Launched in 2012, Powtoon is a video creation and visual communication platform with a mission to empower individuals, teams, and companies to create engaging, visual, result-generating presentations. What started as a tool for marketers and entrepreneurs is now used by a wider professional audience for business presentations, product launches, educational materials, and more.

Forty million licensed Powtoon users have created more than 100M presentations to date. Users can try the platform with a free trial, then choose from three subscription options, depending on their needs and budget. Or, with Powtoon’s enterprise solution, businesses can transform their communications into powerful visual experiences.

Wanting a unified solution for different segments—B2C and B2B (enterprise)—and striving to better personalize multi-audience communications at mass scale, Powtoon needed a no-code platform that could ingest and activate valuable customer data for improved brand engagement. 

Digital-Era Success Requires Next-Level Support

Digital communication provides more opportunities for Powtoon to promote their solution with multiple audiences, upgrade existing members by converting “freemium” to subscribers, and grow its global footprint.  

“As a SaaS platform, we knew that to stay competitive and relevant in the current environment, we must invest more in marketing technology,” explained Anna Levitin, Email and Marketing Operations Lead at Powtoon. 

With a combined database that appeals to both B2C and B2B audiences, plus a massive send volume of 10 million emails per month, Powtoon’s marketing team of two knew their previous email service provider (ESP) couldn’t scale to harness the high volumes of data and personalization of email content.

They sought a long-lasting partner with a shared focus on innovation, differentiation, growth, and long-term success to support the following priorities:

• Unification + activation of B2C and B2B targeting: It was important to keep their B2C and B2B targeting initiatives under one umbrella since both were managed by one team—which wasn’t possible with their former ESP. Harmonious management facilitates a smooth transition from B2C users shifting to B2B while providing a combined picture of the multi-segment user database. Plus, avoiding multiple ESP contracts protects business costs and the bottom line.
• Integration with existing martech tools: When you consider time spent to adopt a new platform, the chosen solution must seamlessly integrate with the existing martech stack architecture, optimizing all information to elevate marketing planning, execution, and outcomes. Instead of jumping between many applications, Powtoon wanted one source of truth—a place where they and other business teams could manage all email campaign activity and find all data.

Iterable provides Powtoon that single source of truth, seamlessly integrating with their martech stack, and leveraging mass amounts of data to enhance marketing agility and create targeted communications. Now, Powtoon can dynamically personalize all subscriber emails—seasonal, new member, and brand-specific.

Plus, with their former ESP, support hours didn’t align with Powtoon’s business hours, which caused a delay in responses to questions or issues. Thanks to Iterable’s global presence and a comprehensive knowledge center, Powtoon’s small Email and Marketing Ops team now has round-the-clock, at-the-ready Iterable staff helping with unexpected challenges, problem solving, and facilitating on-the-fly adjustments, if needed.

Iterable Journeys Give Power Back to Marketers

Previously, with the old ESP, when a new member attribute was added to the user profile, marketing relied on the R&D and Developer teams to make these updates, which could sometimes take up to a few weeks.

With Iterable, it’s easy for the marketing team to add new member attributes—using the User Profile tile—in a journey in a matter of minutes. For instance, when a new B2B user starts a trial with Powtoon, they know when the user started and how—whether they were invited by another user or registered directly online. This information comes into Iterable as event data that triggers the journey, which they can then easily add to a user’s profile for more personalized messaging.

Iterable and Snowflake Unlock Data for Better Enterprise Targeting and Closed Deals

Increasingly, Powtoon has discovered that B2C users don’t always know about their new enterprise solution, providing increased opportunities for conversion. 6sense is Powtoon’s account-based marketing (ABM) platform, and when B2C users register for Powtoon, marketing receives profile and intent data from 6sense. It’s basic profile information (e.g. company, department, and location), which is merged with more customer profile data in Snowflake, and signals to marketing what leads may benefit from the enterprise offering. 

With the Iterable-Snowflake data sharing integration, Powtoon now optimizes the merged 6sense and Snowflake data in Iterable, and applying user attributes, further segments these B2C leads by departments—marketing, human resources, learning and development, and sales. Instead of joining the regular onboarding journey, this audience is added to a different journey with touchpoints and content applicable to their work, encouraging their transition to the enterprise subscription. 

In the last four months, 6,000 B2C Powtoon users have entered this personalized journey, and subsequently, sales closed seven enterprise deals, with another eight in progress. 

Personalized Promotions with Snippets Boost Powtoon Onboarding

Promotions play an important role in targeting and attracting users, and can elevate awareness in a noisy environment, especially with new members. On occasion, marketing needs to update new user welcome messages to feature promotions and with the goal of enhancing multi-audience subscriptions.

Before, it was difficult to update the onboarding flow and the team of two had to update each email manually. It took time and resources they didn’t have. Snippets in Iterable–reusable content blocks that can be added to a template—now make it easy and quick to create or modify welcome messages in bulk that feature a unique promotion. “Our snippet has the promotional banner with a combination of imagery and text that can be easily adjusted to change the onboarding flow and message,” Anna described during the Activate Amsterdam conference.  With snippets, teams can:

• Manage frequently used message elements like email headers and footers
• Store complex logic blocks
• Update multiple templates at the same time

Knowing on some occasions that a promotional campaign needs quick revision—maybe there’s a grammatical error or the images need updating, for example, Anna shared, “in one click, marketing can adjust a snippet” to course correct all associated templates in real time and enhance results.

With a more favorable onboarding experience, supported by Iterable, Powtoon is adding more than 250,000 new registered users per month. Of the 250,000, 73% reflect multiple professional specialties—education, small and midsize business (SMB), and non-profit, and 27% use Powtoon for their personal video creations and presentations. 

With continued partnership from Iterable, Snowflake, and 6sense, Powtoon is excited about the possibilities ahead to deepen their subscriber base. They plan to dig in further with segmentation in the onboarding journey and focus on user milestones that occur during a free trial. Marketing is also excited to increase paid user conversions by prioritizing feature adoption that supports subscription purchases and will concentrate on transitioning Powtoon Capture and Powtoon AI solution users to full-fledged enterprise subscribers.