About Zigzag Puppy Training
Zigzag Puppy Training is the leading app entirely dedicated to supporting users through every stage of puppyhood. It offers simple, bite-sized lessons tailored to each pup’s specific breed and age, empowering pet parents to build an extraordinary bond with their dogs. Their mission is to bring peace of mind throughout a dog’s life, fostering happy and confident companions, wherever they are in the world.
Ed's Bio
Ed has been working in CRM for so long, he can remember when it was called email marketing. His 15 year career has seen him work in gaming, eCommerce, B2B and finally subscription (where he feels he’s doing his best work). He’s no stranger to getting down in the trenches to find a technical workaround in lieu of an out-the-box solution.
Fun Facts
Promotions
Featured Quote
As a subscription app, we have such a small window of opportunity to impress and delight our users. Every communication has to be relevant and helpful. Iterable helps us ensure we’re leveraging user data at the right time, with the right message.
Interview
When and how did you get your start in marketing?
I fell into it while working in Customer Services for a Gadget company in the late noughties (think sharper image, but for cool toys for grown ups). The Creative Director and co-founder offered me a secondment as a copywriter, and I graduated to email marketing, whilst also dabbling in Music PR for 5 years. The rest is history.
What brings you joy in your role?
When you know that the campaign you’ve been crafting is actually achieving its intended goal. We do a lot of educational campaigns to increase engagement due to the nature of our app, and cutting through the noise is a daily challenge.
What tips, tricks, or pieces of advice would give a new Iterable user?
They have a wealth of FAQs and courses – take advantage of them! CRM is constantly evolving, and they provide amazing resources to stay ahead of the curve.
What led you to choose Iterable over others in the market?
They very much gave the impression that support wouldn’t stop once we’d signed on – and they lived up to it! We never feel like we’re “just another client”. They’re great communicators, and they’re always willing to help us work through any of the knottier challenges we face.
What does customer experience mean to you, and how does Iterable play a
role?
As a subscription app, we have such a small window of opportunity to impress and delight our users. Every communication has to be relevant and helpful. Iterable helps us ensure we’re leveraging user data at the right time, with the right message.
As a consumer, what brings you joy from a brand’s outreach/communication?
When you can tell it’s considered, based on information you’ve shared with them, and helps solve a problem.
What would you like to see brands doing more of? Or less of?
I’d like to see a lot less guilt-trip messaging. It was cute when the first abandoned basket/engagement messages started using it, but now it’s so ubiquitous it just makes me roll my eyes. Life gets hectic sometimes – the last thing I need is an owl expressing their disappointment in me.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
“You’ve been hired because you’re an expert in your field – if you have something to say, we want to hear it!” Impostor syndrome can be a daily struggle, but you need to remember that you’re at the table because somebody wants you there.
If you came with a warning label, what would it say?
He’s not angry, his face just does that when he’s thinking.
Campaign Portfolio
Zigzag Puppy Training’s Personalized Training Reminders
Objective
To significantly increase the completion rate of puppy training lessons within the Zigzag Puppy Training app, thereby demonstrating the app's value and improving user retention during the crucial early months of a puppy's training.
Summary
Zigzag Puppy Training created a daily training reminder journey, dynamically adapted to individual user behavior, specifically tracking lesson completion in the prior 24 hours and users who highlighted any lessons needing more practice. The journey delivered one of three message streams daily: congratulatory for recent completion, encouraging a user who hadn't completed a lesson the previous day, or a reminder to practice their highlighted lesson. To prevent message fatigue and ensure variety, a robust randomization system was employed. This involved creating 10 unique push notifications for each of the three message streams, totaling 30 distinct messages. Logic within the journey ensured that users received a different numbered message each day within a ten-day cycle, regardless of the stream they qualified for, resulting in a vast number of potential notification sequences.
Results
This dynamic and highly randomized training reminder journey led to a 40% increase in the lesson completion conversion metric over a three-month period when compared to the previous, less randomized reminder system which used the same message content. This significant improvement in a core engagement metric contributed to Zigzag Puppy Training winning the Growth Team Of The Year award at the 2024 App Growth Awards, highlighting the effectiveness of this approach in driving user engagement and achieving the company's goal of promoting pup happiness through consistent training.
Personalized Training Reminders in Action
These messages showcase examples of the personalized push notifications implemented as part of the Zigzag Puppy Training campaign. The notification on the left exemplifies the “Encouragement” stream, prompting a user who may not have recently trained their pet (“Keef”) to dedicate just five minutes. The notification on the right demonstrates the “Training” stream, reminding a user of the long-term benefits of consistent training and encouraging them to complete another lesson with their puppy (“Keef”).
