With Madison Reed’s online subscription service, consumers can achieve salon-quality hair colouring at home – conveniently, confidently and economically. In addition to aggressively growing its online business, this relatively young company is opening physical locations called “Color Bars” to give customers the option of obtaining hair-colouring products and services in person.

According to Julia Papane, Email Marketing Specialist, understanding and responding to customers’ hair colouring needs and preferences is key to building lasting relationships that drive company growth and ultimate customer lifetime value. Until 2016, however, the marketing team didn’t have an effective way to create highly personalised, cross-channel interactions that help build long-term customer relationships.

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.”

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.