User Guide

Iterable is a multi-channel marketing platform with which customers can manage contact lists, create and send blast and triggered campaigns, use journeys to send campaigns to contacts based on their profile and behavioral data, run experiments to improve campaign effectiveness, and report on campaign performance.

Iterable supports various message mediums (availability and cost subject to contract): email, push notification, in-app message, SMS, and web push notification.

This document describes Iterable’s core functionality.

Table of contents

• Organizations
• Projects
• Project settings
• Contacts
• Events
• Lists and segmentation
• Templates
• Campaigns
• Journeys
• Experiments
• Reports and dashboards
• APIs

Organizations

To represent a company’s members, data, projects, and configuration, Iterable uses an organization. Organizations provide:

• Administrative settings
  • Member management (member creation, account details, and project assignments)
  • Permission management (roles and their appointment)
  • Authentication options (specification of a login mechanism)
  • Billing information (credit card details)
• Projects (settings, resources, content, contacts, data, etc.)

Projects

An Iterable organization can have multiple projects, each of which is a grouping of settings, resources, content, contacts, data, etc. Projects provide a place for associated team members to build campaigns that use shared resources such as lists, templates, etc.

Projects provide:

• Project settings (configuration details)
• Contacts (potential recipients and information about them)
• Events (generated or ingested data that’s related to Iterable or customer activity)
• Lists and segmentation (contact groupings based on manual specification or dynamic search criteria)
• Templates (customizable message content that can be cloned, modified, and used in campaigns)
• Campaigns (messages sent to lists or individuals, triggered in assorted ways, and targeting various message mediums)
• Journeys (custom, multi-step, multi-branch processes by which Iterable structures interaction with contacts)
• Experiments (multi-variation campaigns attempting to optimize for a specific outcome)
• Reports and dashboards (descriptions of campaign performance over time)
• APIs (programmatic interfaces by which Iterable allows interaction with some of its data and functionality)

Project settings

Iterable projects provide assorted configuration settings. For example, various project settings include:

• Logo
• Physical address
• Time zone
• Email domain and sender configuration (domains and addresses used when sending campaigns)
• Link tracking configuration (domains used to capture information about campaign link clicks)
• Message channels and types (categories by which contacts can opt in or out of specific types of messages)

Contacts

Contacts are the people for whom an Iterable project has created profiles. Projects can create contact profiles in various scenarios; for example, when updating lists or ingesting events.

For any contact, Iterable can save information such as an email address, demographic data and preferences, campaign engagement events and custom events generated by interactions with a customer website or application. Iterable can use a contact’s saved data as the basis for features such as list segmentation, campaign personalization, and journey filtering.

Events

Iterable saves events to represent particular moments of activity initiated by or related to a project’s contacts. For example, Iterable can create events for email opens, email link clicks, and list subscribes/unsubscribes. Events contain various fields that capture further contextual information.

Additionally, Iterable’s API can ingest custom events. Custom events represent information about specific actions taken by or related to particular contacts. Frequently, websites and applications send custom events to Iterable when contacts complete notable tasks.

Lists and segmentation

Lists are groups of contacts. They can be defined statically (by adding and removing specific contacts) or dynamically (by using a search query to find, at the time the list is used, all contacts who match specific criteria). Campaigns can target static and dynamic lists.

Members can create the search queries that define dynamic lists, searching against contact profile and event data.

Templates

Templates define a starting point for content that campaigns can use in messages. When a campaign uses a template, Iterable copies it so that it can be modified as necessary without impacting existing campaigns.

Templates also specify relevant, message medium-specific configuration information such as sender and subject (email), title and body (push notifications) or icon (web push notification). Iterable allows template creation for all its supported message mediums: email, push notification, in-app message, SMS, and web push notification.

Templates can be cloned, modified, and dynamically customized at send time.

Campaigns

Campaigns send messages, customizing their associated template’s content at send time for each recipient (using contact profile data and campaign triggering event data, if applicable). Blast campaigns send messages to selected contact lists one time or on a recurring schedule. Triggered campaigns send messages to individual contacts or lists when Iterable receives a triggering API call. Journeys can also trigger campaign sends.

Iterable can send campaigns for any of its associated message mediums: email, push notification, in-app message, SMS, or web push notification.

Journeys

Journeys are multi-step customer interactions you can build in Iterable. You can use journeys to send messages, add or remove users from lists, make user profile updates, and more! With journeys, you can create personalized, contextual brand interactions for all of your users.

There are various ways for contacts to enter journeys (for example, by API call, custom event creation, or any of various campaign interactions). In a journey, contacts progress from step to step and path to path as they do things such as interact with Iterable campaigns, use websites and mobile apps that send custom events to Iterable, match filter queries (or not), and wait for specified delays. Each step in a journey can take an action such as modifying a contact’s profile, filtering a contact to a different journey path (or out of the journey altogether), or sending a campaign.

Experiments

Experiments help members optimize a campaign’s outcome for a selected perfomance metric (such as opens or clicks). To do this, they facilitate the creation and sending of multiple variations of a campaign, measure the selected performance outcome for each variation, and in some cases use the winning variation to optimize remaining sends.

Reports and dashboards

Reports and dashboards allow you to generate charts, graphs, and tables that display specific or aggregate campaign and journey-related metrics. Iterable hosts these reports, and members can view them as necessary.

APIs

Iterable projects provide various APIs: programmatic interfaces by which clients can interact with some of the project’s data and functionality. These APIs require authentication with project-specific API keys provided by the Iterable web app and can be used to do things such as modify contact profiles, save custom events, and trigger campaigns.