Aspiration, a Los Angeles-based neobank, provides a socially conscious digital banking alternative to traditional financial institutions.

“At the heart of Aspiration is a mission: helping our customers make money and make a difference at the same time.” (Source)

Through its “Dimes Worth a Difference” programme, Aspiration donates ten cents of every dollar earned to charitable organisations focused on expanding economic opportunities. And while its product and service offerings mirror what you might find at a traditional bank, each offering is structured with social consciousness and sustainability top-of-mind.

To engage with its socially-minded customers, Aspiration relies heavily on email and mobile push notifications. Having “exploited the limits” of its previous marketing platform and recognising the opportunity of a more personalised customer engagement strategy, Aspiration unified its cross-channel customer experience with Iterable.

To engage with their customers at the right moment, Aspiration leverages Iterable’s Send Time Optimisation (STO), which applies machine learning to automate and personalise the optimal send time for each unique recipient. Powered by Iterable AI, STO has enabled Aspiration to more than double open, click and conversion rates.

Prior to STO, the Aspiration team tested and tweaked campaign send time in order to optimise for engagement. While tailoring send time to the segment or time zone improved engagement, it lacked the ability to continuously learn, adapt and personalise send times across channels at scale.

The first time the Aspiration team applied STO to a campaign, they saw an immediate increase of over 100% in open and click rates. By analysing historical engagement data and weighting more recent engagement signals, Iterable STO predicts the optimal send time for each unique individual.

“When I first saw the results of the campaign with STO, I was truly shocked. I assumed we’d see some percentage lift in engagement, but more than doubling engagement across the board (opens, clicks and conversions) was astonishing.”

Following the success in campaigns, Aspiration introduced STO to their workflows. They ran an STO experiment in Workflow Studio designed to increase engagement with low engagement users. The results showed a 27% increase in open rates of customers who received the STO-enabled email compared to the control group.

Looking to the future, the Aspiration team will continue to seek out AI-driven solutions for the ability to improve performance beyond what they could ever do on their own.

“Even with the largest, most technical marketing team, I could never match the results we see with Iterable AI.”