple channels – email, push notification and in-app – to cultivate a strong foundation from which customers can build their relationships. In this workflow, UpHabit even sends a survey directly from Wainwright. His goal is to keep an open conversation with users for an enhanced customer experience. The cross-channel welcome campaign does just that. “Customers often freak out how quickly I reply!”

Building Meaningful Relationships

The UpHabit-Iterable partnership makes valuable connections easier. These connections are not linear either; they create a network. By incorporating Iterable into their latest product enhancements, UpHabit has seen this network grow with a 718% increase in subscriber conversion and, perhaps more importantly, maintain its size, seeing a 42% drop in subscriber churn.

With Iterable’s technology and expertise simplifying the customer journey, UpHabit has helped users create more meaningful relationships while simultaneously building a more meaningful relationship between the company and its customers.

Anu Verma, head of marketing, says that the emphasis on personalising interactions based on customers’ interests, health goals and the combination of vitamins and supplements they take is a major reason the company selected Iterable as its growth marketing solution.

Iterable’s omni-channel marketing platform enables Care/of to segment customers based on their health goals and deliver elegant and highly relevant content across email, social, SMS and other channels.

Encouraging a Sense of Community

The post-purchase workflow also provides a means of encouraging participation in the Care/of community. Anu says that getting customers to share workout routines, healthy eating tips and successes helps strengthen a sense of belonging. “One way we do that is by featuring user-generated content, such as Instagram posts, in email messages to our customer base. With Iterable, marketers can move user content into a message with a few simple edits.”

Care/of also circulates information about trending health topics, articles and riddles in its monthly newsletter, providing engaging, often educational, health content with a dose of fun and creativity. In setting out to dedicate an editorial and creative voice to a topic with real depth – health and wellness – Care/of makes use of a broad tool set available within Iterable, including A/B testing content and copy, segmenting users based on interest area and workflow functionality.

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 endeavours.

In 2019, Loren Elia, Director of Product Management at HoneyBook, and her team realised 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.

Fast Time to Value

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, personalised 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.

Tackling the Complexity of Selling Tickets for Live Events

It takes innovation and creativity to take market share from well-known, high-visibility incumbents that have been in the ticket business for decades. Increasing brand awareness, however, is just one of the challenges SeatGeek marketers face. Selling tickets for live events is complicated. At any given time, hundreds of thousands of events are happening and the majority of sales for any given event occur close to the event date.

Taking a Consolidated, Personalised Approach

Since implementing Iterable two years ago, the marketing team have consolidated all types of email as well as push notifications onto the Iterable platform, including:

• Transactional messages triggered by purchases – for example, purchase confirmations and ticket deliveries – as well as routine transactional messages for such requests as password resets.
• A completely automated weekly newsletter with content personalised based on customer purchases, location and website behaviour combined with suggestions derived by SeatGeek’s recommendation engine.
• A welcome workflow that builds engagement with customers who open an account with SeatGeek.

Driving Revenue Increases

“We’re very close to achieving our vision of maturity for email as a channel. We’re also making great progress with push and we’re using Iterable to experiment with artificial intelligence, SMS and in-app messaging to better understand what kind of metrics we can achieve in each channel. With that information, we can make a case to the business and justify spending in other channels,” Ben says.

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.

Targeting and Personalisation Improve Campaign Results

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.

Innovation Drives Engagement

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.

Business Results

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.

Fender was founded in 1946 by Leo Fender, a radio repairman whose experiments with Hawaiian lap steel guitars grew into the world’s leading guitar manufacturer. Over 70-plus years, Fender has produced some of the most iconic guitars and amps in the history of American music: Princeton Reverb® amplifiers, the Telecaster®, the Precision Bass® and, of course, the Stratocaster®. These instruments have been played by legends like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and can be found on every festival and rock or jazz club stage.

Fender Play is a digital learning subscription app that helps people pick up skills and start a lifelong relationship with guitar, bass or ukulele; Fender Tune is an intuitive digital guitar tuner with several added features for pros/advanced players; and Fender Tone works hand-in-hand with the brand’s Mustang GT digital modelling amps to help players explore guitar tones from their favourite artists and create their own.

With these digital properties, Fender wanted to do more than sell guitars – it wanted to become a mentor that provided customers with the education, information and support they needed to pursue their passion for music. Beyond subscription revenue, Fender aimed to develop the lifetime value potential of any given guitar player and create a customer journey that would last for decades. To accomplish that goal, Fender needed holistic insight into the customer journey.

However, because Fender started out as a manufacturer of physical products and because its digital ecosystem was built quickly, the company had a siloed tech stack with user data spread across many disparate locations. Its old email provider, for example, didn’t integrate with its data layer. When someone signed up for Fender Play, the system didn’t know what instrument or genre they were playing, or if they were even playing at all.

Fender also had a separate solution for pushing in-app messaging that didn’t know what was happening on the website or in the other Fender apps, because they were all in separate locations. All the disparate silos meant the data could not be made actionable to create a more meaningful, engaging, personalised customer experience that drove retention.

Solution

Fender wanted to own its relationships with customers and evolve how it thought about LTV to encompass instrument sales, app subscriptions and engagement and in-app purchases. The marketing team set out to map the customer journey and identify opportunities for engagement and potential drop-off points. By working with Iterable, Fender was able to consolidate all customer information across all digital sources into one unified customer profile. If a customer is watching a video in Fender Play or buying something on Fender.com or connected to their digital amplifier, the company can use that data to deliver a more personalised experience. Collectively, all these data points provide insight into a customer’s offline behaviour with their guitar, such as how often they play, and make it actionable, creating a feedback loop.

Fender uses Iterable as a growth marketing platform for email and mobile messaging. This enables Fender to deliver cross-channel campaigns that drive offline behaviour with online engagement. Take onboarding, for example. Fender uses Iterable’s Workflow Studio to onboard new customers in Fender Play. A customer comes in – either from iOS, Android or the web – and chooses to start a free trial. Then Fender activates their messaging workflow. Based on what instrument they’re playing, what genre they’re playing, how much they’re playing and what platform they’re on, Fender’s marketers make decisions around the types of messages to send them.

Results

Fender has seen improvements in retention of a month-to-month paying user because of engagement with videos. 89% of users watch a video on their first day. Through a personalised onboarding experience, Fender has seen an increase in engagement, encouraging people to watch more videos, learn more guitar and then stick around as a paying member.

To make those interactions possible, the company replaced its cumbersome and limited marketing solution with Iterable. This innovative growth marketing platform is enabling the team to create engaging campaigns that reach people through the web, email, SMS, direct mail and other channels. The results speak for themselves: the upgrade-to-subscription conversion rate for Iterable campaigns is 45% higher than that of a control group. Moreover, the team found that adding direct mail to the workflow yielded an incremental 3% lift in upgrades.

Achieving a Seamless Path to Value

Marketers and engineers alike were excited about the move to Iterable. Iterable’s flexible data model, modern APIs and universal webhooks saved engineering time by simplifying integrations with other platforms. For example, Madison Reed leverages integrations with Segment, for customer data, and Lob, for direct mail.

Because of Iterable’s straightforward, intuitive interface, marketers were able to quickly leverage these integrations. Today, Segment events trigger campaigns based on customer purchases and other behaviours. Delivery of a customer’s first order, for example, triggers a series of messages containing how-to videos and custom tutorials to set customers up for success, thereby increasing the likelihood of subsequent orders.

“We’ve created some cool dynamic lists and workflows that leverage integrations to automatically trigger campaigns,” Julia says. “Through the integrations, we can automatically synchronise Iterable with the customer database and create messages including instructional materials that are personalised based on an online hair colour survey completed by each customer. The messages include relevant images and descriptions from our product catalogue. It’s super exciting.”

Cross-Channel Reactivation Campaigns Reduce Early Drop-Off

Marketers have leveraged Iterable to create a reactivation campaign that is reducing customer drop-off after the first purchase. Because the hair colour survey asks how often customers colour their hair, marketing can determine expected reorder dates. The campaign workflow uses that information to generate lists of people who didn’t reorder at the expected times and put their names in the reactivation workflow.

“Through testing, we found that the best reactivation sequence is an email message followed by a direct mail postcard, which is then followed by another email message,” Julia notes. “The win-back content is consistent across all interactions. It’s easy to include webhook integrations in our workflows to trigger interactions in real time – for example, the direct mail postcards. That’s key in a business where highly personalised timing is everything. We’ve put an SMS webhook in the workflow so that customers who have opted into SMS receive an SMS nudge if they don’t engage with the email messages or postcard.”

Building Customer Lifetime Value With Online and Offline Interactions

Today, Madison Reed marketers use Iterable across the full range of customer interactions, from transactional communications and onboarding campaigns to reorder and reactivation campaigns that drive engagement and build lasting relationships. The ability to track online and offline interactions provides a 360° view of each customer, sharpening personalisation and relevance. And ongoing testing of content, timing, channel and other campaign components provides the insights marketers need to continually optimise email, postcard and SMS campaigns to gain lifts in engagement and overall business KPIs.

Box Scales to Millions While Achieving Seamless Customer Engagement With Iterable

More than 90,000 businesses globally use the Box cloud content management platform to enhance collaboration among their employees and partners. End users in these enterprises leverage Box capabilities for tasks ranging from file sharing and access on mobile devices to sophisticated business processes such as data governance and retention.

Two years prior to implementing, Box created a customer engagement function to expand the company’s reach beyond administrators to the people who use Box every day. The new team’s purpose: to ensure that end users get maximum value from Box’s offering.

The expansion required scaling up Box’s customer communications capability from tens of thousands of administrators to tens of millions of end users.

Highly Tailored Onboarding Drives Usage

Nora and her colleagues are focused on growing adoption to increase the value of the Box platform to enterprise customers, ultimately promoting customer loyalty and retention. To achieve this mission, the team is developing and executing campaigns that talk directly to the end-user community.

“We’re constantly working with our business analytics team to understand the next action a given user is likely to take based on previous actions taken or not taken,” Nora explains. “We use those insights to fine-tune the welcome series and build out new workflows that shorten the time it takes to move people to the next level of usage. We used Iterable’s A/B testing to compare the results of the new welcome series with our previous approach and were able to show a 10% increase in user adoption,” Nora says.

Lifecycle Campaign Composition Enables Personalisation at Scale

Nora attributes the success of the welcome series and other campaigns to the ability to gather and combine many different types of data for segmentation and personalisation. The team takes advantage of Iterable’s modern APIs and flexible data integration to access data from Salesforce.com and other sources and combine it with Iterable data. Iterable’s Workflow Studio pulls external data into the platform and triggers tailored messages as users reach specific milestones. Message content is based on such factors as lifecycle stage, Box components downloaded and usage data.

With over $17 million in funding and a business that has grown by over 500% in the past year, Curology is on a mission to provide personalised prescription skincare for acne and anti-ageing directly to tens of thousands of subscribers.

Curology sets itself apart from other skincare companies by offering its patients customised combination treatments and one-to-one interactions with licensed dermatology providers.

To achieve this personal touch, its team of marketers need a growth marketing platform that can deliver highly personalised content and relevance at scale.

Iterable’s Impact at Curology

In the past, the growth marketing team at Curology used two separate platforms to manage email and SMS campaigns. Data silos hindered the company’s ability to build robust subscriber profiles and deliver personalised messages in real time.

“When two communication channels don’t talk to each other, you can’t execute cohesive user engagement campaigns. With Iterable’s true omni-channel platform, we know we can provide the seamless experience that our patients expect,” says Fabian Seelbach, VP of Marketing at Curology.

Now, by partnering with Iterable, Curology has eliminated its data silos and increased its treatment plan compliance by 14% by incentivising its customers with highly relevant messages.

For example, members receive a daily SMS reminder to apply their acne treatment. Those that do are rewarded with a funny GIF, encouraging patients to stick with their prescribed treatment regimen.

Using Iterable’s visual, drag-and-drop Workflow Studio, Curology can now identify which members aren’t engaging via SMS and reach these individuals with targeted email follow-ups, tracking email and site metrics to ensure that they’re achieving relevance across all marketing channels.

This true omni-channel approach to supporting patients throughout their journey has improved Curology’s customer engagement by 26%, increasing revenue by 10%.

Targeted Text Messaging to Teens

At Curology, licensed dermatology providers create treatment plans and customised formulas; to ensure their patients’ success, they need to know if patients are following through on those plans and what the improvement looks like.

“It sounds simple, but getting teenage patients to apply their medication every night is difficult,” says Seelbach. Sending a daily email reminder fell short as a solution, which led the Curology team to add SMS messaging to their campaigns.

Now, thanks to Iterable’s flexible data model, Curology can create custom events for any customer data point, including whether members have uploaded a recent photo of their skin’s progress.

Those who haven’t are segmented and sent a targeted SMS, reminding them to send a photo update and explaining why it matters. Most importantly, members are able to snap a selfie and respond directly to the text – dramatically reducing the friction in patient-to-provider response rates.

Curology’s segmentation becomes even more sophisticated during the customer journey. Email follow-ups are triggered automatically if members haven’t shared a photo in a designated number of days.

These dynamic segments are leveraged in other email campaigns as well, creating a cohesive customer experience that directly results in higher engagement.

How Does Curology Work?

Curology’s mission is to connect customers with highly customised prescription skincare for acne and anti-ageing – and that sense of connection and customisation needs to shine through its marketing messaging as well.

To keep its young user base engaged with the product and in dialogue with the team of dermatology providers, Curology has mapped several highly specific communication touchpoints.

But there’s no one-size-fits-all to how – or where – members interact with the brand, so flexibility is paramount.

Here is how it works:

• The onboarding campaign is triggered by Iterable when someone signs up for a Curology subscription.
• Habit forming is paramount to Curology’s growth rate, so users are invited to participate in a 21-day challenge, receiving daily SMS reminders to apply their customised formula as prescribed.
• Based on the individual’s behaviour, personalised emails may also be sent to increase their engagement.

This measured approach to SMS and email messaging is part of an in-depth process to drive relevance at every stage of Curology’s customer experience.

The company uses Iterable to ensure that members are following their skincare regimens and achieving better outcomes. And as Curology’s marketers can attest, the more satisfied customers become, the greater the impact on top-line growth.

SingleCare offers savings on out-of-pocket prescription, dental, vision and telehealth costs. Members save up to 80% on prescriptions and have access to SingleCare’s national dental and vision networks.

Whether it’s a life-saving drug, routine dental cleaning or just an eye test, SingleCare believes that consumers should be able to compare costs for healthcare services and receive care without worrying about networks, coverage limitations or the excess.

Iterable’s Impact at SingleCare

SingleCare uses Iterable’s Growth Marketing Platform for all email messaging, including transactional emails, marketing blasts and behaviourally triggered emails.

Once a user signs up for an account, Iterable enables SingleCare to trigger workflows based on website interactions.

SingleCare can send personalised emails related to customers’ specific needs, whether they are interested in discounts on prescriptions or booking a dental or vision appointment.

Marketer-Focused for Highly Effective Campaigns

As a rapidly growing start-up, the marketers at SingleCare found themselves frustrated with the slow support response times and outdated user interface from their legacy email service provider.

They needed technology that offered a more organised, streamlined process to build their programmes without depending on their engineering team.

After evaluating several alternatives, SingleCare selected Iterable for its modern functionality and ease of use.

Elisha Singh, Marketing Coordinator at SingleCare, can also trust that emails sent through Iterable end up in the inbox where they belong, not blocked by internet service providers or tossed in spam folders.

In addition to appreciating its marketer-friendly UX and reliable, robust technology, SingleCare benefits from Iterable’s dedicated customer support.

“Iterable’s customer success team is incredibly knowledgeable, quick and helpful. Everyone is so nice and pays such great attention to any issues I reach out to them with,” said Singh.
By freeing up resources and increasing efficiency, SingleCare now spends more time testing email messaging and deploying targeted campaigns with Iterable.