Instead, send time optimization, as a concept, uses data science and artificial intelligence to automatically find the ideal time to send emails or notifications to each customer. By taking into account individual behaviors, such as usage patterns and open times, the tool can send a message when contacts are most likely to be looking at their inbox or glancing at their phone. That’s a powerful and effective way to bolster the odds of engagement.

How Does Iterable’s Send Time Optimization (STO) Work?

Iterable’s Send Time Optimization (STO) feature—part of Iterable’s AI Suite—relies on a target market’s engagement data. As every marketer knows, there’s no shortage of data when it comes to crafting and sending email campaigns. But, analyzing that data to produce actionable insights requires machine learning—unless you want to do it manually. Behind the scenes, STO uses real-time AI to analyze individual behaviors, like usage patterns and open times. The tool then predicts an optimal time to send a marketing message so that the message reaches the individual at a time they are most likely to see and engage with it.

The more data an AI tool has about an individual, the more refined that timing can become. STO aggregates data across a customer’s entire lifecycle. That means optimized send times aren’t set in stone. As an individual’s behavior shifts over time, the real-time AI tool captures and integrates that new data into the overall analysis. More recent data is more heavily weighted than historical data.

Engagement is the overarching goal when it comes to marketing communications and when to send them. However, specific metrics vary by platform. For email campaigns, Send Time Optimization tries to maximize two metrics: the open rate (calculated by comparing the unique opens or clicks to the total number of emails delivered) and the click rate (calculated by comparing the unique email clicks to the total emails delivered). For push notification campaigns, STO focuses on maximizing the open rate metric (calculated by comparing the unique pushes opened to the total pushes delivered).

Benefits of Send Time Optimization

Think of STO as the next evolution of marketing. In the early days of email marketing, for example, sending communications was a fairly manual process, and timing was based on a best guess. As email marketing matured, marketers pushed past generic email rules—like aiming for midweek or mid-morning messages—to create segmented lists. They would then target those segments by time zones or through strategies like A/B testing to vary email delivery and increase engagement.

STO takes that refinement even further. For example, two people on a segmented marketing list may share an incredible amount of overlap—from demographics to buyer’s journeys, engagement levels to brand loyalty—and still have dramatically different behaviors in terms of when they engage with their marketing communications. Send Time Optimization takes the guesswork out of timing marketing communications by using real data and powerful machine learning to target every customer as individuals.

While STO doesn’t guarantee higher engagement, it can increase the likelihood that messages will be sent and received at times when individuals are most likely to open and engage with those marketing messages. And there’s no question that reaching individuals when they’re most receptive to messages is a powerful differentiator in the world of marketing.

Send Time Optimization as Part of a Cross-Channel Campaign

Cross-channel marketing is all about connecting with customers across a cohesive customer journey—and sustaining that brand engagement as they move from passing contact to brand loyalist. Send time optimization can help drive home those goals, with minimal marketing effort.

How? Well, personalization is paramount when sending marketing communications. But that doesn’t only mean the marketing content should be tailored to the recipient. By also personalizing exactly when a message is sent to the individual, it’s possible to foster more (and more meaningful) connections between your brand and the customer. Rather than get lost in the slew of messages, a marketer can reach the top of someone’s inbox exactly when they’re most likely to be opening up their email. And push notifications can shift from generic, blasted sends to a more personalized delivery cadence that feels more useful and relevant. It can even help an individual feel seen and understood by the brand.

Given the number of marketing channels available, reaching an individual on the right channel and at the right time can be challenging. By leveraging the power of AI, Iterable’s Send Time Optimization makes it that much easier for marketers to personalize delivery and, ultimately, engage the people they’re trying to reach.

If you’re interested in learning more about STO, reach out to your CSM or schedule a demo today.

The post What is Send Time Optimization? appeared first on Iterable.

An example of a welcome journey built in Iterable Studio. Source: Studio Support.

A Checklist for QAing Journeys

As much as I wish I could build a new journey every day, launching a new one happens just infrequently enough that I have to re-collect my processes every time to make sure I’ve properly reviewed everything. So to do “Future Jeanette” and my colleagues a favor—and to be able to confidently hit that little green “publish” button—I pulled together this checklist template to help QA a journey before it goes live.

Download the full PDF template before you QA your next Journey.

Journey Details

We have a QA template we use that we copy, fill out, and review for each item (in this case, journeys). At the top, we have all the key info about the journey, including:

• Journey link and name (so you know you’re all looking at the same thing!)
• Key details about how it works, such as audience and trigger, and when you plan to have it start running
• Link to any docs you used for content planning as a reference point

Triggers

Your trigger is what you use to make sure the right users enter your journey at the right time. Some key elements to consider:

• Did you test the trigger? How did you test it?
• Maximum entries settings
• Simultaneous entry settings
• Did you check the parameters on the trigger? (Including within a scheduled list, if that’s the type of trigger you’re using)
• End date sendings (or set to never if you don’t want it to end)

Journey Operations

• Are all your tiles connected?
• Have you set your exit rules to correctly manage your audience?
• Have you included any suppression lists in either (or both!) the trigger and/or as an exit rule?

Messages

• Are all messages from the content source-of-truth accounted for?
• Have you QAed them according to whatever your QA process is for each message?
• Does the message type fit the audience entering your journey?
• Have you turned on conversion tracking, Send Time Optimization (STO), and quiet hours where it makes sense to do so?

The Checklist, Explained

The list speaks for itself (and everyone will have different things they add or subtract over time), but there are certain items on the template I think it’s important to emphasize or explain further.

Reviewing the Journey

We make a point of having a person that’s not the builder review the journey, but recognize that option is not always available. If you’re a team of one, I’d suggest adding a step where you verbally walk through each piece of the journey for a friend, your pet, or another captive audience member.

Keeping Notes

Labeling is key, as is our Notes feature. I often use one note to keep an abridged change log for the journey, and notes within specific tiles carry info about everything from quirks of the segmentation in a Yes/No tile, to ideas we’d like to test in a future email. 

Example of a note that can be attached to a Tile within Iterable Studio.

With the Labels and other info provided in each tile, whoever is serving as the pre-launch QA reviewer should be able to understand your journey without you needing to verbally tell them exactly what each tile is doing. (Think of Notes and Labels as a favor to Future You. With them, you won’t have to open each and every tile looking for the one Yes/No segment to which you need to make a teensy adjustment.)

Considering Individual Campaigns

The message-related items in this checklist are focused on what you can manipulate on the journey level, without opening the campaign. Our email QA process is separate from this, but I cannot emphasize enough that each message (whether it’s email or another channel) should also go through a rigorous process that includes sending a proof to multiple people, who will look at it on multiple devices, and click all the links.

Come Back for Seconds

It’s easy to forget this invisible checklist item. Make sure you set time to go back and review your journey. This is important so you can check on how it’s performing and also see if there’s anyone going somewhere they shouldn’t. The first time you check up on it should be as soon as possible after you expect the first users to enter. 

I can’t speak to our entire customer base, but personally I think the most common mistake I’ve made with journeys is accidentally blocking everyone from entering the journey!

Adding Experimentation

The lack of mention of experiments in this checklist is deliberate. You are free to choose your own adventure, but when launching something new, I prefer to keep it clean of experiments. That way, if something isn’t happening quite as expected, I’ll have an easier time troubleshooting without the additional “noise” of an experiment. The initial goal of journey building is to establish a performance baseline to help measure success against.

If you’re nervous about launching a journey, however, you can always add an A/B split tile just after the trigger, and adjust the percentage feeding into the actual journey before you turn it on. 

Go one extra step to add a “Subscribe to List” tile to capture whoever doesn’t enter the rest of the journey, and now you’ve got a holdout group you can track performance against to show your journey’s impact!

In the journey below, you can see I’ve adjusted the A/B split tile so that only 10% of the audience will be fed into the actual journey. The remaining 90% is tracked by getting added to a list. As you can see, this lowers the risk of launch while also providing a method for us to see the lift this journey can create with your audience. I’ve also left a clear note as to when the split tile should be removed so that the full audience can go through the entire journey.

Journey showing A/B split tile with 10% of the audience being fed into the actual journey.

Get Out of Your Own Way

Don’t let the perfect journey in your head prevent you from launching the good-enough journey in your project. Sure, maybe it would be better if you could get a different event built, or maybe you want to do fancier emails than you have right now. But if you have something that works, get it going so you can gather more info while you fine-tune…and, dare I say, iterate.

To learn more about Iterable Studio, reach out to your CSM. Or, if you’re not yet an Iterable user, schedule a custom demo today.

The post Creating an Iterable Journey Pre-Flight Checklist appeared first on Iterable.

The Expies recognize and celebrate Iterable customers and partners who are leveraging Iterable to deliver joyful experiences with harmonized, individualized, and dynamic communications at scale.

Like we’ve said before, “businesses often strive to sell. Make sales, close deals, generate leads—you know the drill. But making sales would be close to impossible without the support from the marketers behind the scenes. If sales are the fire, marketing is the coal, fueling success.

The Expies celebrate those marketers and marketing teams that go above and beyond. They ignite the flame of inspiration and spark thoughtful, innovative ways to drive growth and build customer relationships.”

The Iterable Expie Awards

The Expies were designed to showcase customers and partners that leverage Iterable to power world-class communication. From extraordinary customer experiences to authentic, emotional connections, Expie Award nominees and winners raise the bar for marketers all over the world.

We received countless applications for the 2024 Iterable Expie Awards, but could only choose a select few as our finalists. They’re the best of the best. The fuel behind the fire.

The 2024 Expie Award Finalists

The Iterable Expie award finalist list includes individuals and brands from around the world: Guild, Peet’s Coffee, Dotdash Meredith, PGA of America, Rover, Fender, Redbubble, Wolt, Redfin, Booksy, IPSY, Care.com.

This year we’re also introducing our Next-Gen Innovators Award, which is given to marketers who are embracing change, pushing boundaries, and turning ideas into impactful realities. With multiple winners, we aren’t announcing finalists ahead of time, but stay tuned!

Best AI-Powered Customer Experience

AI is making the lives of marketers not only easier but more efficient. Gone are the days of being worried about being replaced by robots. Top marketers are embracing the benefits Iterable’s AI Suite has to offer. The Best AI-Powered Customer Experience award recognizes those marketers who have grabbed AI by the horns and used tools like Iterable’s Brand Affinity , Send Time Optimization (STO), Copy Assist, and more—throughout the entire customer journey.

Most Inspiring Switch to Iterable

Have you switched to Iterable from another platform in the past year? This award celebrates the team that embraced adaptation, revision, and change by making the switch to Iterable. This team hit the ground running and has a success story that will inspire and excite others looking to do the same.

Best Use of Cross-Channel Marketing

Consumer messaging is, more often than not, inconsistent across channels. Many consumers receive a fragmented experience as they engage with a brand across multiple channels. That’s what makes individualization and cross-channel communication essential in today’s market.

The Best Use of Cross-Channel Marketing award celebrates Iterable customers who are making every interaction part of a holistic cross-channel experience by leveraging multiple channels throughout the customer journey, such as SMS, push, in-app, embedded messaging, and more, to enhance their brand’s reach and engagement.

Most Individualized Customer Experience

Marketers today have access to more data than ever before but also have to stand out amidst hundreds of messages for each consumer every day.

The Most Individualized Customer Experience award celebrates the brands that are able to activate their data in unique ways that drive individualized experiences for customers at scale.

Winners Coming Soon…

The anticipation is killing us! If you’re feeling the same way, don’t fret—we’ll be announcing the winners of the Iterable Expies at our signature conference, Activate Summit, and, with that, the winners of our Next-Gen Innovators Award and partner awards: Agency Partner of the Year and Technology Partner of the Year.

We hope this lights a fire under you and your team to get out there and continue executing some world-class marketing strategies.

If you want to see who wins and you’re looking for even more marketing inspiration, be sure to register for Activate Summit, coming to you live in San Jose, April 30-May 2.

The post Announcing the 2024 Iterable Expies Finalists appeared first on Iterable.

With automation, marketers can set up sequences of emails triggered by specific actions subscribers take or time intervals, allowing for targeted and timely engagement with their audience. Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, mastering email marketing automation can significantly enhance your marketing efforts and increase your return on investment (ROI).

This article will discuss the various aspects of email marketing automation, how to use it, its benefits, and the steps for building your own automation. Keep reading to learn more about email automation and how to set up a workflow.

• What is Email Marketing Automation?
• How to Use Automation in Email Marketing
• What Are the Benefits of Email Automation?
• How to Build Automated Email Campaigns
• Email Marketing Automation Tips
• Revolutionize Your Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing Automation?

Email marketing automation involves the automated delivery of tailored and individualized emails to subscribers or customers triggered by predefined actions, events, or timing parameters.

Automated email marketing allows marketers to create dynamic and highly relevant campaigns that engage recipients at the right moment with the right content, enhancing the customer experience, driving conversions, and improving the effectiveness of their email marketing.

Simply put, email marketing automation allows marketers to set up sequences of emails that are automatically sent to subscribers based on specific criteria or user interactions. These criteria can include signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, abandoning a shopping cart, clicking on a particular link, and more.

How to Use Automation in Email Marketing

So, what can you do with email marketing automation? Here are several ways you can use it in your marketing strategy:

• Abandoned cart reminders: Abandoned cart emails are triggered when customers add items to their cart but fail to complete the purchase. Automation allows you to send timely reminders to encourage them to return and complete their transaction. These dynamic emails often include details of the items left in the cart, compelling visuals, and a clear call-to-action (CTA) to prompt the customer to revisit the website and finalize their purchase.
• Re-engagement campaigns: Over time, subscribers may become disengaged or inactive. Re-engagement campaigns can help rekindle their interest and bring them back into the fold. Automated emails may offer incentives, exclusive promotions, or valuable content to reignite their interest and encourage them to interact with your brand again after a set period of no or little interaction.
• Onboarding workflows: Onboarding workflows are automated communications that introduce new subscribers to your business, set expectations, and guide them through onboarding. Automated emails, for example, could be triggered when someone subscribes to your email list.
• Drip campaigns: Drip campaigns can use automated emails to nurture leads, guiding them through the sales funnel over time. By segmenting your audience based on their interests, behaviors, or demographics, you can use automation to deliver targeted content and offers at each stage of their journey.

What are the Benefits of Email Automation?

While one-off promotional emails can be effective at delivering specific messages or offers to your audience, email automation offers several distinct advantages. By automating your email marketing efforts, you can achieve greater efficiency, consistency, and personalization in your marketing strategy. Here’s a breakdown of some key advantages of automating emails:

• Increase efficiency: Automation eliminates manual tasks associated with email marketing, such as individually crafting and sending emails, managing subscriber lists, and tracking campaign performance. Automating these repetitive processes can save time, reduce workload, and focus your efforts on more strategic activities.
• Enhance customer experiences: Automation allows for highly targeted and personalized communication with subscribers, delivering content and promotions based on data like their interests, behaviors, and preferences. By sending timely and tailored emails, you can provide a more engaging and seamless experience, fostering stronger customer relationships.
• Drive engagement: You can trigger automated emails based on specific subscriber actions or events, such as website visits, purchases, or form submissions. By delivering relevant content at the right moment, automation helps keep subscribers engaged with your brand, encouraging them to take the desired actions.
• Minimize errors: Automation reduces the risk of human error associated with manual email marketing processes, such as typos, incorrect segmentation, or missed deadlines. With predefined workflows and automated quality checks, you can ensure emails are sent accurately and consistently.
• Optimize resource management: By automating routine tasks and workflows, you can make better use of your resources, including time and budget. Email marketing automation allows you to achieve more with less to scale your marketing efforts without significantly increasing overhead costs or administrative burdens.

How to Build Automated Email Campaigns

Building automated campaigns requires you to have email marketing automation software that lets you create workflows, segment your audience, personalize content, and schedule emails.. Once you’re ready to begin, here’s how to build an automated email campaign:

1. Establish the goals of your campaign: Clearly define the objectives you want to achieve with your automated email campaign. Whether it’s increasing sales, nurturing leads, driving website traffic, or improving customer retention, having specific goals will guide your email marketing strategy.
2. Choose the right email automation software: Select an email automation platform that aligns with your needs, budget, and technical requirements. Look for features like workflow automation, audience segmentation capabilities, testing, analytics, and integration with other tools or platforms.
3. Segment your email list: Separate your email list into segments based on criteria such as demographics, behaviors, purchase history, or engagement levels. Segmentation lets you deliver more targeted and personalized content to different groups of subscribers, increasing relevance and effectiveness.
4. Build your workflows: Map out the customer journey and create automated workflows that guide subscribers through various stages of the campaign. Define triggers and actions that will initiate each email sequence, such as sign-ups, purchases, or specific interactions with your website or content.
5. Create your content: Develop compelling dynamic content for each email in your automated campaign. Tailor your messaging to resonate with your target audience’s needs, interests, and preferences. Use persuasive copywriting, eye-catching visuals, and clear CTAs to drive engagement and conversions.
6. Test and send: Conduct thorough testing before launching your automated email campaigns to ensure everything works as intended. Test for email rendering across different devices and email clients, check for broken links and formatting issues, and review the automation workflow for any errors or gaps. You can also use seed testing to ensure your email reaches subscribers’ inboxes. Once confident in your campaign setup, you can schedule or activate your automated emails.

Email Marketing Automation Tips

While email automation offers immense potential for driving engagement and conversions, its effectiveness depends on your strategic implementation of best practices. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a newcomer, using these tips can help you through the process of setting up your email marketing automation campaigns:

• Optimize your mobile content: With most email opens now happening on smartphones, it’s crucial to ensure that your emails are optimized for mobile. Your emails should look good and be easily read on smartphones and tablets. Consider factors like font size, image size, and button placement.
• Refine with A/B testing: A/B testing lets you compare two versions of an email to see which one performs better. You can test elements like subject lines, sender names, email copy, CTAs, or design elements to determine what resonates best with your audience.
• Track your results: Tracking and analyzing metrics is the only way to know how well your emails performed. Keep a close eye on email marketing KPIs like open rates, click-through rates, conversions, deliverability metrics, and unsubscribe rates to measure campaign performance.
• Follow all email marketing laws: Compliance with email marketing laws and regulations is non-negotiable. Make sure you’re familiar with and adhere to laws such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM. This means getting explicit consent from subscribers, providing clear opt-out mechanisms, including your physical address in emails, and honoring unsubscribe requests.

Revolutionize Your Email Marketing

With the right tools and best practices, you can use email marketing automation to streamline communication efforts, nurture leads, and drive conversions at scale. By embracing automation, you can deliver timely, personalized messages that speak to your audience, maximizing engagement.

Iterable is a cross-channel marketing platform with email marketing automation that empowers marketers to create, deploy, and optimize automated campaigns. With workflow automation, advanced segmentation capabilities, and robust analytics, Iterable provides everything you need to build and execute successful email—and cross-channel—campaigns.

To learn more about how Iterable can help you execute email marketing automation, schedule a demo today.

The post Email Marketing Automation: How to Automate Emails Like a Pro appeared first on Iterable.

Best Marketing & Digital Advertising Software Products

According to G2, “To qualify for the best Marketing Digital Advertising software list, products must be listed under one or more of the Marketing or Digital Advertising software categories.

Businesses use marketing and digital ad software to automate marketing processes, manage marketing and advertising campaigns, and measure marketing performance. These software solutions can be used to generate leads, promote products and services, manage customer data, improve customer experiences, and analyze marketing effectiveness.”

Marketing Automation by Iterable

Because the award is Best Software by Function, G2 assigns each marketing and digital advertising software a “main category.” Iterable falls under the Marketing Automation category.

G2 defines Marketing Automation software as a product that “automates marketing actions or tasks, streamlines marketing workflows, and measures the outcomes of marketing campaigns. These tools provide a central marketing database for all marketing information and interactions, helping marketers create segmented, personalized and timely marketing experiences for customers or prospects.”

With Iterable’s AI Suite, marketers can combine artificial intelligence and marketing automation to make customer communication not only easy, but impactful. With features like Send Time Optimization (STO), Channel Optimization, Frequency Optimization (beta), Copy Assist, Brand Affinity, and more, Iterable can take the manual guesswork out of sending the right marketing messages at the right time. Here’s how.

• Send Time Optimization (STO): “Send Time Optimization (STO) is an Iterable AI feature that helps send email and push notifications when your contacts are most likely to engage with them. For each campaign recipient, STO analyzes historical engagement behavior and selects an optimal, per-person send time.”
• Channel Optimization: “When a user arrives in a Channel Optimization send tile in a journey, Iterable analyzes their historical data and sends the message to the channel it determines they’re most likely to engage with. Data is analyzed on a weekly basis to account for changes in channel preference.”
• Frequency Optimization (beta): “This feature uses Iterable AI to maximize engagement by adjusting how many email, SMS, and/or push notifications each user receives in a given period of time, based on their historical engagement data. For more information about beta testing this feature, talk to your Iterable customer success manager.”
• Copy Assist: This “Iterable AI feature that enhances and expedites the process of writing copy for your campaigns. When you’re creating a campaign or template, enter text as you always do, and Copy Assist generates alternative suggestions for you to consider.”
• Brand Affinity: “Brand Affinity uses Iterable AI to label your users based on their historical level of engagement with your brand. You can use these labels in segmentation, campaigns, journeys, data feeds, and Catalog collections to send personalized, relevant messages to your customers.”

In addition to the AI Suite, Iterable’s key features support cross-channel automation. Take Iterable Studio, for example. This journey-building tool allows marketers to create an automated user journey via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

This is an example of a welcome sequence that not only uses tilesets, but AI as well.

This tool can be used to automate marketing messages across various channels, at certain times, to specific segments. You can even perform automated A/B tests within Studio to maximize engagement. It’s no wonder Iterable fits into G2’s Marketing Automation category.

Why Iterable Fits the Bill

G2 actually has a list of features for a software to be considered as a Marketing Automation software, making it even clearer why Iterable fits the bill. To qualify for inclusion in the Marketing Automation category, a product must, among other factors:

• Automate two or more of the following: email, social media, SMS, and digital ads
• Provide advanced email marketing capabilities including A/B testing, spam filter testing, scheduling, segmentation, and detailed performance reporting
• Act as a central marketing database for marketing information and interactions
• Allow dynamic segmentation of marketing campaign targets
• Contact targets across multiple channels after specific actions, triggers, or periods of time
• Provide analytics and reports that track the entire lifecycle of a campaign, including ties to revenue and/or campaign ROI

In addition, these following metrics affect a company’s Satisfaction rating:

• Customer satisfaction with end user-focused product attributes based on user reviews
• Popularity and statistical significance based on the number of reviews received by G2
• Quality of reviews received (reviews that are more thoroughly completed will be weighted more heavily)
• Age of reviews (more-recent reviews provide relevant and up-to-date information that is reflective of the current state of a product)
• Customers’ satisfaction with administration-specific product attributes based on user reviews
• Overall customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score® (NPS) based on ratings by G2 users

What Our Customers Say About Us

“I love the user friendly interface, especially for someone who is coming more from the marketing side, without a ton of technical experience. The flows and journeys are easy to build and the capabilities are very advanced. In addition, I appreciate that Iterable is always looking to improve their product and has a future-oriented mindset, introducing features such as their AI Suite and Copy Assist, which can help automate more of the operational work & inspire new ideas. Not least, our CSM is very involved & helpful with our questions & ideas, so the support is appreciated.”

– Sanda Z. (Mid-Market 51-1000 emp.)

“Innovative staying ahead of the curve in the tech space. One of the best workflow building and segmentation tool.”

– Kaylyn K. (Small-Business 50 or fewer emp.)

“I am newer to Iterable (~7 mos), and have previously used competitors including Mailchimp, Braze, and Hubspot. So far, some key pro’s to using Iterable include the user friendly interface and a responsive customer support team.”

– Julia A. Mid-Market 51-1000 emp.)

Thank you to our amazing customers for their partnership in maintaining Iterable as one of the best Best Marketing & Digital Advertising Products on the market!

Looking to learn more about Iterable? Schedule a demo today.

The post Iterable Named a 2024 Best Software by G2 appeared first on Iterable.

This single-channel strategy might have worked in a simpler era, but today’s customers are digital nomads, seamlessly transitioning between platforms and devices. They adopt new channels and can even abandon old, tried-and-true channels when they no longer benefit from them.

Additionally, when customers see disparate, disconnected messages on different channels from a single brand, it can feel like those messages are coming from different companies altogether. In modern marketing, truly reaching and resonating with customers requires a holistic strategy that transcends the limitations of a single touchpoint. Consistent messaging needs to move across marketing channels—a.k.a. cross-channel marketing.

Why Cross-Channel Marketing is Essential

Cross-channel marketing isn’t about blasting generic messages across multiple platforms. It’s about orchestrating a personalized, unified customer experience, ensuring consistent branding and messaging across all touchpoints. Cross-channel marketing not only benefits the customer, it benefits your brand too.

Reach Customers Where They Are

Single channel campaigns can miss some customers entirely if that particular channel is not the one that customers are actively using. By reaching them on their preferred platforms with relevant messages, cross-channel marketing allows for a much higher likelihood of those messages to be seen and interacted with.

Tip: Marketing platforms that are driven by historical data and AI can allow marketers to easily set up campaigns that automatically leverage channels that customers interact with most. Best-practice marketing organizations will ensure that their martech platforms can do this with ease.

Boost Engagement & Conversions

Imagine a customer browsing a product on your website. With cross-channel marketing, you might retarget them with a social media ad featuring the product they viewed, followed by a personalized email featuring that product and then, if they still haven’t interacted with your messaging, an SMS or push notification with a discount code.

This creates a cohesive experience that resonates with the customer and increases the chance of conversion. By tailoring communication to each channel and leveraging customer data for personalization, cross-channel marketing guides customers seamlessly through the buying journey, leading to significant improvements in engagement and conversion rates.

Tip: Map out each stage of the buyer’s journey and create templated content blocks for each stage and channel, leaving space for dynamic content snippets that contain personalized content for things like products viewed, sale prices and even promotion dates.

Build Stronger Customer Relationships

Consistency across touchpoints fosters trust and loyalty—the bedrock of any strong customer relationship. A single, impersonal message might be easily lost or dismissed, but a well-coordinated cross-channel campaign can create a lasting connection with your customers.

Cross-channel marketing allows you to deliver relevant content and offers at each stage of the buying journey. This can be easily done with best-in-class marketing platforms that leverage historical data on customer interactions to determine segments, channels, content and send times. This personalized approach shows the customer you care about their individual journey, rather than just a quick sale. This builds trust and fosters a sense of loyalty that goes beyond a single transaction.

Tip: In addition to where they are, think about when a customer is more likely to engage. Historical data should help inform when each customer is most active and knowing this, in addition to their preferred channel, can demonstrate that you really listen to your customers.

Fueling Cross-Channel Marketing Campaigns with Customer Data

If there’s one thing to take away from this post so far it’s that effective cross-channel marketing cannot exist without a strong foundation of quality customer data. This data allows you to personalize communication, tailor content to specific channels, and ultimately, create a seamless, individualized customer experience. Below are some key steps to developing a cross-channel marketing strategy built on customer data.

1. Create a Unified Customer View

The key is to establish a unified customer view. This is your single source of truth for customer profile and interaction data. This can be created within a traditional CDP (customer data platform) or data warehouse. This platform will be able to gather or ingest customer information from all touchpoints—website visits, social media interactions, email clicks, purchase history, etc.—and create a holistic customer profile.

For companies using a data warehouse, the approach might involve creating a central repository within the data warehouse that compiles customer data from various sources. This ensures a comprehensive understanding of each individual, enabling personalization across channels.

2. Segment Your Data

As we discussed in our recent blog post, Making Better Customer Segments and Why it Matters, effective segmentation goes beyond basic demographics and emphasizes building comprehensive customer profiles based on data points like purchase history, product preferences, message interactions, website visits, etc. to create highly targeted groups for personalized messaging.

Experienced cross channel marketing professionals, armed with modern platforms, leverage layers of segmentation which allow them to start with broad audiences—think, all customers who have opted in to marketing emails—and then whittle those groups down to smaller and smaller segments with layered segments for highly personalized messages. And the best part is that these layers can be reused repeatedly for future campaigns—small and large, specific and broad.

3. Automate Marketing Tasks

Choose a cross-channel marketing platform that integrates with your chosen data source and allows you to streamline the campaign creation process through AI-driven automation. Some notable Iterable examples are:

• Predictive Goals: An AI-driven feature that analyzes user behavior and predicts which users are most likely to perform certain actions based on business goals
• Copy Assist: which helps marketers generate copy for messages
• Send Time Optimization (STO): Another AI-driven feature that leverages customer interaction data to send messages at the most optimal time

Automating as much of the campaign creation process as possible, while still sending customers highly personalized, relevant campaigns, is a win for both the marketers who are being asked to do more with less and the customers who feel more connected to brands.

4. Track Cross-Channel Analytics

Lastly, track and analyze customer behavior across all channels by leveraging the analytics insights tools found within your cross-channel marketing platform. Firstly, with these insights you can keep a finger on the pulse of your active campaigns so that you can identify any potential issues before they become real problems.

Secondly, you’ll use them to monitor how well specific channels are performing as well as the content being leveraged within those channels. This will help you optimize where needed for active campaigns and inform your strategy for future campaigns. By continuously analyzing your data, you can refine your cross-channel strategy and create even more seamless customer journeys.

Remember, high-quality customer data is the fuel that drives a successful cross-channel marketing campaign. By implementing these steps, you can create a unified experience for your customers, regardless of the touchpoint, and ultimately achieve your marketing goals.

Build Connections Between Channels and With Customers

In the competitive world of modern marketing, a fragmented approach leaves your brand adrift in a sea of noise. Cross-channel marketing empowers you to break free from these limitations. By orchestrating a unified customer journey across all touchpoints, you can transform fleeting interactions into lasting customer relationships and ultimately, drive sustainable business growth.

To learn more about how Iterable can help you automate and optimize your cross-channel marketing campaigns, schedule a custom demo today.

The post Why Cross-Channel Marketing is Essential for Modern Businesses appeared first on Iterable.

In case you missed it, in previous posts, we covered:

• What marketers really think about generative AI
• How AI automation and optimization impacts today’s marketers
• Why explainability and optionality are the foundation and future of all AI marketing

We’re now concluding this series with an explainer on predictive AI. Once we reveal the current state of predictive AI, we’ll share a marketing success story and how to set up your marketing campaigns for success using Iterable’s Predictive Goals.

Let’s get started.

Want even more stats about AI marketing? Head to Ad Age now to download the full study.

What is Predictive AI?

Ad Age explains that marketers have been using artificial intelligence—despite its recent hype— for predictive analytics and personalized communications for many years. It defines predictive AI as using, “machine learning-based AI models [to] churn out customer insights and help marketers predict audiences and build segments for digital campaigns.”

When asked which type of AI would make marketers’ jobs easier, survey respondents listed predictive in the top four:

• Optimization (e.g. automatically recommending improvements): 57%
• Automation (e.g. machines automatically do tasks without intervention): 53%
• Predictive (e.g. segment most likely to convert): 50%
• Generative (e.g. content creation): 49%

That said, these categories aren’t mutually exclusive, and indeed, Ad Age mentions the benefits of using them in tandem:

“When combined with predictive analytics, AI-driven automation features can help marketers strengthen customer relationships, improve brand performance and meet their KPIs in today’s fast-moving marketplace.”

To demonstrate how predictive AI can positively impact your marketing campaigns, let’s walk through a case study of the technology-powered real estate brokerage, Redfin.

How Predictive AI Works

Iterable’s Predictive Goals feature analyzes your historical data and predicts which users are most likely to convert on your business goals in the future.

We gave a brief explainer of Predictive Goals in our last post on how the platform bridges the gap between insights and actions. Diving deeper here, you can use Predictive Goals for the following use cases:

• Identifying segments of users who are likely to convert on business goals you want to optimize—like purchases and clicks—or minimize—like returns or unsubscribes.
• Identifying which of your project’s relevant user properties and first-party data you want to increase or decrease in frequency to promote desired outcomes—like sending more special offers to the users who are most likely to make multiple purchases each month.
• Generating conversion probability scores for use in journeys to direct how users interact with your brand—like creating a loyalty campaign for users with strong scores.

With Iterable, you can create a new predictive goal from scratch or use one of the available templates displayed in the image above.

As always with any AI model, the larger the dataset, the more effective the outcomes. We recommend at least three to six months of historical data and 100,000 unique users to achieve a meaningful forecast.

Putting Predictive Goals Into Practice

You can create up to six predictive goals with Iterable’s AI suite. To build a predictive goal, use one of the predefined templates or criteria you specify based on your particular business goals.

In the example below, your goal criteria could look for users who might add at least one item to their carts OR redeem at least one promo code, AND who have a Premium account type within a given month.

Completely customize your Predictive Goals by setting specific goal criteria relevant to your business.

Once your Predictive Goals are built, you’ll see information about how likely users are to convert on your goal from the last refresh date through a 30-day period of time. Predictive Goals don’t have an end date, but instead “roll” from one refresh to the next, so you can keep an eye out for potential trends.

The dashboard also gauges predictive strength, telling you how reliable a prediction is likely to be from a range of weak to satisfactory to strong. This predictive strength is refreshed monthly to account for recent changes to relevant project-related data.

You can better understand your AI-powered predictions by evaluating each goal’s predictive strength.

There is so much to see underneath the hood of this robust feature, so be sure to check out our support articles on building and evaluating a predictive goal to learn more.

Redfin Lifts Conversions 72% With Predictive AI

Effective marketing is all about reaching people with the right message at the right time, and that’s never been truer than in real estate. With more than 50 million average monthly users across 100 markets, Redfin is the #1 real estate brokerage in the United States.

But despite its sizable audience, only a small percentage of Redfin users are active—meaning they’ve engaged with an email or visited Redfin’s website in the last 30 days. People don’t buy or sell a home frequently, so these actions are crucial early indicators that a user is ready to use Redfin’s services.

To take the guesswork and manual labor out of predicting the highest converting users, Redfin uses Predictive Goals, part of Iterable’s AI suite, to move users from inactive to active.

Redfin sent conversion-oriented emails like these to potential homebuyers and sellers, identified by Iterable’s Predictive Goals as having the highest likelihood to convert.

The retention marketing team at Redfin used holdout groups to determine the incremental difference that Predictive Goals made on conversions. Then they sent conversion-oriented emails to both Predictive Goals homebuyers and sellers, achieving significant results:

• A 72% lift in converting inactive sellers to an active state
• A 15% lift in converting inactive buyer to an active state
• A directionally positive lift in seller consultations and tours booked by buyers

Notably, with Iterable’s more predictive insights, the marketing team has the information they need to act quickly, with minimal-to-no support from engineering. The platform allows them to be creative and experiment with all their customer data at their fingertips.

Lisa Tulloch, Email Marketing Channel Manager at Redfin, spoke to the power of predictive AI:

“Predictive Goals has been an absolute game-changer for our team, maximizing our efficiencies and accelerating time to value. We’ve seen the tangible benefits of AI on our business, and look forward to seeing the impact of Iterable’s new AI innovations.”

Not to mention, you don’t have to be one of the largest real estate marketplaces to experience the value of predictive AI. Let’s now see predictive AI in action by walking through how a brand can set up its own Predictive Goals using Iterable.

We Predict Knockout Marketing Campaigns in Your Future

AI technology is only getting better and more sophisticated, so if you want your marketing campaigns to be at the forefront of innovation, download the full Ad Age report for even more stats and insights on AI tools.

And if you’re curious to see what predictive AI can do for your brand, we’re here to help.

Want to get started building business-specific predictive goals? Reach out and schedule a custom demo of Iterable AI today.

The post What is Predictive AI? appeared first on Iterable.

Introducing Iterable’s brand new Analog Suite. See ya later advanced metrics, automated tracking, glowing screens, and efficiency. We’re taking inspiration from the past to move us into the future. Our Analog Suite will include four new channels: Carrier Pigeon Delivery, Snail Mail, Fax Messaging, and Pager Notifications. Let’s explore the features of these channels and, because we believe in transparency, we’ll share both the benefits and considerations for each of them.

Carrier Pigeon Delivery

With Iterable’s Carrier Pigeon Delivery you can reach new heights as you let your marketing initiatives take flight. Just attach whatever marketing message you’re looking to send to an Iterable pigeon and let ‘em fly. 

Benefits: A friendly companion during down-time, absolutely zero technology involved, perfect for messages that aren’t urgent and maybe don’t need to be delivered at all, low cost (bird seed).

Considerations: Bird…droppings, really clean and/or closed windows, bread crumbs, Gen-Z may think they’re robots. 

We actually sent a Pigeon announcing this Analog Suite to each of our existing customers—still waiting on responses, but we’re confident we’ll hear back. 

How Fake Flights Used Pigeons to Increase Message—and Wing—Span

Definitely real travel brand, Fake Flights, was lucky enough to have access to our Carrier Pigeon Delivery beta and they’ve already seen impressive results with this new channel. 

Sending hundreds of thousands of communications per day requires a large fleet of feathered friends but, with Iterable’s flexible premium fleet packages, brands can choose the number of pigeons that fits their messaging needs. Fake Flights has seen a 54% uplift in messages delivered—attributed directly to the wind patterns in their geographic location—and only a 400% increase in complaints of “beak-related injuries.” 

Fake Flights now not only sells flights, but has their marketing messages soaring through the air as well—talk about cloud storage!

Snail Mail

Let us be very clear: we’re not talking about direct mail when we say Snail Mail. Direct mail involves too much automation, efficiency, and tracking to be part of this Analog Suite. What we are talking about is snails. Literal snails. Just attach your messages to the mini mucousy mailmen and off they go.

Benefits: Most effective delivery channel immediately post the rainy season, slow and steady, delivers messages with a vintage, ground-worn aesthetic. 

Considerations: Salt.

Note: There seems to be some…unwanted interaction…between the Iterable Pigeons and Snails. We do have plans to fix this on our product roadmap, so stay tuned!

Fax Messaging

You heard it here first (and probably last): Fax Messaging is making a comeback. For those who don’t know how fax machines work, you just scan a message you want to send to your customers, dial their fax number, and the receiving machine will print the scanned message. All customers who opt-in to Iterable Fax Messaging will receive an Iterable-branded machine through which they can distribute messages. 

Benefits: Warm paper coming out of the printer, no need for emails when hard copies exist.

Considerations: Absolutely zero metrics or tracking, your customers also need fax machines.

Pro Tip: Get your filing cabinets ready and make sure you have a method for organizing all of the paper messages you’ll be scanning.

Pager Notifications

Beep beep! Who needs a cellphone when you have Pager Notifications? Picture this: you want to connect with a customer but want to make sure they’re available first. Simply dial their individual pager number (hello, personalization) and wait for them to call you! Inbound marketing at its finest.

Benefits: The customer comes to you, no need to craft any messaging whatsoever, just make sure you have someone available to work the phones.

Considerations: Customers could just ignore your page.

To quote the lyrics of the Kim Possible theme song, “Call me, beep me if you wanna reach me, when you wanna page me it’s ok.” Now, imagine your customers singing it—compelling, right?

This is Totally, Completely Real

We want to stress the date we’ve chosen to roll out this Analog Suite: April 32nd. We think it’s important to note and set expectations for when these channels will be available to all customers. Spoiler alert: it’s never. If it wasn’t made clear as you read through the post, these will never be released to the public as legitimate channels. April Fools, ya’ll! 

If you’re interested in a beta of the Analog Suite, please don’t reach out to your CSM.

If you’re curious about our actual channel offerings—none involve animals*—be sure to register for Activate (April 30 – May 2 in San Jose) and come talk to Iterable experts at our booth. We’re just as funny IRL, we swear.

^{*But we DO have puppies coming to Activate!}

The post Introducing Iterable’s New Analog Suite appeared first on Iterable.

But with the quick adoption has been quick calls for regulation. Mounting concerns have prompted a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights from the White House and many companies—Iterable included—to initiate AI councils that review all tools for security and governance risks.

Every week we are seeing new tools and new considerations around risk. So does this mean we slow down or continue forward? The answer is a bit more nuanced.

The State of AI

Whereas last year marketers took the time to test and learn, this year marketers are looking to optimize for even greater benefits in three phases.

Any change worth having comes with risks. AI is no different. But this shouldn’t be a deterrent, and as you can see above, hasn’t been for marketers.

The truth is, these technologies are moving and evolving so quickly our understanding of the potential risks of AI is incomplete. We’re in the “what if” stage where teams are working to mitigate risks that haven’t arisen yet.

The more we adopt and adapt, the more we find out and understand what safeguards should be put in place. Marketers are learning this in real time, but so are legal, security, and IT teams.

Phase One: Increasing Productivity With AI

AI liberates marketers from operational tasks that take time, resources, and headspace to complete. The net gain in time and headspace opens the door for strategy, creativity, and scaling production.

When asked the top metrics for defining the ROI of AI, efficiency was the top selection. Marketers are facing increased expectations to reach their customers in a meaningful way despite battling against thousands of other brands vying for the same group’s attention.

It’s a difficult ask, but one made that much easier by utilizing AI tools for increased production, execution, and—perhaps most importantly—experimentation. Optimization and automation beat out Generative as the types of AI our survey respondents believe will simplify their jobs the most.

In an economic environment where marketers are asked to do more with less, AI answers the call. We are already seeing some significant gains in productivity like our customer, Care.com gaining 25% time by using Iterable’s Channel Optimization.

Phase Two: Unlocking Potential Through AI

As it stands, marketers are still adapting to the AI revolution. Yes, the majority are using these tools in their workspace, but there is an expertise gap forming. Just over half of survey respondents (53%) believe that the majority of their team is not fully trained to make the most of AI technologies.

So we need to accelerate investments to upskill our teams in using these technologies—everything from assisting in copy creation, to automating repetitive tasks, to automating decisioning for optimizing segments, channels and frequency.

The experimentation with creative and AI technology occurring now will unlock previously untapped brand potential. As we start to actually apply AI to our everyday workflow, we will start to uncover opportunities we can’t even conceive right now.

We will start to reorganize our teams, develop new practices, and change once more the way we market to people. Imagine a world where it takes seconds to create multimedia content, or where we move away from websites altogether, where the concept of campaigns does not exist.

The future of marketing and advertising technology will look vastly different in the coming years as the insights and scale from AI production converge creativity and personalization. As Josh Geiser, Senior Manager – CRM, Lifecycle and Mobile at Redbubble said: “The most exciting benefit of Iterable AI is giving us more time to daydream. When we can take a lot of that busy work away and let our minds wander, that’s when we come up with our best ideas.”

The true opportunity behind AI is elevating entire industries, not just functions within teams.

Phase Three: The Intersection of Creativity and AI

But, this isn’t to say the skills marketers have spent years developing will go away. They’ll simply be utilized in different, more efficient ways. The creativity and ingenuity of marketers will still be crucial to the success of a brand.

As more and more brands are built off the production of AI tools, we’re likely to see more homogeneity in marketing. With the noise of advertising and marketing already clouding consumers’ field of vision to find what they need, this potential future is bleak.

That’s where creativity and humanity come in. These tools will accelerate marketers’ ability to build the foundation for strong brands, but it is up to the marketers driving brand development to add a human layer on top to make sure brands stand out in a sea of sameness.

Context, connotation, intonation, sarcasm, slang. The way we communicate as people evolves quickly and these changes are often how we communicate. As the source of connecting brands and customers, marketers need to be sure to add the creative layer to their AI outputs to keep the human connection alive and thriving.

Where AI and Creativity Spark Marketing Joy

Much like how AI is being adapted and changing all at once, the above phases will happen concurrently for some and slower for others. The important thing to note is that we’re all building the future of marketing and customer engagement together.

At this stage, we’ll meet the intersection of creativity and AI—the art and science of marketing to create joyful experiences.

Curious about the future of AI and creativity? Hear from Adri and dozens of industry leaders at Activate Summit in San Jose, CA April 30 – May 2. Register here!

The post CMO Corner: Is the AI Revolution Slowing Down? appeared first on Iterable.

The Iterable team set up shop (the booth with the aura readings!) at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from March 17th to March 20th to attend Shoptalk 2024—an event that provides a platform for brands of all shapes and sizes to learn, network, collaborate, and evolve.

The Iterable team at our booth. Peep the Aura Reading station behind us.

I was on site as part of the Iterable team and got to attend some sessions. So, if you weren’t able to go, I’ve got you covered. Without further ado, let’s get into the takeaways.

Creating Frictionless and Continuous Store Experiences

Lauren Morr, SVP of Digital Engineering & Architecture at Abercrombie & Fitch Co., Patrick McIntyre, Head of Development at Krispy Kreme, and Fei Wang, Chief Technology Officer at Saks Off 5th—moderated by Steve Dennis, Founder & President, SageBerry Consulting—discussed the benefits of omnichannel experiences.
They highlighted that omnichannel customers shop nearly two times more often than single-channel shoppers, making it imperative for retailers to provide them with a seamless, unified experience across physical and digital channels. There are two critical components to delivering on this promise—creating a frictionless and continuous experience.

Key Takeaways

• Brands need to focus on being “customer-obsessed.” Consumers want brand love and want to feel seen and rewarded for being loyal brand advocates.
  Morr emphasized that personalization will go very far in creating more brand advocacy in new and returning customers.
• A unified experience—online, in-store, or in-app—is imperative in creating a positive customer experience. The key is to listen to what your customer says through their data and then deliver a product at the price that works for them for a higher conversion rate.

Legacy Brands Winning Over New Generations

Heidi Cooley, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer at Crocs, Winnie Park, CEO at Forever 21, and Scott Mezvinsky, North America & International President at Taco Bell—moderated by Sarah Engel, President ofJanuary Digital—chatted about how each new generation of consumers is defined by their distinct worldviews, preferences, and expectations that influence their purchase decisions.
Brands need to adapt and remain relevant to young consumers while also keeping their history and values top-of-mind to avoid being labeled inauthentic or alienating existing customers.

Key Takeaways

• For Crocs, the challenge was that the brand was very recognizable but irrelevant. The team decided to take a consumer-centric approach: they listened to the fans’ feedback on social media when it came to designs, collaborations, and restocks, and acted on those needs quickly.
• Crocs saw a connection between their brand mission and the attitude of Gen Z and leaned into this for their brand voice, especially on social media and when selecting authentic fan partnerships that ignited the brand.
• Forever 21 went from facing bankruptcy to becoming a part of the zeitgeist. They let customers, especially Gen Z customers, tell them what areas of pop culture were of interest and tapped the culture through collaborations like Cheetos, Barbie, Juicy Couture, and more.
• Collaborations are a key part of the Taco Bell strategy—they connect and partner with celebrities who are true fans of the brand and lean in. For example, singer Doja Cat tweeted about bringing back the Mexican Pizza and Taco Bell resurrected the previously-discontinued product and asked Doja Cat to announce the addition during her Coachella set.

Creating the Next Growth Wave With AI-Powered Commerce

Maria Renz, Global Head of Commerce at Google and moderator Chris Walton, Co-CEO at Omni Talk, talked about how staying essential to both merchants and consumers is paramount. Specifically, they covered how the transformative power of AI is shaping commerce strategy, revolutionizing the shopping experience, and supercharging personalized interactions at scale.

Key Takeaways

• AI will change shopping in three key ways: 1) more connections with customers, 2) creating an “assisted experience”, and 3) supercharging personalized experience at scale.
• AI has also caused an evolution in the commerce space. It can give customers confidence when ordering online through a new level of personalization (for example, Google virtual try-on).

Maintaining a Modern E-commerce Tech Stack

Jason Gowans, SVP & Chief Digital Officer at Levi Strauss & Co. and moderator Vikalp Tandon, Managing Director, Global Commerce Lead at Accenture did a deep dive into how organizations are deploying modern, flexible e-commerce tech stacks.

Key Takeaways

• Businesses need to develop a new way to manage channel complexity. Previously, brands began in a fragmented state by starting with channels they want to communicate through, building capabilities, and then investing in key foundations reactively on a need-to-have basis. Versus starting with the necessary foundations and building capabilities that can handle anticipated complexities for new and existing channels.
• Life centricity is key for building an effective modern tech stack. Being life-centric means that a brand must:
  • Understand the full life of a customer—not just where your brand fits in.
  • Avoid a one-size-fits-all mentality.
  • Simplify for relevance—streamline internal loops and external customer experiences.
  • Scale for growth by connecting data tech and talent for constant evolution.

Until Next Year, Shoptalk!

We hope you could stop by the Iterable booth to meet our team, discuss your business and marketing goals, and get your aura read. If not, make sure you catch us next year in the exhibitor’s hall!

If you’d like to learn more about how Iterable is helping marketers power world-class customer engagement, then schedule a demo of our platform today.

The post Our Top Takeaways from Shoptalk 2024 appeared first on Iterable.

To help combat the difficulty of platform migrations, we recently published The Cross-Channel Marketing Platform Migration Guide—a detailed, step-by-step breakdown of what to consider when migrating to a new marketing platform. But, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of information jammed into that one guide. We still recommend you use it, share it, bookmark it, etc. but if you’re looking for a skimmable breakdown of the guide, you’ve come to the right place. 

In this first installment of the Platform Migration series we’ll explore the first section of The Cross-Channel Marketing Platform Migration Guide: Defining Your Goals and Quick Wins. In particular, we’ll focus on the questions you should ask yourself as you get started on your migration journey. 

Defining Your Goals and Quick Wins

As we say in the full guide, defining your goals and quick wins is, “An overlooked but critical step in migrating to a new platform is to review the goals of the migration and identify the first tangible wins you want.” Setting goals and quick wins helps focus the team when moving through a migration—it’s creating a north star. 

Following the People, Process, and Technology framework—which focuses on three powerful marketing assets to fuel growth—we explored the questions you should ask yourself during a platform migration as they pertain to people, process, and technology. 

People Questions to Ask Yourself

Think of people as the “who” of the migration process. This is when you can decide who will have a role in the platform migration and why. 

1. Who would do what during the migration?

Think about teams and individuals when you ask yourself this question. Think about everyone from executors to approvers and how they will impact the overall process.

2. Who would you not need after the migration is complete?

If you hire freelancers or third party partners to help you complete the migration, they may not be needed after the migration is complete. Because the migration could also lead to consolidation, some roles may become obsolete as well. It’s important to consider this before you dive in.

3. Which team members have bandwidth?

If there are people who will need to be involved in the migration—marketing operations, data teams, etc.—ensure they have the bandwidth to help in the desired timeframe. 

4. Which teammates are change agents excited about making a difference?

Maybe there are people on the team who are excited about the migration process or have experience with migrations in previous roles. Take advantage of these excited team members and be sure they’re included in the process.

Process Questions to Ask Yourself

Think of the process as the “when” and “why” of the migration process. This is when you can decide deadlines, milestones, what works in your existing processes and what doesn’t. This phase will be a lot of discovery and connecting with subteams to ensure everyone feels they have an opportunity to share input. 

1. What date do you want to start with the new platform?

This is a crucial step of the process. Without that hard launch date, there’s no proverbial fire under the team’s behinds. Choosing a launch date and working backwards is also a great way to block out milestones you want to hit to help you reach the launch date. 

2. Which processes work well and are efficient?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Don’t reinvent the wheel. [Insert preferred idiom here.] There are a lot of ways to say the same thing—there’s no need to create a new process if a business unit has found a way that works. Use this as a learning experience and apply it to other parts of the migration.

3. Which processes have bottlenecks due to reliance on other teams or other tools?

Set up calls and talk to the different teams who will be involved in the migration and who will use the new platform. People will want to share their roadblocks and challenges because they want to find a solution.

Technology Questions to Ask Yourself

Lastly, think of the technology as the “what” and “where” of the migration process. This is when you can discuss what you’re planning to accomplish with the tool and necessary features. Rather than from a workflow perspective, which was considered with process, technology questions should focus on actual capabilities of the tool.

1. What are the pain points you’d like to improve by using a new cross-channel platform?

Here, reflect on your current platform and the tasks or goals you can’t achieve due strictly to technological limitations. This will help you understand what specifically to look for as you weigh the various options that exist.

2. What is the first campaign your team wants to launch?

Understanding where your team wants to start is helpful when evaluating the features readily available in your new platform. If a feature is on a prospective platform’s product roadmap or still in beta, consider how crucial that feature will be in helping your team hit the ground running.

3. Does your new platform have different integrations from your existing platform?

Platform migrations are an important consideration when migrating to a new platform. If your new platform doesn’t work with existing integrations, those partners may become obsolete. Then you have to consider contracts and how long you’re working with these partners. It’s easier to find a platform that works with the integrations you already have.

Setting the Groundwork for a Successful Platform Migration

Hopefully this breakdown of the questions to ask yourself provides a bit more depth into the initial stages of a platform migration. Remember, asking yourself these questions should result in your team determining quick wins and goals for the overall migration. Keep that in mind as you go through this list to keep everyone aligned. 

As we continue this series we’ll breakdown assembling teams, organizing campaigns, and standardizing data—so be sure to check back in. 

In the meantime, feel free to explore the entire Cross-Channel Marketing Platform Migration Guide and, if you’re considering making the migration Iterable, first of all, hi! Second, be sure to schedule a custom demo today.

The post Questions to Ask Before a Platform Migration appeared first on Iterable.

Many of you will already be familiar with Google Postmaster Tools, which allows senders to monitor their Gmail sending reputation. For those not using GPT (Google Postmaster Tools) to monitor your sending domain’s reputation, we encourage you to configure ASAP.

In this article we will cover what Google Postmaster Tools is, how to set it up, some of its features, and what was just unveiled.

What is Google Postmaster Tools?

Google Postmaster Tools is a free resource that gives senders direct access to feedback on how Google views their sending practices. Designed with high-volume senders in mind, this tool provides insight into your reputation, performance, and infrastructure setup, allowing you to be proactive about your deliverability. Access to this data is more critical than ever with the recently updated sender requirements.

What’s New in Google Postmaster Tools?

Let’s now look at how to access the new dashboard and what information is available there. You can log in using your Google Postmaster tools credentials. Upon logging in, you’ll be presented with a banner notifying you of the new dashboard.

Compliance Status Dashboard

The dashboard informs you how compliant the selected domain is with the new email sender requirements as a checklist to make sure you’re compliant with the requirements.

These requirements include:

• SPF and DKIM authentication: Sending domain has SPF and DKIM authentication
• From:header alignment. Does the from domain match that associated with SPF and DKIM
• DMARC authentication: Sending domain has DMARC authentication
• Encryption: The domain is using a TLS connection for transmitting email.
• User-reported spam rate: Is the domain under the spam rate threshold? The current threshold is 0.3% but senders should aim to remain under 0.1%
• DNS records: Sending domain and IPs have proper forward and reverse DNS

The two remaining requirements have a coming soon placeholder that will show compliance with:

• One-click unsubscribe (RFC8058): This applies to bulk sending and if sending over 5,000 messages a day and not transactional sending.
• Honor unsubscribe: We expect this will monitor if recipients continue to receive emails after using the one-click unsubscribe

How to Set Up Google Postmaster Tools

Let’s rewind a bit. If you’re not using Google Postmaster Tools yet, this should help you get started. Getting Google Postmaster Tools set up is pretty straightforward. As the tool is domain-based, you will need to add and authenticate your sending domains to identify your email traffic.

Visit postmaster.google.com and sign in with a Gmail or Google Workspace email address that you wish to serve as your account to manage your Postmaster Tools data.

Pro Tip: If you have a team that may need access to your account and Postmaster Tools data, we recommend creating a new Gmail address for your team to share. For example: GPT@company.name.com or marketing@companyname.com.

Once inside your Postmaster Tools account, you can hit the GET STARTED button, and it will prompt you for three additional steps to complete the domain verification process.

Step 1 of 3:

Enter the sending domain you want to monitor in Postmaster Tools.

Step 2 of 3:

You will be provided a TXT record to insert into the (Domain Name System) DNS for the sending domain. After you grab the TXT record, you can hit “NOT NOW” and verify later once the TXT record is added to the DNS.

Step 3 of 3:

Once the TXT record is added to the DNS for the sending domain, you can hit “Verify Domain.” Once the screen below pops up, simply hit the VERIFY box, and the sending domain will appear as verified in your Postmaster Tools dashboard. This is what it will look like once successfully verified (3c):

Important note: If you try to verify the TXT record before it is put into DNS correctly, you will see an error like the one below. Please have your IT/DNS team verify that the TXT record was put into place correctly.

How to Share Access to Google Postmaster Tools

It’s uncommon for just one person to be reviewing email deliverability and having the ability to share access with team members makes it even easier to stay on top of reputation metrics

To share access:

• On your Postmaster Tools account, mouse over the verified domain to which you want to add your team member.
• Click on the icon with the three dots and select Manage Users.
• In the bottom right, click Add.
• Enter your team member’s Google account email address in the pop-up window.

What Data is Available Once Verified?

Configuring your domain in Google Postmaster Tools gives you access to a swath of helpful email metrics to determine how effective your email sends are. Senders are provided with several different data points displayed in different dashboards:

• User Reported Spam rate
• IP reputation
• Domain reputation
• Spam feedback loop
• Message authentication
• Encryption
• Delivery errors

Below we go into a bit more detail.

User Reported Spam Rate

This dashboard shows how many users reported your message as spam. Complaint rates have a serious impact on your ability to get messages to their intended destination. From Spring 2024, Gmail has indicated that they will start blocking mail from senders that exceed a 0.3% complaint rate threshold.

Complaint rates are often calculated by dividing the number of emails marked as spam by the total number of emails sent. Gmail, however, calculates this differently. They compare the number of emails marked as spam against the total number of emails that landed in the inbox.

Emails delivered directly to the spam folder are not included in the User Reported Spam rate calculation. Only emails authenticated by domainkeys identified mail (DKIM) are eligible for spam-rate calculation.

Because there are no insights into the specific Gmail addresses that have reported messages as spam, brands need to consider all possible factors and all possible messages to help keep recipients from marking as spam. After all, user-reported spam can influence a brand’s domain and IP reputation.

Domain & IP Reputation

Domain and IP reputation gives a sense of whether Gmail’s automated spam filter will send mail to inbox or filter to the spam folder. If you have a bad domain or IP reputation, for example, there’s a higher likelihood your emails are sent to spam. Remember that spam filtering is based on thousands of signals and that domain and IP reputation are just two of them.

Domain & IP Classification:

• BAD: Sending history shows a high rate of spam. Emails sent by this domain will nearly always be refused by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), or will be marked as spam.
• LOW: This domain or IP has the reputation to regularly send a significant volume of spam. Emails sent from this domain or IP are highly prone to be marked as spam.
• MEDIUM: This domain or IP has the reputation to send good emails, but is susceptible to sending spam sometimes. Most of the emails sent by this domain or IP will have a good deliverability rate unless the spam rate increases.
• HIGH: This sender sends very low volumes of spam and respects Gmail’s best practices for senders. Emails sent from this domain or IP will rarely be marked as spam.

Feedback Loop

This dashboard will show more granular identifiers if you have signed up to Google’s Feedback Loop (FBL). It allows you to track the average feedback loop spam rate and the volume of unique identifiers available for a given day. An Identifier could be campaign ID, customername or other project ID. The information is displayed if the rate is high enough to trigger a data point.

When this metric is provided it can help pinpoint a specific mailing that recipients have been complaining about. Allowing corrective action to be taken.

This can be particularly useful in identifying if a particular campaign or message channel is impacting overall sending reputation.

Authentication

This dashboard shows what percentage of sender policy framework (SPF), DKIM, and domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC) authentication is passing into Gmail. DMARC-specific reporting would need to be set up outside of Google Postmaster to get details other than the percentage.

This metric is important because it informs if authentication has passed or if there are any issues. If no DMARC record is published, for example, then you would see 0% for that metric. When dips occur you can then diagnose and fix any authentication problems.

Encryption

This dashboard shows the percentage of inbound and outbound traffic that is being Transport Layer Security (TLS) encrypted into Gmail. GPT does not provide further details other than the aggregated percentages. This is important because as of December 2023, TLS is required to send emails to Gmail.

Delivery Errors

If Gmail rejects any traffic (emails sent for that day by the domain) on a given day, this dashboard will show the percentage of messages rejected and a high-level reason for the rejections.

Keeping an Eye on Compliance

Once compliant, most of these requirements will likely remain marked as compliant unless something breaks or a new infrastructure is created and not set up according to the requirements. (In this view, known status results are “Compliant” or “Needs work.”) The one exception is the user-reported spam rates, which should be monitored frequently since it can fluctuate based on sending practices.

Monitoring both Google Postmaster Tools pages—the new compliance dashboard and user- reported spam—regularly should be a part of any sender’s reputation monitoring. They should be used in conjunction with one another. For instance, you should monitor your user-reported spam rates in the original Google Postmaster Tools and compare them with the Compliance Status of the user-reported spam rate on the updated page.

To learn more about Google Postmaster Tools or your brand’s email deliverability, ask your CSM about Iterable’s Deliverability Services. If you’re not yet an Iterable customer, schedule a demo today.

The post A Closer Look at Google Postmaster Tools appeared first on Iterable.

Today, we’re talking about what Ad Age refers to as “the foundation and future of all AI marketing:” AI explainability and optionality and Predictive Goals. These aspects of AI marketing are why Iterable specifically is at the forefront of AI innovation.

So let’s jump in.

Want to read through all our AI research? Head to Ad Age now to download the full study.

What are AI Explainability and Optionality?

As Ad Age states, AI optionality and explainability are “the next stage of evolution for automation […] in which marketers can take even more cues from AI.” With this two-pronged approach, “the AI not only automates the deployment of a campaign, but it also automatically generates the campaign itself.”

If the idea of an AI deciding which of your audiences to target—and how—for example, makes you apprehensive, that concern is valid. That’s why explainability and optionality are so crucial to AI marketing:

• Explainability establishes trust by infusing transparency into the AI model’s decision-making process
• Optionality provides marketers the option to override the system’s recommendations

In a previous blog post about key AI terms to familiarize yourself with, we further defined Explainable AI:

“Explainable AI involves transparent systems with clear, understandable processes. Unlike the opaque, black box of certain AI solutions, Explainable AI provides a more ‘glass box’ experience that shares deeper insights into the data that powers predictions.”

Let’s now walk through an example to demonstrate explainable AI in action.

Explainable AI in Action

Ad Age illustrates the concept of explainable AI with an example—a fitness chain. To achieve its goal of converting free mobile app users to paid subscribers (a.k.a. “freemium” to “premium”), the business could use an AI model to target people who have signed up for three fitness classes. AI has identified that this particular threshold has a high statistical correlation to the campaign’s desired outcome, and explainability is how the algorithm shows its work, so to speak.

In this example, with the right marketing platform, marketers can pull up a dashboard with details that reveal how the model arrived at its conclusions. That way, the team can be reassured that the AI is working effectively—before they hit the send button.

Adriana Gil Miner, CMO of Iterable, discusses the reasoning behind this explainable AI:

“For instance, you will be able to see that the people most likely to move to the paid app watched three videos and logged in five times in 30 days. This builds transparency and trust. It validates the audience and the quality of the prediction, and further, it gives marketers insights on how to drive their business with ideas for other strategies.”

Explainability and optionality were built into Iterable’s AI from the outset, so let’s dive into how marketers can take advantage of explainable AI with our suite of tools.

AI Explainability With Iterable

Iterable’s AI Suite was designed to empower your marketing and forge deeper customer connections, and at its core is putting people in the driver’s seat of AI-assisted decision-making.

This built-in intelligence uses explainable AI at the heart of several features:

• Brand Affinity
• Next Best Action
• Predictive Goals

You can click through to get a comprehensive explainer of each feature, but here’s the TL;DR.

Brand Affinity

Brand Affinity harnesses Iterable AI to label customers based on their level of engagement with your brand. You can use these labels to provide rewards to loyal users, improve open rates by suppressing negative users, test offers by sentiment, and so much more.

If you’re wondering how these labels are assigned, that’s where Iterable’s Explainable AI comes in. Simply click into a specific user’s Brand Affinity score to view additional insights, such as:

• A user’s affinity labels for the past 30 days to see what changes may have occurred.
• A summary from the past 90 days of the campaigns that contributed most to a user’s past and current affinity scores.
• A summary from the past 90 days of the metrics that contributed most to a user’s affinity score with an explanation of how those actions compare to the behavior of users.

Iterable’s Explainable AI breaks down the contributing factors to each user’s Brand Affinity score.

It’s not enough for an AI model to score subscribers by sentiment. It must be able to explain why it’s given those scores and how these factors impact overall engagement.

Next Best Action

As Ad Age stated, we’re now entering a technologically advanced era in which an AI model can not only deploy a campaign, but also generate it. Iterable’s Next Best Action takes this to the next level, analyzing the end-to-end logistics of your campaigns and generating audience and copy recommendations to improve areas of performance.

With just a few clicks, you can automatically create a campaign, select the right segment and come up with the perfect subject line. You’re still in full control, but now you can access an AI-assisted push in the best direction.

Automatically send campaigns to the right customer segments using AI-optimized subject lines with Iterable’s Next Best Action.

Predictive Goals

In the last installment of our AI blog series, we’ll be covering Predictive Goals in more depth, but for the sake of this post, Iterable uses Explainable AI within its Predictive Goals feature to analyze your historical data and predict which users are most likely to convert on your business goals in the future.

Like Brand Affinity, Predictive Goals includes modules that explain how to understand the predictions the AI model is making. The platform lists the custom events and user fields that are contributing to the prediction, and surfacing which data points are making the most meaningful impact.

As seen in the image below, you’ll see a predictive strength score and an interactive view of your prediction results, including the events and properties that Explainable AI indicates have the greatest potential to influence your outcomes.

The module on the left-hand side in Iterable’s Predictive Goals displays how Explainable AI is reaching its prediction conclusions.

And when you click the “Explore” button to learn more, you’ll see a panel like the one below that shows the number of events and properties that Predictive Goals evaluated when the prediction was generated. It also displays a breakdown of the statistically significant contributors.

Clearly see exactly what factors are shaping your Predictive Goals with Iterable’s Explainable AI.

With Iterable, nothing is a mystery. While its AI-driven insights are sure to be illuminating, you’ll never be stuck wondering how the model is making its decisions. That’s our “glass box” promise.

Let Us Explain Iterable’s Explainable AI

We have so much more to cover on Predictive AI, so stay tuned for the final blog post in this AI series.

You can learn about all of the features we discussed and more in Iterable’s AI Suite. And don’t forget to download the full Ad Age report for even more insights about the next evolution of AI technology.

Ready to get even more explanation about how to advance your AI marketing? Reach out and schedule a custom demo of Iterable AI today.

The post Explainable AI: The Next Stage of Evolution appeared first on Iterable.

AI-powered marketing has an unprecedented ability to process large amounts of data. Whether it’s analyzing customer demographics, tracking online behavior, or interpreting social media interactions, AI algorithms excel at extracting valuable insights. These insights are the foundation for creating targeted campaigns that speak directly to the needs and desires of individual consumers. 

By using artificial intelligence, you can uncover patterns, trends, and correlations that help you make data-driven marketing decisions. From enhancing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns to optimizing customer journey experiences, AI marketing strategies enable you to stay ahead of the competition and deliver meaningful value to your audience. 

Keep reading to learn more about AI marketing and how you can use it to drive growth for your business. 

• What is AI Marketing?

• Types of AI Marketing
• How to Use AI in Marketing

• Advantages and Risk of AI Marketing

• How to Build an AI Marketing Campaign
• AI Marketing Best Practices

• The Future of Marketing: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence


What is AI Marketing?

AI marketing is the application of advanced technologies like machine learning, generative AI, natural language processing, and predictive analytics to enhance various aspects of marketing strategy, execution, and analysis. It leverages algorithms and data-driven insights to automate tasks, personalize communication, and optimize campaign performance, driving better outcomes and return on investment (ROI) for businesses. 

This allows marketers to use the power of AI to analyze large datasets and extract actionable insights about everything—from consumer behavior to market trends. By using these insights, AI marketing can help you create highly targeted and personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with customers on a more personal level. 

From segmenting audiences and tailoring content to predicting future behavior and optimizing ad spend, AI empowers marketers to deliver more relevant, timely, and impactful customer experiences. 

Types of AI Marketing

Integrating AI in marketing allows for diverse strategies and techniques to enhance efficiency, improve personalization, and increase effectiveness. Let’s dive into the different types of artificial intelligence in marketing and how they’re transforming the way businesses connect with their audiences: 

• Machine learning (ML): Machine learning uses algorithms and statistical models to help computers learn from and make predictions or decisions based on data. These algorithms use customer data to identify patterns, trends, and insights that inform marketing strategies. 

• Automation: AI is particularly useful when it comes to automating repetitive, once-manual tasks. Think about marketing workflows, for example. With automated triggers, you can send messages to users based on the last action they took and, to go one step further, if there are multiple options after a trigger event, AI can help determine which message is best for that individual user.

• Optimization: AI is also critical when it comes to optimizing marketing campaigns. AI takes historical data into account to help create the most effective marketing messages for individual users. Take message send time, for example. If certain customers only open emails before noon, your marketing platform can take that data into account when messages are sent to that customer going forward. 

• Generative AI: Generative AI is artificial intelligence that can generate new content or images based on patterns and examples from existing data. In marketing, you can use generative AI to create content, such as blog posts, images, social media posts, or product descriptions. 

• Natural language processing (NLP): NLP involves using computers to interpret and generate language. In marketing, NLP technologies can help businesses analyze text from various sources, such as customer reviews, social media comments, or chat transcripts, for sentiment analysis. 

• Predictive analytics: Predictive analytics analyze historical data and predict future outcomes. In marketing, you can use predictive analytics to forecast customer behavior, identify potential leads, and optimize marketing campaigns. For instance, these models can help you predict customer churn or forecast sales trends. 


Learn more about AI terms before diving into your own strategy to ensure you have a comprehensive understanding of the possibilities and potential applications of artificial intelligence in marketing. 

How to Use AI in Marketing

There are several ways to use AI marketing to automate and streamline your internal and external processes. From automating routine marketing tasks to analyzing data for valuable insights, AI offers a variety of opportunities to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing strategies. 

Let’s take a look at a few AI marketing examples to help you understand what it can be used for: 

• Content generation: AI content generation tools can automatically create written content based on predefined parameters and patterns. These tools use NLP algorithms to generate high-quality content at scale.
• Personalization: With AI, marketers can deliver personalized experiences to their audience by tailoring content, recommendations, and offers to individual preferences and behaviors. Personalized AI campaigns can significantly enhance customer engagement, loyalty, and conversions. 

• Data analytics: AI-powered data analytics can process large amounts of data, extract actionable insights, and uncover hidden patterns. This can give you a deeper understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and purchase patterns. 

• Automation: AI automation tools streamline repetitive tasks, such as email marketing, social media posting, and ad campaign management. By automating routine tasks, you can save time, reduce manual errors, and focus on more strategic activities requiring human creativity and decision-making. 

• Customer service: Chatbots and virtual assistants provide customer support and assist users with real-time inquiries or issues. These solutions enhance customer satisfaction and reduce the workload on support agents.  

• Segmentation: Advanced algorithms can analyze customer data and segment audiences based on demographics, behaviors, preferences, and purchase history. By segmenting audiences more accurately, you can deliver personalized messages to specific customer groups, increasing relevance and engagement while minimizing wasted resources on irrelevant marketing efforts. 

• Forecasting: AI models can predict future trends, demand patterns, and market fluctuations based on historical data and other relevant factors. You can use these predictive insights to anticipate customer needs, optimize inventory management, and allocate resources more effectively. 

• Media buying: AI can analyze advertising data and optimize media buying decisions in real time, ensuring that ad placements are targeted, relevant, and cost-effective. Media buying platforms powered by AI use machine learning to optimize ad spend allocation, adjust bidding strategies, and maximize ROI across digital channels, including search, display, and video advertising. 


According to our study in collaboration with Wakefield and Ad Age, 47% of those surveyed use AI to work more efficiently. 

Learn more about how to use AI in marketing with this AI guide.

Advantages and Risks of AI Marketing

As with any technological advancement, AI marketing has benefits and drawbacks. While it offers unprecedented capabilities that enhance efficiency, decision-making, and effectiveness in marketing, it also presents challenges. 

Advantages of AI Marketing

Is AI marketing worth it? Let’s take a look at the benefits: 

• Boost ROI: With AI marketing, you can optimize your campaigns to get insights that drive better decision-making. Machine learning can help you allocate resources more effectively, target the right consumers, and optimize ad spending to maximize return on investment. 

• Enhance customer engagement and loyalty: Personalization through AI allows you to deliver highly tailored and relevant experiences to your audience, increasing engagement and fostering stronger customer relationships. AI algorithms can anticipate needs, recommend personalized content or products, and deliver targeted offers that resonate with consumer preferences, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.  

• Improve decision-making: Analytics tools give you actionable insights and predictive intelligence that inform strategic decision-making. By analyzing data from multiple sources, including customer interactions, market trends, and competitor activities, you can make decisions founded on evidence. 

• Increase efficiency: AI automation streamlines repetitive tasks and processes, freeing up time and resources for you to focus on more strategic activities. From automating email campaigns and social media posting to optimizing ad targeting and content creation, AI tools enable marketers to work more efficiently, reduce manual errors, and scale their efforts. 


According to our study in collaboration with Wakefield and Ad Age, 49% of those surveyed believe AI should increase business metrics. 

Risks of AI Marketing

Unfortunately, no technology comes without potential risks. For AI marketing, these include: 

• Ethical issues: One of the main considerations with AI marketing is the ethical implications of using algorithms to make decisions that impact the lives of individuals. This includes issues like algorithmic bias, where AI systems inadvertently perpetuate or amplify existing biases in the data used for training. 

• Privacy risks: AI marketing relies heavily on data collection and analysis, which relates to privacy and data protection. You must ensure compliance with regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and make sure to protect customer information. 

• Overreliance: While AI can improve decision-making and efficiency, there’s a risk of overreliance on AI systems without proper human oversight. This can lead to complacency among marketers, who may blindly trust AI without evaluating its recommendations, which can result in missed opportunities, flawed strategies, or unintended consequences. 

• Data quality: AI requires high-quality data to generate accurate predictions and insights. However, data quality issues like inaccuracies, incompleteness, and biases can undermine the effectiveness of AI marketing efforts. Poor data quality can lead to ineffective personalization and suboptimal decision-making, impacting the success of marketing campaigns. 


How to Build an AI Marketing Campaign

Building an AI marketing campaign allows you to use advanced technologies to streamline processes, enhance personalization, and drive better results. Here are the key steps to take when implementing AI into your marketing strategy: 

1. Determine your goals: Clearly define your goals and the outcomes you want to achieve with your marketing campaign. Having well-defined goals will guide your AI marketing strategy and help you measure success. 

2. Evaluate your marketing processes: Assess your current marketing processes to identify areas where AI can help. This could include audience segmentation, content creation, campaign optimization, and customer engagement tactics. 

3. Choose a marketing platform with AI capabilities: When selecting a marketing platform, consider factors like features, capabilities, ease of use, scalability, integrations, and pricing. Look for platforms that offer advanced analytics, predictive modeling, personalization tools, automation capabilities, and support to meet your specific needs.
4. Adopt and implement your strategy: Develop a comprehensive plan outlining your campaign objectives, target audience, messaging, content strategy, channels, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Use AI technologies to automate tasks, personalize communications, optimize targeting, and analyze campaign performance. 


AI Marketing Best Practices

Incorporating AI into your marketing can help you stay competitive. Here are a few best practices and tips for using AI in marketing to achieve profitable business outcomes: 

• Activate  your data: Marketers often find themselves with a lot of customer data and no way to activate that data in a way that benefits customers. Because AI relies on data to generate insights and make decisions, implement AI to create recommendations, automations, and optimizations based on the data you have.

• Individualize customer experiences: Use AI to deliver individualized experiences to your audience across various touchpoints. Use recommendation engines, predictive analytics, and dynamic content generation to tailor messages, offers, and interactions to individual preferences and behaviors. 

• Test and adapt: Continuously test and adapt your AI marketing campaigns to optimize performance and achieve better results over time. Use A/B testing, multivariate testing, and experimentation to refine your strategies, messaging, and targeting.

• Ensure transparency: Maintain transparency and ethical standards when implementing AI in your marketing efforts. Be upfront with customers about how their data is used, ensure compliance with privacy regulations, and mitigate the risk of algorithmic bias by regularly monitoring and auditing AI systems. 


The Future of Marketing: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence

Incorporating artificial intelligence into your marketing efforts allows you to streamline processes and drive better results. By investing in AI, you can gain valuable insights from data, automate tasks, and deliver highly targeted and personalized experiences to your audience. 

With Iterable, you can unlock the power of AI to revolutionize your marketing strategies and drive growth. Whether you want to optimize campaign performance, improve customer engagement, or maximize ROI, we provide the tools and support you need to succeed. Schedule a custom demo today.

The post AI Marketing: Your Guide to Revolutionizing Your Marketing Strategy  appeared first on Iterable.

Rather than focusing on making a sale, the goal of customer experience marketing is to create an enjoyable, memorable experience from the moment consumers meet your brand.

You can think of the goal as turning potential customers into life-long fans of your brand. You’ll be rewarded in the long-run with enduring customer loyalty, high retention rates, and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

What is the Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Service?

While customer service is part of customer experience, it’s only one part. You may have a customer service team dedicated to handling sales questions, purchasing, returns and troubleshooting, but customer experience is more than that. It’s a strategy that focuses on nurturing the customer relationship before a sale is ever made—and long after payment is collected.

Customer experience marketing is about fostering a positive brand association that extends to all the ways people interact with your company—not just on the sales floor, but online,, and through all of the marketing channels they use to connect to your brand. Customer experience marketing is used as part of a branding strategy to make the customer’s experience so good that they wouldn’t even consider switching to another brand. Customer experience marketing also generates increased engagement and positive reviews and recommendations.

Keys to Successful Customer Experience Marketing

Customer experience is important across all your marketing channels. Your users should have a great experience on every platform, device, and channel. Here are tips for creating a holistic customer experience marketing strategy that leaves customers wanting more, buying more, and recommending your business to others.

Take a Cross-Channel Approach

Show customers you care about their particular interests by using a cross-channel marketing approach. Cross-channel marketing not only reaches the customer via the channels they access most, but when they’re most likely to engage with that channel.

For instance, a user might historically never open emails, but they do open SMS messages. Rather than sending countless unopened emails, you could send this particular customer SMS messages. If the goal is to get the customer to open emails, perhaps the SMS message could include a note about the promotion code you sent to their inbox.

Why it works: Cross-channel messaging is essential for a seamless customer journey that leads your customer to your end goals—increased engagement and higher conversion rates. Cross-channel orchestration leads to consistency, which sets the framework for customers to recommend your brand to others. A good branding strategy that integrates consistency will lead to better brand awareness and loyalty, higher customer lifetime values and greater brand equity.

Take Full Advantage of Reviews

Customer reviews are a crucial part of any marketing strategy. With a cross-channel marketing tool, you’ll be able to keep track of your reviews and respond immediately, either thanking the customer for their feedback or addressing their concerns. Tracking review ratings is an important tool of customer listening, gathering priceless information about the customer experience and what you need to change about your strategy. And your responses to their feedback matter, big time. According to ReviewTrackers, 53% of consumers expect a response to their review within seven days.

Why it works: Reviews add legitimacy to your brand and products. According to a recent survey conducted by PowerReviews, 98% of consumers feel that reviews are an essential resource when making purchase decisions. The higher your customer ratings, the higher your brand equity. Keeping a close eye on reviews, responding appropriately and adjusting to customer expectations also reduces the need for expensive customer service interactions, increasing your return on investment and your bottom line.

Personalize Every Message

To create a smooth customer experience, you must deliver consistent branding across all channels. Never leave customers wondering if your brand knows who they are. Use a cross-channel marketing strategy to ensure your brand looks, feels and communicates in sync for every customer interaction across all platforms.

You can set up automatic connection points triggered by every specific interaction, personalizing the communication along the way and guiding the customer down the funnel at each point. The top personalization efforts that customers most expect include easy store/online navigation (75%), relevant product/service recommendations (67%), messages that are tailored to their needs (66%) and targeted promotions (65%), according to McKinsey & Company’s Next in Personalization 2021 report.

Why it works: A personalized marketing approach creates a better customer experience by anticipating their needs and meeting them in real time. Personalization leads to higher brand awareness and loyalty, better customer retention and higher lifetime customer values. Companies that grow faster net 40% more revenue from personalization than slower-growing companies.

Measure and Change

Keep a close eye on your customer metrics and adjust your marketing strategies accordingly. Your cross-channel marketing platform should provide a user friendly dashboard and offer customized reports to show you where your customer pain points happen. If you set up a marketing workflow to send an SMS message about a sale on a product, for instance, but the SMS message campaign has a low engagement rate, you know it’s time to make a strategic change. What’s more, these changes can be made in real time to adjust to customer expectations throughout the lifecycle of any campaign.

You can also use survey responses through your cross-channel marketing tool to calculate quantitative measures of how happy customers are with the overall experience of working with your company.

Common metrics include:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS), based on responses to a question like, “How likely are you to recommend [XX company or service]?”
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), based on prompts to rate a certain part of the customer experience, such as product delivery or onboarding process
• Customer Effort Score (CES) determines how hard or easy it was for the customer to complete a task, such as completing an online order or setting up a profile

Why it works: Using metrics and adjusting in real-time is an agile marketing approach that allows you to understand what is and isn’t working for your customers and immediately create a better experience. This strategy leads to more team efficiency and better marketing results, because you’re not waiting until the end of a campaign to make changes. Instead, you can increase your return on investment in real time all while creating a better customer experience.

Benefits of Customer Experience Marketing

Focusing on customer experience may sound like a “nice” thing to do, but it offers true sales benefits. According to a recent Forbes Insights Report with Treasure Data, 74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experience alone.

Excellent customer experience can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher customer retention, higher lifetime customer value and greater brand equity.

At the end of the day, you’re not just selling a product or service, you’re selling a brand and an experience. Customer experience marketing will help you keep the focus where it belongs—on building a strong relationship between your customers and your brand.

To start focusing your initiatives on the overall customer experience, schedule a custom Iterable demo today.

The post What is Customer Experience Marketing? appeared first on Iterable.

So in this installment, we’re diving deeper into the bread and butter of most AI marketing: campaign automation and optimization.

Want to binge all the AI insights? Head to Ad Age now to download the full study.

What’s the Difference Between AI Automation and Optimization?

Automation and optimization are core components of all modern marketing campaigns, but when it comes to how they’re connected to AI specifically, the research denoted key differences.

Automation was defined as using machines automatically to do tasks without intervention. As Ad Age explains in the study, “AI-driven automation features can help marketers strengthen customer relationships, improve brand performance, and meet their KPIs in today’s fast-moving marketplace.”

Optimization, on the other hand, was defined as automatically recommending improvements. Ad Age differentiates the two by stating, “AI-powered optimization occurs both inside and outside of automation. AI is now a standard practice in automation platforms as a means to optimize send times and frequency for email campaigns and in-app or web push notifications.”

Put another way, automation is invoked when you send a triggered message, but with AI optimization you can trigger the message to send via the channel a customer uses most often or at the time they’re most likely to engage. Both are necessary to ensure the success of any marketing campaign.

What Marketers Think About AI Automation and Optimization

The data proves AI automation and optimization are indeed standard practices. When asked, “Which type of AI would make your jobs easier?,” 57% of the 1,200 marketers surveyed selected optimization, and 53% selected automation. Although marketers could select more than one subset, these two were the top-ranked options.

When it comes to AI making marketers’ jobs easier, Adriana Gil Miner, CMO at Iterable, has heard this feedback firsthand:

“Marketers are telling us: I do not want to set up campaigns anymore. I do not want to crunch data or take a half-day to set up a three-stage welcome program. They’re saying, automate all of that for me, and surface the insights and recommendations to give me the option of making human decisions.”

And, given that 62% of marketers currently use AI both for their job and outside their job, it’s clear they’re looking to AI technologies to simplify and streamline both their professional and personal lives.

Marketing Advantages of AI Automation and Optimization

If there was one word that sums up the advantage marketers have with AI automation and optimization, it would be efficiency. Ad Age states in the report, “AI is now widely acknowledged as an essential driver of marketing efficiency and brand performance.”

In fact, nearly half (47%) of marketers are drawn to AI specifically because it will help them work more efficiently. As for the other advantages:

• 49% believe AI should increase business metrics and reflect better on their job performance
• 45% believe AI will increase their skills and make their work more accurate
• 37% see AI as becoming an integral part of their overall skill set as a marketer

Ashley Kramer, chief marketing and strategy officer at GitLab, agrees these insights reflect what she’s observing on her own team:

“This report finds that marketers increasingly view AI not as a threat but as an enhancer […] AI can drive tremendous efficiencies throughout all organizations.”

AI-driven optimization and automation impact a marketer’s ability to increase their skills and improve their business metrics by streamlining their routine tasks and unlocking their capacity for creativity and innovation. When you no longer have to stress about the logistics of building a campaign or maximizing engagement rates, you’re free to dream up bigger and better ways to strengthen customer loyalty.

After identifying why today’s marketers are using AI to automate and optimize their campaigns, the next question, of course, is how they’re actually putting it into practice.

Spoiler alert: they’re using AI-powered platforms like Iterable.

Automation and Optimization with Iterable AI

As defined above, AI automation and optimization are all about letting technology tackle your routine tasks and improving performance over time. While any modern marketing platform worth its salt should already be leveraging AI as part of its toolset. Iterable goes beyond the basics to making every campaign a piece of cake.

Optimization has been at the core of the Iterable platform from the beginning, and its AI suite offers three features every marketer needs:

• Send time optimization
• Channel optimization
• Frequency optimization

Over the past decade, marketers have become so sophisticated that sending mass emails at nine o’clock on Tuesday mornings has been rendered obsolete. Now the popular mantra of sending “the right message to the right person at the right time” can be completely automated.

Iterable AI analyzes when, where, and how often a customer is most likely to engage with your brand, so you can let it decide and save your brainpower for developing creative and innovative campaigns.

And once those campaigns are complete, you can use Iterable’s Next Best Action to automatically identify how to maximize future engagement. Next Best Action uses AI to analyze the end-to-end logistics of your campaigns and suggest new audience segments and content recommendations to improve performance. It’s like having your own personal guide to point your marketing strategy in the right direction.

You can learn about all of the features in Iterable’s AI Suite and download the full Ad Age report for even more insights about AI-powered automation and optimization. Stay tuned—we’ll cover AI explainability and predictive goals next.

Ready to take the next step on your AI marketing journey? Reach out and schedule a custom demo of Iterable AI today.

The post How AI Automation & Optimization Impacts Today’s Marketers appeared first on Iterable.

What Impacts Email Deliverability? 

At this point, you’re likely already aware of how much work goes into maintaining a successful email marketing strategy. You need to be concerned about email delivery rates and ensure your messages don’t end up in a subscriber’s spam folder or get marked as spam by the recipient after it lands in the inbox. Spam placement can happen in several ways:

• You don’t have explicit permission from email subscribers to send them email, resulting in low/no engagement and/or spam complaints

• You sent to inactive or nonexistent email addresses repeatedly.

• You have low email open rates. The average open rate for business emails is 21.5%. If yours is well below that, it can lower your deliverability rate.


While ending up in the spam folder isn’t the desired outcome, there is still a chance that emails in spam folders might be read. What’s worse is if your email is rejected before it even arrives. Emails can bounce back for several reasons. 

• Soft bounces are considered temporary since action can usually be taken to avoid additional future bounces. These can be caused by a recipient’s inbox being too full, an out-of-office message, or a message that’s too large. 

• Block bounces are a type of soft bounce, but will have more of an impact on your sending reputation. You, the sender, are being blocked by the mailbox provider because previous negative signals were not heeded. 

• Hard bounces happen when you send to an invalid email—whether it’s spelled wrong or doesn’t exist—and are considered permanent.


Also included in your email lists might be spam trap addresses. These addresses are managed (and sometimes created) by mailbox providers and filtering companies to identify and monitor organizations sending spam. But not all spam traps are created equal. Some can have highly disruptive effects on your sending, leading to your IP address or your domain being blocklisted.

How to Improve Your Deliverability Rate

There are many ways to fix and, even better, improve your email deliverability rate. You can:

Clean Up Your Email List

Regularly reviewing and removing inactive subscribers will help keep your email list in good shape. A good rule of thumb is to cull addresses that haven’t engaged with your emails in the last six months. Use a cleaning service such as BriteVerify to verify your email lists before sending any emails. Also, be sure to remove any emails that have previously hard bounced. 


Tip: You can still include addresses outside the 6-month engagement window in re-engagement campaigns, but add them back in small segments to see at what point engagement drops. At that point, you will want to stop.

Make Your Opt-In Memorable

If people don’t remember signing up for your emails, there’s a good chance they won’t trust you and will either unsubscribe or mark your email as spam. Therefore, using a double opt-in is a good idea. This means recipients must confirm their subscription in their inbox before they are added to your list. 


Tip: Requiring a double opt-in helps you build a more engaged subscriber base and protects your sender reputation. 

Make it Easy to Unsubscribe 

It might seem like you’d want to make it harder for people to stop getting your emails, but it’s better for people to unsubscribe than mark your email as spam. 


Tip: Ensure the unsubscribe link is easy to find and use clear language. Also, keep the unsubscribe process simple. Don’t require the user to jump through hoops to unsubscribe (such as logging in to their account first.

Check Your Data

Track metrics such as open, bounce, and complaint rates for signs that your emails aren’t being delivered to your subscribers or aren’t resonating with your subscribers.


Tip: You know what metrics are typical for your program, so look more closely when something looks unusual. Examples include a significant drop in open or click rates or a large increase in bounces. These can indicate spam placement or blocks.

The Case for Email Deliverability 

Email is the backbone of a successful cross-channel marketing strategy. Emails drive sales, help you build a relationship with your consumers, offer a forum for feedback, and generate traffic to your website and social media accounts. That’s why it’s so important to ensure that your emails are safely making it to your subscribers’ inbox and that you’re providing content they find valuable and relevant.

If you’re currently an Iterable customer and are interested in our Deliverability Services, be sure to reach out to your CSM. If you’re not an Iterable customer yet, schedule a custom demo today. 

The post What is Email Deliverability? appeared first on Iterable.

The idea behind in-app messaging is to grab the viewer’s attention to drive deeper engagement and encourage retention—which is important considering app retention rates drop over time. At the 30-day mark apps have a 66% retention rate, at the 90-day mark it dips to 48%. You can encourage interaction and deliver more value from your app by using in-app messaging to promote new app features or products, assist with onboarding, or provide updates on recent purchases.

Because in-app messaging can be used to send timely, targeted, and informative messages that drive users to take action, they are compared to push notifications. The major difference is that in-app messaging appears when the user is actively using the app, whereas push notifications pop up outside app use and are designed to bring the user into the app. In-app messaging can also be more timely since they’re often a direct response to user behavior. For example, if a customer is browsing a particular product page within your app, you might send an in-app notification offering them a 24-hour discount on that product, or alerting them that stock is low.

When to Use In-App Messaging

There are many ways that in-app messaging can deliver value to your users. Some of the most common and beneficial uses include:

• Onboarding: In-app messaging can be a great way to guide people through your app’s features, help them set up a profile, or turn on location services.
• Recognition: Gamification and rewards can help build loyalty to your app. For example, you might send users a badge when they complete a portion of their profile.
• In-app purchases: In-app messages are natural vehicles for offering new product promotions, deals, and coupons that drive in-app purchases.
• App updates: Layout or functionality updates and new features are things that users want to hear about. You can use in-app messaging to alert them to these changes as soon as they open the app.
• Collecting feedback: In-app messaging is a great way to get immediate feedback through surveys or ratings, and to encourage users to leave starred reviews on other platforms.

Best Practices for In-App Messaging

In general, the best in-app messages are short, engaging, and simple. You can dress up the text in your notifications with links, images, and even GIFs. In cases where you may need to send a longer message, you can use an interactive carousel feature to allow the user to rotate through the notifications.

Although many in-app messages are promotional, they should be helpful. After all, you want to encourage users to visit your app more often. To be sure your messages are more helpful than harmful, consider the timing. You don’t want to send pop-up messages when users are in the middle of a task in your app, like filling out a survey.

To test that your messages are resonating with your intended audience, use A/B testing as you would with other marketing efforts. When done well, in-app messaging can mean the difference between a user finding your app beneficial and easy to use, and deleting it off their phone.

Benefits of Using In-App Messaging

One of the top benefits of in-app messaging is its ease. Unlike push notifications, users don’t have to opt-in to get the messages. That means the potential audience for these messages is every user of your app. In-app messages also stand out more because people only see them when they’re using your app, versus the dozens of push notifications they receive from all of their downloaded apps throughout the day.

Targeted in-app messaging can provide a lot of added value to your user, and take pressure off certain aspects of your business, such as customer service. For example, you can use in-app messaging to alert people when a product is back in stock, or to offer real-time price drop announcements.

In-app messaging can be easily integrated into your app and is a simple tool to use. Most importantly, relevant and timely in-app messaging can help improve return on investment by boosting app satisfaction and conversion rates.

In-App Messaging as Part of a Cross-Channel Marketing Campaign

In-app messaging can be used as one valuable component of a comprehensive cross-channel marketing campaign.

For instance, if your hospitality brand is promoting a discount on a multi-night stay, you might launch a campaign that incorporates an email promotion, an SMS message, a push notification, and an in-app message, customizing your channel optimization for each customer based on the channels they use and how they respond to the offer across each platform. By engaging with your customers across the channels they are most likely to use, you’ll increase the chances they consider your offer and, ultimately, book a trip.

By using a sophisticated cross-channel marketing solution like Iterable, you’ll be able to get a 360-degree view of each customer and develop the right engagement strategy for each one of them, incorporating in-app messaging alongside other marketing channels to find the right way to connect with them.

Schedule a demo to learn more.

The post What is In-App Messaging? appeared first on Iterable.

In our latest research with Wakefield Research published by Ad Age, we’re bridging this gap and combating any misconceptions with an exclusive look at how marketers are using AI technologies. In this four-part blog series, we’ll share insights about all types of AI tools, starting today with GenAI.

And if you’re looking for fewer hot takes and more hard facts, then download the full AI report on Ad Age.

What is Generative AI?

As Ad Age explains in the report, “generative AI represents a subset of the automation category focused on content creation.” These tools use natural language processing (NLP) models to generate copy or imagery that can be used for marketing campaigns, hence the name.

Lynn Girotto, CMO of Vimeo, discusses the importance GenAI plays in marketing personalization:

“Personalization in marketing has evolved from having the right data and technology to crafting the right message at the right place and time. I’m a big believer that AI, especially generative AI, will bring us closer to realizing this vision of deeper personalization.”

Testing and learning are critical components of GenAI, as marketers can craft more options for email subject lines, text messages, and other elements of campaign copy to experiment with. This is even more true at scale: in record time, GenAI can spark marketers’ creativity and unlock their writer’s block so they can stay competitive and drive better results.

What Marketers Think About Generative AI

In our survey of 1,200 marketers, the data was clear, according to Ad Age:

“Today’s marketers increasingly recognize AI’s ability to do things for them, not as a replacement for them, and are much less likely to view AI as a threat to their careers. The majority of marketers now believe AI will increase future job opportunities and allow them to perform their current roles better.”

Specifically, these were the survey results that stood out the most:

• 91% of marketers are already using AI in their jobs.
• 62% use AI both for their job and outside their job.
• 49% believe generative AI will make their jobs easier.

Ashley Kramer, chief marketing and strategy officer at GitLab, notes that Iterable’s research validates what she’s seeing with her audience of software developers:

“Companies that use AI to automate inefficient tasks will free up talent to focus on more creative endeavors, leading to improved productivity, innovation, and a competitive advantage.”

As the data shows, that competitive advantage doesn’t just apply to a brand’s ability to succeed in a crowded marketplace. It also applies to a marketer’s ability to succeed in a rapidly evolving job market.

GenAI’s Advantages for Marketers

The rapid acceleration of AI adoption doesn’t mean marketers don’t have legitimate concerns: nearly 9 in 10 expressed concerns that “I will have to learn how to use AI to maintain my value as a marketer.”

But the impact of GenAI’s success with tools like ChatGPT has brought opportunities for marketers to reduce the need for “do” time and increase their “think” time.

When marketers were asked what draws them to use AI at their jobs, these were the top responses:

• 47% the ability to work efficiently
• 45% increasing personal skill sets
• 43% fostering more accurate work

These advantages contribute to over two-thirds of marketers (67%) seeing AI as a transformative tech revolution, not just a tool. The key for marketing organizations, both big and small, will be making sure their teams have proper training and access to the right AI tools.

And that’s where Iterable can help.

Leveraging GenAI with Iterable’s Copy Assist

Modern customer communication platforms are already harnessing the power of generative AI, and Iterable is no exception. Iterable’s Copy Assist is designed to provide alternative text suggestions for short message copy, like email subject lines, SMS messages, and push notifications.

Last fall, we announced Copy Assist’s integration within Iterable Experiments, so marketers can test which messages will perform better with their audiences. With a centralized space to review and group past experiments, marketing teams can review their experiments’ performance and automatically create new, optimized ones based on previous results.

You can learn about all of the features in Iterable’s AI Suite and download the full Ad Age report for even more insights about AI-powered marketing. Plus, stay tuned for the deep dive into all things AI automation and optimization.

Ready to take the next step on your generative AI journey? Reach out and schedule a custom demo of Iterable AI today.

The post Survey Says: What Marketers Really Think About Generative AI appeared first on Iterable.

To give you a sense of everything we’ve accomplished over the years, here are just a few of our favorite moments:

• Keynotes from Disney, Netflix, and comedian Nicole Byer
• Sessions from Corporate Natalie, Dotdash Meredith, NBC, SeatGeek, Strava, Ritual, Stitcher, and Evernote
• A unique virtual conference on Activate Island
• Taking Activate global with trips to London, Amsterdam, Sydney, and recorded sessions from around the world

But again, this is just a handful of everything we’ve offered at Activate over the years. To convey this entire evolution visually, we’ve compiled the below infographic. So take a walk down memory lane as you scroll through the Activates of yore.

Oh, and don’t forget to join us at Activate Summit this year to become a part of history. If you’re not already registered, get to it! 

The post The History of Activate [Infographic] appeared first on Iterable.

I couldn’t help but think about each visit from a marketer’s perspective. Considering I work for a company that expresses the value of a personalized experience, there were a lot of mental notes made. In this case, an individualized experience would have made a world of difference.

Boutique #1

I started the day at a smaller boutique. My mom, my maid of honor, and I were led to a back section of the store which we were told was “just for us.” I took note of the various gowns that flocked the walls as we were shown to a sitting area. Once seated, the sales associate, let’s call her Lily, asked me a slew of questions about my wedding, my style, and my preferences—some zero-party data, if you will.

Important to note is that when booking all of these appointments, I was asked to fill out a form with this same information. I noted the time I spent filling out the form only to answer similar questions in person. The appointment was only an hour long, so having to cut into my time with repetitive questioning was already a demerit in my book.

Then, Lily pulled some dresses for me based on the information she had asked. Some were huge misses, some were hits. I tried them on and gave my feedback, and she would pull more options. What was frustrating was that I wasn’t given the option to browse myself. I had to trust Lily to listen to my preferences.

After rounds of getting sort of close to what I wanted, I found a dress I loved, but it needed some alterations. This boutique doesn’t offer in-house alterations, so Lily wasn’t comfortable recommending solutions. I was told “that would need to be discussed with a seamstress.” Sigh, more people to repeat my needs to.

We left the boutique without making a purchase, but still keeping that gown in mind.

Marketing Takeaway: Data is knowledge, so use it when it’s offered up. Customers are going to get frustrated if they provide data and it’s not used to enhance the overall customer experience.

Boutique #2

The next boutique we had trouble even locating. We went into a building, got lost in a stairwell, found the elevator, entered the shop, all to be told we had to go to the bridal store, not the events store (both under the same brand name). So, we went to the building next door and finally found the right spot. As soon as the elevator doors parted, future brides were whizzing back and forth in their prospective gowns. Definitely a bit busier than the last boutique.

I was greeted by an associate at the front desk who proceeded to hand me a tablet with a form asking for basic information like my email address, home address, phone number, etc. It also asked for my preferences and wedding information. Again, I had to fill out this information when booking the appointment and had since received confirmation emails, meaning, at the very least, they had my email already.

My appointment was at 2:30 and we waited until about 2:50 until we were even spoken to by another associate. We were finally taken to another room where we waited another 10 minutes.

The sales associate that I was working with, let’s call her Sarah, came into the room and greeted us. I bet you can’t guess what she asked me next. Yep. “What are you looking for? When’s the wedding? What styles do you like?” At this point I was already frustrated and told Sarah that I had just filled out all of that information on the form about 20 minutes earlier. She replied with “oh but it’s on the computer so if I were to go read it we’d be postponed even longer.” Not off to a good start, Sarah.

A more experienced salesperson than Lily, Sarah was able to quickly help me find dresses based on the information I had told her. She also let me walk around the store and point out what I liked. This boutique did offer alterations, so Sarah was also able to show me what was possible, which helped me better envision the final product.

I found another dress I liked here but, again, left without a purchase.

Marketing Takeaway: Reduce friction for customers interacting with your brand. Take deliverability, for example. Having multiple addresses or sender names from the same brand often leads customers down the wrong path or, like in this case, to the wrong storefront.

Boutique #3

Last stop of the day. Throughout my experiences with the other two boutiques I had picked a dress silhouette I liked and realized that this last boutique didn’t carry any with this silhouette. On the way over to the store I called the associate, let’s call her Lauren, and asked about the silhouette. She confirmed they didn’t have any but, since we were already en route, we decided to go.

This boutique was also very difficult to find, but when I called, the associate walked me through how to find it and stayed on the phone with me until she greeted us at the door.

Prior to this appointment I had picked five dresses the store carried that I wanted to try on. When I walked into our fitting room I noticed the five dresses and, beautifully written on the mirror was “Congratulations, Brooke! We’re excited you’re here!” I pointed it out to my mom and maid of honor, and specifically noted how the other boutiques didn’t do that.

Lauren offered us glasses of prosecco and then helped me try on the gowns. While none of them were what I wanted, Lauren was super kind, patient, and helpful. She even let us hang out in the room after the failed try-ons so we could chat and finish our drinks. Even though I didn’t end up buying anything, or even finding something I liked, at this last boutique, I couldn’t help but compare the experience and level of personalization to the previous two shops.

Marketing Takeaway: Details matter and the little ones are what turn even non-buyers into brand advocates for others. Customers are going to compare what you do and what your customers do, so it’s important to stay ahead of the curve.

Each Customer is One-of-a-Kind

I left the day with a bad taste in my mouth. Not only did I feel rushed and pressured to make a decision, but I really felt like just another number to these boutiques—especially boutiques one and two. While they may see 20 brides a day, I’m only visiting a few boutiques and picking a once-in-a-lifetime dress. It felt like the salespeople lost sight of that and were only angling for a commission.

As a brand, it’s a good reminder to consider your customers as individuals. While you may have hundreds of thousands of customers, to them, you may be the one store they’re willing to purchase with. To them, you’re the top choice.

Be sure to deliver an optimized, individualized experience where you take their zero-party data into account and use it to inform every step of the overall experience. It can really make a difference to your customers, especially if your competitors are doing it and you’re not.

To learn more about how you can personalize your customer experience, schedule a custom Iterable demo today.

The post Wedding Dress Shopping: A New Perspective on Personalization appeared first on Iterable.

How are Winback Campaigns and Re-Engagement Campaigns Different?

Both winback campaigns and re-engagement campaigns are aimed at increasing lapsed engagement. But these marketing terms aren’t interchangeable.

Re-engagement campaigns tend to be centered on a single marketing channel—say, sending a personalized, targeted email to re-engage customers who once reliably opened emails, but no longer do. A winback campaign, on the other hand, tends to take a more holistic approach to the customer-brand relationship. The goal is less focused on a particular marketing channel and more on increasing overall engagement across all channels, to support the intention of increasing customer lifetime value.

Keep in mind, winback campaigns don’t always target customers who have unsubscribed from a brand’s marketing messages or stopped interacting with the brand entirely. These campaigns can also be aimed at customers who are still somewhat engaged, but at far lower rates than they once were.

How do Winback Campaigns Impact Customer Churn?

Every business deals with customer churn. Even if a company’s overall number of customers stays relatively steady over time, marketers tend to keep a close eye on customer churn rate—the percentage of customers who stop utilizing a service within a specific time period. That’s because finding and acquiring new customers tends to be far more costly than retaining existing customers. So, high customer churn can take a serious bite out of the bottom line.

Keeping customers happy is obviously important for high customer retention and low customer churn—but so is winning back customers who have become more dormant. Lapsed customers have already demonstrated an interest in, and affinity towards, the brand, and because they’ve engaged in the past, your brand likely has past data to draw on that can make future marketing efforts more successful.

Consider the data you have on a churned customer. You know what actions they’ve taken in the past, what channels they prefer to engage with, what time of day they like to receive messages, what incentives spark them to action, how their current engagement compares to their historic peak, and more. Plus, you can also see if there are similar customers that have hit lulls in the past that have been won back. That’s powerful information. Strengthening a brand relationship with this audience is far less resource-intensive than starting afresh and trying to get net-new customers.

Tips for Building Successful Winback Campaigns

Not every customer who has hit a lull can be made into a brand enthusiast. But there are best practices that help marketers target their efforts and maximize returns.

• Clearly define the target audience: Will you focus on long-term customers whose purchase patterns have dipped more than one month in a row? Customers who showed high levels of activity on the site before finally making a first purchase, but haven’t been back since? Every brand will have its own definition of what they consider a churned customer, and setting a clear target for the winback campaign is foundational to its success.
• Leverage the intel you have: This isn’t a mystery shopper, it’s a customer you already interacted with. All of the data you have about how and when they engaged with the brand in the past puts you at a powerful advantage to rebuild that brand connection. Cast a wide net when it comes to this intel, compiling insights on everything from marketing channel to timing of communications, friend referrals to customer complaints.
• Consider where the customer is now: If someone has largely stopped engaging with the brand because they feel inundated with generic emails, sending another message to their inbox could be the final straw that loses that customer for good. That’s why it’s so important to look at a churned customer’s current behavior. Have they stopped engaging on certain platforms, but are still active on others? Does engagement tend to bump up when they receive promotional texts or emailed coupons? Are they still shopping in-store, even as their online engagement has hit a lull? Harness that data to power the next steps in the winback campaign.
• Make it personal: Customers can feel when marketers pick up a bullhorn and blast out the same message to everyone on their list. No surprise, that sort of broad-strokes approach is more likely to turn off customers that have drifted away than welcome them back into the fold. Leaning into personalization sends a signal that you know this customer. You know which platform to reach out on, what type of message to send them, which promotions they like, and exactly when the message should hit their phone or inbox. When customers feel seen, they feel connected. The more personalization that can be integrated into the winback campaign, the more effective it can be at turning those churned customers back into loyal ones.

It’s important to develop a dedicated strategy for winning back lapsed customers, using their own preferred channels and types of content to re-engage them with relevant and personalized messaging.

Still want more winback info? Learn more about how to build a successful winback campaign.

The post What is a Winback Campaign? appeared first on Iterable.

Looking forward is really just an answer to the question we all ask ourselves at some point: “now what?” Once you’ve established your gaps and overlaps and evaluated the options that exist on the market today to help you consolidate to a more efficient martech stack, it’s time to set the wheels in motion.

A Quick Refresh on Looking Inward and Outward

Just in case you’re under the wire and don’t have time to reread two full posts (although we definitely recommend perusing eventually), we’re going to speed through a recap of looking inward and looking outward.

Looking Inward

Let’s start with looking inward. This first step is all about evaluation. Taking a look at your current martech stack and understanding what tools are absolutely essential, which are not, and if there are capabilities in existing tools that aren’t being utilized by your team. It all boils down to the question, “Would removing any of these tools impede your team’s ability to execute the necessary use case?”

Looking Outward

Then, there’s looking outward. You’ve gone through your stack architecture, you’ve created an inventory spreadsheet, you’ve thought about your team’s use cases, and now you need to evaluate martech tools. Looking outward is about the trifecta: partners, features, and support. There are marketing tools out there for pretty much everything you can imagine but a true all-in-one marketing platform will have an ecosystem of partner integrations, a detailed product roadmap, and customer support to help you get the most out of the tool. 

If you’re not sure of the right questions to ask when evaluating martech tools, we’ve put together a guide to help. 

Once you’ve selected the right tool, it’s time to put your plan into action. Put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.

Looking Forward: Making the Most of Your MarTech Stack

Now that you’ve made your choice regarding your martech platform, it’s time to make the most of the tool you’ve chosen. We recommend a cycle of exploring, experimenting, and adjusting to ensure you’re continuously using your tool in the most beneficial and effective way possible.

Exploring Your Platform

First, it’s important to get familiar with the tool you have. Sure, you explored the tools’ capabilities in the looking outward stage, but it’s likely those examples or capabilities were shared in the context of an example—not with your actual use cases. When looking forward with your martech stack you need to be sure you understand all of the tools’ capabilities and how the tools can work for your specific business. 

This is where support is crucial. To start, having an Implementation team will be critical in setting your brand up for success. An Implementation Consultant ensures the platform is set up to optimize for your team’s use cases. Then, you’ll want to be sure your brand is assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM) and you’ll be able to ask them questions specific to how you intend to use the platform after implementation. 

Don’t be afraid to poke around the tool and explore every nook and cranny to make sure you know what the tool can do. And don’t forget to get your team involved! They may have different ideas for how to use certain features, widening the breadth of how the one tool can help everyone.

Experimenting With Features

When you bring your team into the process, you’ll see features through different lenses and gain different perspectives on how certain features can be used. This is when you can really start to dig into experimentation. Remember: nothing is set in stone. You can try a feature one way and, if it doesn’t go the way you were hoping, you can try something else. 

Take Iterable Studio, for example. Maybe you set up a Journey in Iterable and it only involves email. It runs totally smoothly and emails get sent out to the right segments without a problem. However, you’re thinking about adding a third email to your onboarding flow. Don’t just think about it, test it out (for frequency, send time, and even the content), see what happens. Flexibility will take you far.

Adjusting Your Processes

Speaking of flexibility, think about why you embarked on this martech consolidation journey in the first place—you had too many tools that were used by too many teams and there were too many features that were going unused. It was all too much. If you can adjust as you go, making sure you’re creating processes that fit your tools rather than getting tools that fit your processes, you’ll avoid going down the same chaotic path. 

Take the Iterable Studio example we used above. Testing and adjusting go hand-in-hand. Say your onboarding journey is perfect, the three emails work great, but now you need to incorporate a new channel—SMS. You could start looking for an SMS platform or you could adjust the journeys you already have to incorporate the new channels. Small change, big results. 

Empowering Forward-Thinking Marketers

Albert Einstein said, “Life is like riding a bicycle, to keep your balance, you must keep moving.” We’d like to think this applies to marketing as well. If something isn’t working for you with your current martech stack, you have to push forward to find a solution. 

While it may seem like a daunting task to explore, experiment, and adjust within your martech tool, this cycle gets easier the more you do it. You’ve chosen your new platform, so the goal now is to continuously move forward and use it in the most efficient and effective ways possible. Without understanding your tool you’ll seek new capabilities, new tools will pop up, and your martech stack will become unwieldy once again—bringing you back to where you first started.

It’s early in the year, so there’s no better time to look inward, look outward, and look forward. 

To learn why Iterable is the right choice for consolidating your tech stack, schedule a custom demo today. 

The post MarTech Stack Consolidation Part 3: Looking Forward appeared first on Iterable.

I’m incredibly proud of our team, and the entire Iterable community, for working together to drive the ongoing momentum and impact of Iterable.

The Iterable team at our in-person company kickoff earlier this month: Unite FY25.

Join me in exploring some of our banner year highlights:

Surpassing $200 Million in Annual Recurring Revenue

Over our nearly 11 years as a business, Iterable has established itself as the leading platform of choice for today’s biggest global brands. While industry recognition is certainly rewarding, our greatest source of pride comes from exceptional customer feedback about our team. Time and again, our customers highlight the dedication, passion, and tenacity of our people as one of our greatest values and differentiators:

 “Iterable has a top-notch customer support system; they truly feel like an extension of our internal team. They go above and beyond to make sure our problems are solved and that our needs and wishes are met. We feel like our opinions can truly make an impact on the roadmap of the product. They help finesse our customer journeys and even give us new ideas and ways to optimize, too.” 

– Iterable Customer, Redfin, in G2

Iterable isn’t only the platform of choice for today’s biggest brands, we’re the partner of choice. Our shared commitment to customer-centricity has been instrumental in driving our success. Surpassing the $200 million ARR milestone is a testament to the extraordinary individuals who define the Iterable community.

Only a tiny fraction of companies ever cross this revenue milestone. It’s extremely rare, and it’s a sign that we’re doing something special. This achievement not only underscores the ever-growing importance of customer connections but also reflects the crucial role Iterable plays in addressing the expanding needs of the market. It highlights the rising relevance of keeping customers engaged and the growing value of customer loyalty!

Leading the Charge in AI Innovation

A recent Iterable survey of marketers from Wakefield Research reveals that a staggering 91% of marketers currently use AI technology in their daily work. But despite widespread adoption, the data also reveals that marketers haven’t yet unlocked its full potential.

AI isn’t just about automation, it’s about elevation, and it offers the opportunity to liberate marketers from time-consuming tasks, enabling them to redirect their efforts toward creativity and crafting unique experiences that evoke joy and connection for their customers.

At Iterable, we are committed to empowering marketers with the tools they need to deliver individualized, harmonized, and dynamic experiences for their customers with ease. We released 37 new platform capabilities, including cutting-edge AI-powered innovations, in the last fiscal year alone.

A few AI-powered features introduced last year include:

• Channel Optimization, which uses historical data to help marketers determine and send messages on the channels users prefer based on their likelihood to engage with the message
• Copy Assist, which allows marketers to generate alternative content and messages quickly and easily, saving them time, enhancing creativity, and creating new opportunities for valuable customer engagement
• Next Best Action, which enables marketers to retarget unengaged users swiftly and effectively through AI-driven audience recommendations and pre-populated copy suggestions, streamlining the campaign creation process
• AI-Driven Experiments, which includes AI-assisted variant ideation, minimizing the time and effort it takes to configure and conduct experiments at scale to drive optimal results faster
• Frequency Optimization, which taps into Iterable’s powerful AI capabilities to determine what frequency is right for each individual within a set range.

At Activate Summit 2023, the Iterable Product team announced our latest AI innovations and releases.

Iterable’s customers, like John Geiser, Senior Manager of CRM, Lifecycle, and Mobile at Redbubble, not only share in the excitement and value of AI advancements but also witness firsthand the transformative impact of Iterable AI in their daily work.

“I’ve experienced firsthand how Iterable AI has revolutionized the way I work on a daily basis, but the most exciting benefit of AI is that it gives us more time to daydream. When we can take a lot of that busy work away and let our minds wander, that’s when we come up with our best ideas. Creativity, fueled by these moments of mental freedom, enables us to cultivate richer human connections and explore collaborative opportunities with AI, amplifying our creative potential.”

– John Geiser, Senior Manager of CRM, Lifecycle, and Mobile at Redbubble

Read about Iterable’s 2023 Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter product releases.

Ongoing EU Expansion

Iterable took our first step in going global back in 2019 when we opened our first international office in London. It’s amazing to see how our team and customer community has grown and continued to expand since. Last year, we opened our European Data Center, ensuring EU-based and multinational brands can confidently build customer trust through enhanced performance, compliance, and data security.

And I’m excited to share that we are establishing a new office in Portugal! This expansion will open doors to new global talent and allow our team to further support and engage with our customer community in the EU.

Last year, our team took Activate on tour to eight cities around the world, including: Berlin, London (shown here), Amsterdam, and Sydney.

We’re extending our reach and enhancing our capabilities in the region. This year, in addition to Global SMS, Iterable introduced a range of other innovative international features—including Flexible Default Locales and AI-Powered Frequency Management—that empower our customer brands to expand their global reach.

Discover how our EU-based customers like Wolt, Secret Escapes, and Zoopla leverage Iterable to foster and establish meaningful connections with their customers in different regions around the world.

Expanding Our Enterprise Customer Community

We continued to expand our customer base, and grew to over 1,200 customers globally in 2023! In addition, we saw a remarkable 32% increase in platform users last year, reflecting marketers’ growing reliance on Iterable to effectively engage their audiences as well as the success of Iterable’s focus on building a platform designed for marketers.

“To date the project I am most proud of is our migration to Iterable…the speed and success of this program was due in large part to the highest quality teamwork, work ethic, organization and leadership from everyone involved.”

– Madison McKone, Associate Director of Growth Marketing Platforms at Dotdash Meredith

Caption: Marketers from customers all over the world joined us at Activate Summit and Activate Tour.

Scaling With Our Customers

Iterable stands out as a driving force of innovation in the marketing automation space. Marketers from innovative brands like Redfin, Box, Airtable, and GitLab leverage Iterable to deliver more than 200 billion cross-channel messages and execute over 2.65 million campaigns annually. The extensive scale at which we operate isn’t by chance—our platform was designed over 11 years ago with unprecedented flexibility, allowing us to seamlessly grow alongside our customers.

Customers like Steve Mastrocola, Senior Director of CRM at SeatGeek, the high-growth technology platform transforming the live event experience for fans, teams, and venues. Steve highlights SeatGeek’s confidence in foreseeing and adapting to changes with Iterable as their partner, ensuring ongoing meaningful customer connections.

“SeatGeek has been a loyal Iterable customer since 2016. Working with Iterable, we’ve successfully expanded our reach across multiple channels, driving impressive results in the process. Staying attuned to evolving customer trends and demands is paramount for SeatGeek’s success. Through cross-channel marketing and AI capabilities, the Iterable team ensures we stay ahead of the curve in this dynamic industry. We’re confident that with Iterable as our partner, we can anticipate and adapt to these changes, ensuring we continue to connect with our customers in meaningful ways, now and into the future.”

– Steve Mastrocola, Senior Director of CRM at SeatGeek

A Bright Future Ahead

After three days filled with collaboration, connection, and strategic planning at our company fiscal year kickoff event, Unite, I wrapped up our time together with this quote:

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Working together, I have no doubt that we’ll go fast and far as a company. We’ll keep pushing the boundaries, not just in innovation and customer success, but in everything we put our minds to as a company.

This is just the beginning of an incredible journey, and I’m beyond excited to keep growing alongside this exceptional team and community! Let’s keep the momentum going. Our brightest years are ahead.

Employees from our New York office celebrate the $200M ARR milestone at NASDAQ Tower.

To learn more about Iterable’s new product releases and capabilities, check out what’s new. Join the Iterable team at Activate Summit happening in San Jose from April 30 – May 2, 2024!

The post Celebrating a Stellar Year of Growth, Community, and AI Innovation appeared first on Iterable.

But that’s not giving segmentation the credit it deserves.

We’re diving deeper into Iterable’s segmentation tools and revealing features you may not know you already had at your fingertips. Knowledge is power, and knowing more about audience segmentation will make your marketing unstoppable.

1. Benefit From Historical Trends With a Longer Lookback

Segmentation is a core feature of most modern marketing platforms, but did you know not all of them grant you access to your historical customer data? Some vendors only offer a 30-day lookback window—unless, of course, you pay extra for a longer range.

This may suffice for certain types of businesses that rely heavily on very recent customer interactions, but falls short when it comes to companies with longer or more complex sales cycles. If households are only buying a mattress every ten years, for example, how useful is it if you can’t access a customer’s lifetime data?

By default, Iterable stores customer data in perpetuity, without additional cost, and does not restrict access to historical data. This allows you to benefit from a wider variety of segmentation use cases, such as:

• Rewarding legacy customers for how long they’ve made certain purchases
• Personalizing messaging based on product usage or purchase frequency
• Using patterns in certain markets or segments to guide future campaigns

The Event history provides details about system and custom events that Iterable has saved for the user you’re inspecting.

2. Directly Access Your Business Data With Catalog

Catalog has been a robust part of the Iterable platform for years. It provides a way to store and activate important business and e-commerce data, like store locations, product inventory, and text variations. This enables dynamic recommendations, which you can automatically populate within your customer communications.

But Catalog data can also be accessed during segmentation (currently in beta). This can be used as search criteria to help identify specific groups based on purchase history. For example, customers of a food delivery service who have ordered from restaurants located in a certain San Francisco neighborhood or customers of a streaming app who have recently watched a movie from the romance genre.

This functionality is important because now marketers don’t have to duplicate data on their user profiles just to leverage valuable business information. This makes it easy to activate customer segments at a more granular level, so you can match people with the products and content they’ll love the most.

Catalog’s greatest strength lies in its flexibility. Marketers control how and where Collection content is used across your digital channels.

3. Identify Customer Sentiment with Brand Affinity

Marketers have always been on the hunt for their VIPs—the loyal customers who will keep coming back again and again. It’s standard to segment audiences based on metrics that indicate brand adoration—like purchase frequency, average order value, or a loyalty program tier.

But AI can take this type of segmentation even further. Iterable’s Brand Affinity^TM uses Iterable AI to label your users based on their level of engagement with your brand. You can use these labels to send more personalized and relevant messages.

When you’re in Iterable’s segmentation tool, simply select Contact Property and choose field brandAffinityLabel. Select Equals as the operator and enter one of the following values (in all lowercase): loyal, positive, neutral, negative, or unscored.

To learn more about using Brand Affinity, check out our support article.

Whether you want to provide higher discounts to your loyal customers or improve open rates by suppressing sends to negative users, Brand AffinityTM can take your audience segmentation to the next level.

4. Gain Deeper Customer Knowledge with Audience Insights

As your business grows, it can be harder to provide an individualized customer experience at massive scale. If your subscribers are little more than email addresses, then how can you speak to them as intimately as their friends?

Iterable’s Audience Insights allows you to get a better understanding of your users by displaying actionable behavioral and demographic data from lists you’re already using.

You can discover a treasure trove of information, including:

• Where your users are located
• What locales they prefer
• The mobile devices and email domains they use
• Their Brand Affinity status
• Their total and unique purchases
• Their revenue and average order value
• Their conversion and unsubscribe rates

View detailed segment demographics in Iterable’s Audience Insights.

You can also see where a segment is being used, in campaigns, journeys, and other lists. And for more specific use cases, you can add custom insights for any conversion event and user profile field.

For example, to learn if users in a certain segment open your emails and subscribe to your newsletter, you can add a custom behavioral insight for the Email Open conversion event, and another the custom conversion event you use to track newsletter subscriptions.

With Audience Insights, you can make more informed decisions about your various customer segments and improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

More to Come on the Segmentation Front

As you can see with these innovative features, Iterable never treats segmentation as table stakes. There are always better, more individualized ways we can group our customer cohorts.

Expect to see more modernization in Iterable’s segmentation tool as we revamp our user interface and offer new methods of building and organizing your lists. Whether you’re just getting started with segmentation or looking to become more sophisticated, we want to provide a superior experience.

To learn the latest with Iterable’s audience segmentation and see it in action, schedule a custom demo today.

The post 4 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Audience Segmentation appeared first on Iterable.

For this reason, batch-and-blast campaigns don’t cut it anymore. To capture some of that diminishing attention and be heard over the noise, brands must lean heavily into relevance and personalization in their marketing campaigns. To customers, anything else feels disingenuous, alienating, and can lead to unsubscribes. What’s more, your competitors aren’t sitting still, waiting for you to get it right. They’re leveraging best-of-breed marketing automation and segmentation tools to craft hyper-personalized experiences that build genuine connections.

Segmentation: Your Key to Rising Above the Noise

The key to breaking through the clutter and forging meaningful customer connections lies in effective customer segmentation. But what IS customer segmentation? Perhaps it might be easiest to start with what it’s not. It’s not taking your entire customer list and sending them the same message, regardless of demographic or firmographic attributes, the products or services they’ve purchased, or how they’ve engaged with your brand.

Essentially, best practice segmentation is about moving beyond broad demographics and diving deep into your data to truly understand the details of your various customer groups, or cohorts. This means identifying shared characteristics, behaviors, and preferences to create distinct groups with specific needs and interests.

Customer Segmentation in Action

An example of a best practice segment for a company in the productivity software industry might look something like this: All 90-day trial users who have been active within the last 30 days, who’ve indicated (through surveys or other interactions) that their primary use case is for scholastic organization, who’ve used features A, B, and D, but not C.

In this example, the company might use this particular segment to send a cross-channel marketing campaign to educate these users on how to get the most out of the software for scholastic users, with emphasis on the benefit of feature C—a feature that has proven to increase initial conversions and renewals once customers start using it. Messaging might also include some dynamic content snippets that talk about some of the additional benefits of converting to a paid account.

This is why segmentation is important. Any users who have an entirely different use case, or already use feature C or are already paying customers would immediately see this messaging as irrelevant and alienating. So, taking the batch-and-blast approach and sending the same message to all users would not only be less effective, it would cause a pretty big disconnect for many.

Segmentation in a World of Strict Data Policies

Now, you might be concerned, especially in the current environment of increased privacy legislation, that capturing quality data to use in best practice segmentation might be quite difficult. The good news is that the data powering the best customer segments doesn’t have to come from some outside source. It’s probably information that you already have, that your customers have provided to you. This information is known as first- or zero-party data.

First-party data, gleaned from implicit customer interactions and purchases with your brand, can be far more powerful than any third-party source. Analyze purchase history, website behavior, event registrations, email engagement, support requests, and even social media interactions to uncover hidden patterns and affinities.

Zero-party data is information such as preferences, interests, and feedback that customers proactively provide to a company. Unlike first-party data, customers explicitly share this information through surveys, polls, product customization options, loyalty programs, or even casual interactions. Zero-party data unlocks hyper-personalized experiences by directly tapping into customers’ own preferences and desires.

Best Practices for Powerful Segmentation

Now that we’ve discussed what powerful segmentation looks like, let’s dive into some practical steps that you can take to improve your segmentation capabilities.

1. Capture Where You Can

The first, and most crucial step to creating effective customer segments is ensuring that you’re capturing all relevant customer interaction data from every interaction point possible. Think of everywhere your customers engage with you and then work to ensure that all relevant data points are being captured and stored.

2. Activate the Data

Capturing customer interaction data is useless if your marketing automation tools don’t have access to that data. Make sure your data is actionable by getting it into your customer communication platform in a timely fashion.

3. Accuracy Matters

Your data needs to be clean (accurate) and refreshed regularly. One sure-fire way to ruin a good customer segment is to use inaccurate data or allow your good data to become stale. A solid data governance practice will help immensely here.

4. Go Beyond the Basics

Age, gender, and location are just the tip of the iceberg. Consider psychographics, purchase patterns, life stages, and even sentiment analysis to paint a richer picture of your customers.

5. Choose the Right Tools

Ensure that your martech tools make it easy for you to use this valuable data to create both static and dynamic customer segments that can be used across targeted campaigns, website/mobile app personalization and predictive modeling.

The Power of Meaningful Connections: The Segmentation Impact

Investing in better segmentation isn’t just about avoiding the unsubscribe button. It’s about unlocking a world of possibilities. These include:

• Strengthening Customer Relationships: By fostering a sense of understanding and relevance, you build trust and loyalty.
• Boosting Engagement: Segmented campaigns resonate better, leading to higher open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
• Maximizing ROI: Targeted messaging delivers a higher return on investment for your marketing spend.
• Building Positive Brand Affinity: When customers feel seen and understood, they become brand advocates, spreading the word organically.

In a World of Information Overload, Segmentation is Your Winning Strategy

In today’s marketing landscape, segmentation isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a requirement. By leveraging the power of data and insights, you can create targeted campaigns that truly resonate with your customers, forging meaningful connections that drive engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, brand success. So, ditch the batch-and-blast approach and embrace the art of segmentation.

To learn more about how Iterable can help you succeed in your segmentation endeavors, schedule a custom demo today.

The post Making Better Customer Segments and Why it Matters appeared first on Iterable.

With every new year comes new design trends. While we’re over a month into 2024, we figured it’s as good a time as any to focus on some marketing design trends we expect to take off this year. In 2023 we predicted retro, monochrome, highlights, outlines, and touches of illustration. Some of last year’s trends are likely going to stick around for the long haul (retro, we’re lookin’ at you), but this year, things are going to be a bit different.

Who better than us, an in-house Iterable Brand Designer and Social Media Manager, to share our expertise and look at what design trends brands can expect to show up in future marketing communications?

1. Kitsch

Kitsch has historically been defined as, “Something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality.” First of all, rude. Through the lens of this design trend we’re equating kitsch more to unique, colorful, retro, and tacky (in the best possible way). Going hand-in-hand with the maximalism craze, kitsch captures bold color with unexpected shapes.

Pinterest Predicts shared the popularity of kitsch in interior design. Source: Pinterest Predicts.

While Pinterest may be predicting kitsch in interior design, it’s safe to assume that this trend will bleed into all forms of design, including marketing communications.

2. Free-Form Photo Cropping

The next trend we expect to see more of is free-form photo cropping. By this, we really mean more organic shapes will be utilized to crop photography. Rather than just the basic square or circle crop we’re all used to seeing, brands will start cropping photos to shapes that more closely align with their overall brand aesthetic.

Fitbit and Soulcycle use unique shapes to crop the image of the instructor. Source: Really Good Emails.

Take this co-branded email from Fitbit and Soulcycle, for example. Where they could have placed a full width rectangular image, they instead cropped to an organic, rounded shape. This shape adds a bit of interest and, because they cropped the image in a way that breaks the borders of the shape, it adds dimension.

3. Hand-Drawn Illustrations

In what our Social Media Manager, Bri, referred to as “The Graza Effect,” we expect to see a lot more hand-drawn illustrations in emails and other marketing communications. These custom illustrations help develop strong brand identity and individuality. The Graza Effect is named after Graza olive oil, a brand that’s now synonymous with these custom drawings.

A large part of the Graza olive oil brand is hand-drawn illustrations. Source: Graza.

But, of course, Graza isn’t the only brand utilizing these types of drawings in their marketing messaging. Fishwife, a female-owned tinned fish company uses a similar aesthetic in their branding.

Fishwife uses small, custom illustrations throughout their marketing collateral. Source: Fishwife.

These illustrations are appealing to brands because they’re completely unique to the individual brand. Gone are the days of stock photos. Custom drawings are in.

4. Diagonal Lines

Another 2024 design trend we expect to see a lot more of is diagonal lines. Adding diagonal lines to designs makes them a bit more interesting. “Diagonal lines have the most capacity to lead the eye and they tend to make a design or image look more ‘dynamic.’ Since they are neither vertical nor horizontal, diagonal lines can seem unstable, like they are about to fall or they are moving somewhere. Diagonal lines can also show perspective. These lines lead the viewer into the image.”

Nandos uses diagonal lines to break up the various email sections. Source: Really Good Emails.

In this example from Nando’s, diagonal lines are used to separate the various content modules in the email. In a traditional email you’d see straight lines separating each section, but by including diagonals the email is more interesting.

5. Coquette

We couldn’t not talk about the coquette trend that’s sweeping social media. According to Buzzfeed, “The term ‘coquette’ refers to a ‘woman who flirts,’ but the trend leans more into incorporating playful, romantic, and dainty details into everyday style and decor.” Bows have become synonymous with the coquette trend and we’ve seen this play out on Tiktok—from people putting ribbons in their hair to tying ribbons around food.

Pinterest Predicts shared the coquette trend of “bow stacking.” Source: Pinterest Predicts.

One trend that Pinterest Predicts called out, in relation to the coquette trend, is “bow stacking.” Basically, this means wearing a bunch of bows either in one’s hair, as part of an outfit, etc. We wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing bows in brands’ marketing communications.

Design Trends for the New Year

As we picked out some of these trends, we started noticing some overarching themes. This year is not about quiet design. Gone are the days of “millennial gray”—brands are learning to embrace bold, bright colors and shapes.

We’re also noticing a desire for individualization. Just as customers expect to be treated like individuals, brands want to be recognized as unique—standing out from competitors. Hand-drawn illustrations really lend themselves to individualized brand identities because they’re truly custom for each brand. Brands are leaning away from downloaded icon packs and creating their own. Iconic, really.

Now’s the time to set your brand apart. Embrace these trends but really make them your own. Use these trends to develop a strong brand identity and keep it consistent throughout all of your marketing communications.

To learn more about creating consistent cross-channel marketing communications, schedule a custom Iterable demo today.

The post 2024 Marketing Design Trends appeared first on Iterable.

To help reduce the number of tools (and therefore the number of trainings, siloed data, and overall cost), martech consolidation should be a priority. Cutting various marketing platforms can be as tricky as finding new ones. Different teams use different tools for different purposes, so it’s important to find a tool that can perform the way multiple teams need it to.

We’ve created a guide to help you maximize the value of your customer communication platform with a series of questions to understand if a solution delivers on its promises. By focusing on data, design, delivery, and optimization, you’ll be able to direct conversations when you’re in the trenches exploring vendors, support deeper exploration of native features and/or functionality offered, and ultimately rule out what’s function versus fiction so you feel confident about your chosen solution.

This post is a preview but if you want to jump right to the full guide, it’s available here.

4 Measures to Evaluate Customer Communication Platforms

Let’s look closer at the four capabilities to look for in your platform and some questions included in the guide to discern important functionality, features, integrations, and more for each one.

1. Data

Data flexibility encompasses the platform’s ability to operate productively inside your existing technology environment. Flexibility goes beyond integration alone and characterizes how readily the platform ingests, activates, and feeds data throughout your broader stack.
Your martech platform’s ability to store data and make it actionable will dictate how well your team can send relevant communications to customers. Marketers need all the different layers of their data compiled and ready for use if they hope to reflect their customers’ real-time experiences.

Sample questions to ask:

• How readily does the platform integrate with other tools and data sources?
• What levels of personalization are possible?
• How flexible is the platform’s data storage schema?
• How does the platform support the advancement of each customer’s journey?

2. Design

Design speaks to the platform’s campaign management capabilities and the degrees to which your team can elevate messaging efficacy when efficiently creating and launching compelling cross-channel campaigns.

As modern marketers, 1:1 personalization across your customer database is essential. If a customer communication platform prevents you from maximizing a data-rich ecosystem, it will feel like you’re flying blind during campaign execution and management. Look for the platform that ticks off boxes for designing more enriched campaigns and getting them to market faster.

Sample questions to ask:

• How quickly can you build and send a campaign?
• How easily can cross-channel customer journeys be created?
• How can behavioral events be incorporated into campaigns?
• Are there templates to support journey building?

3. Delivery

Delivery speaks to the ability to effectively convey personalized messages to consumers across various channels—like email, SMS, and mobile push notifications—in a cohesive and coordinated manner.

This results in both greater efficiency— as marketers no longer have to switch between tools—and better customer experiences that lead to stronger engagement and retention. Brands with consistent, effective cross-channel marketing have customer retention rates ~91% higher than those that don’t.

Sample questions to ask:

• What level of engineering dependency does the tool require?
• How are audiences segmented while campaigns run?
• Does the platform maintain data export/import requirements?
• What communication channels are natively supported inside the platform?

4. Optimization

Optimization refers to fine-tuning campaigns with AI-powered segmentation and recommendations, experimentation, and insights driven by analytics.

Marketers have many factors to consider when personalizing campaigns at scale—customer profile data, message frequency, delivery timing, etc. Generic messaging just won’t cut it. Optimization can lead to better audience understanding, increased productivity and ROI, improved customer retention, and more.

Sample questions to ask:

• How is campaign effectiveness reported?
• Are there any A/B testing capabilities?
• How does the platform improve campaign performance with AI?
• How transparent is the AI with what data it uses to draw conclusions or make predictions?

Martech Consolidation Should Be the Opposite of Overwhelming

As Beth Comstock, former CMO and Vice Chair at General Electric said, “Marketing’s job is never done. It’s about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day.” What that looks like is different for each brand, but if modern marketers have the right customer communication platform to facilitate insightful, responsive marketing experiences, the outcomes speak for themselves. Work is easier, demands are manageable, consumer expectations are fulfilled, and forward progress is possible..

Download the full guide for a comprehensive list of questions to help you find the best customer communication platform and decide who addresses data, design, delivery and optimization. And, if you’re curious about what makes Iterable a top-rated, AI-powered communication platform that thousands of brands trust, read our customers’ stories.

The post A Guide for Building the Right Martech Stack appeared first on Iterable.

1. Calm

Calm is the #1 app for sleep, meditation, and relaxation that offers guided meditations, sleep stories, soothing background music and more.

By coupling Iterable’s cross-channel customer journeys with Amplitude’s visualized product analytics, Calm gained a deeper understanding of customer behavior. For example, recognizing that user engagement is highest in the first hour of downloading the app, Calm began testing their new-member onboarding flow.

In their experiment, half of new members were funneled through the same onboarding touchpoints, but without the existing delays—instead of 27 days, the same eight emails went out in 15 days. With this shift, Calm quickly saw that users sent down the shortened path were engaging at a higher rate than those on the extended journey.

Investing in Amplitude and Iterable helped Calm build a martech stack that was fit to scale and keep pace with their rapid growth. It has enabled their team to be better informed about their users and continue to refine communications throughout the entire customer journey, ultimately bringing a little more Calm into people’s lives—one test, one conversion at a time.

Results

• 4x increase in revenue from new-member onboarding
• 15 day onboarding, shortened from 27 days

Read the full case study.

2. RealSelf

RealSelf is a leading healthcare marketplace for people to get factual, unbiased information on cosmetic procedures. Their mission is to create a world where every investment in modern beauty is worth it. RealSelf aims to be the go-to advisor for medical and aesthetic procedures by making the experience easy, personal, and trusted.

Due to an unwieldy and ineffective in-house AI model that led to a decline in engagement and high opt-out rate, RealSelf was in need of a more reliable, automated solution that would leverage AI to deliver their messages at the most optimal frequency.

To resolve the challenges with their AI model, RealSelf turned to Iterable’s Brand Affinity, which uses AI to automatically calculate a loyalty score based on a user’s recent interactions across their marketing channels, and converts these into affinity labels tied to each user profile. For example, users labeled as loyal are those who are highly engaged with RealSelf and can be considered brand advocates.

Using these affinity labels, the RealSelf marketing team gains a unique advantage by intelligently translating user engagement data into deeper, more meaningful connections. This helps them maximize retention with loyal customers, nurture customers through lifecycle stages, and mitigate churn with at-risk detractors.

Results

• Within the first month of launching Brand Affinity, RealSelf has seen sessions and contacts increase by 30% and click-through rate has increased by 13%.
• Comparing one month before versus one month after Brand Affinity, RealSelf has seen a +39% increase in website traffic and +44% increase in conversion.
• With the help of Brand Affinity, RealSelf saves their data engineers about two hours each week when downloading their user engagement to their data warehouse.
• Within one month, the team saw a 33% decrease in opt outs with their neutral Brand Affinity group.

Read the full case study.

3. The Body Coach

Founded by personal trainer Joe Wicks ten years ago, The Body Coach aims to get people moving and help them fall in love with fitness. As one of several mobile-based, subscription fitness apps available today, The Body Coach recognized it must move fast and use clever, personalized communications to attract and retain customers.

Easy Start, an activation feature launched in September 2022, helps new Body Coach subscribers—and especially fitness beginners—start their first workout. Having observed a common, but unfavorable behavior with beginners, the product team wanted to address it. Their plan was to soften the onboarding ramp with Easy Start and make it less intimidating for someone going from no-to-low activity to several weekly hiit workouts.

A cross-discipline team including product, design and product marketing implemented the Easy Start in-app feature and used Iterable Studio to develop the complementary communication series—in-app, push notifications, and email messages—with a goal to reduce the % of beginners who are inactive during their first 30 days using the app. After launching the Easy Start campaign and communication series in Q3 2022, Body Coach reduced the number of inactive beginners by 10% in one quarter.

Results

• A 10% reduction in the total number of inactive Body Coach beginners, within one business quarter.
• 60% of users who interact with personal voice messages from Joe, delivered through push notifications, complete a workout in three days.
• Improved customer engagement that increases the likelihood of 30-day retention and member renewal.
• More consistent, cross-channel branding from an improved digital ecosystem of Iterable’s marketing automation platform, the CMS, and social media. This strengthens members’ journeys and their overall emotional connection to the brand and Joe as the face of The Body Coach.
• Automated, nimble communications create operational efficiencies and support both reactive and proactive customer engagement to match the brand’s quick, effective, personal social strategy.

Read the full case study.

4. Curology

With over $17 million in funding and a business that has grown by over 500% in the past year, Curology is on a mission to provide personalized prescription skincare for acne and anti-aging directly to tens of thousands of subscribers.

In the past, the growth marketing team at Curology used two separate platforms to manage email and SMS campaigns. Data silos hindered the company’s ability to build robust subscriber profiles and deliver personalized messages in real time. Now, by partnering with Iterable, Curology has eliminated its data silos and increased its treatment plan compliance by 14% by incentivizing its customers with highly relevant messages.

Using Iterable’s visual, drag-and-drop Studio, Curology can now identify which members aren’t engaging via SMS, and reach these individuals with targeted email follow-ups, tracking email and site metrics to ensure that they’re achieving relevance across all marketing channels.

Results

• With Iterable’s true cross-channel capabilities, Curology has improved customer engagement by 26% and increased revenue by 10%.
• Curology uses Iterable to increase treatment plan compliance by 14% by sending dynamic, personalized messages across SMS and email.
• Patients younger than 30 are 10% more likely to opt-in to the SMS challenge—Iterable’s dynamic data segmentation allows Curology to quickly act on customer behavior.

Read the full case study.

5. Madison Reed

With Madison Reed’s online subscription service, consumers can achieve salon-quality hair coloring 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-coloring products and services in person.

Marketers and engineers alike were excited about Madison Reed’s 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 behaviors. 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.

Results

• The upgrade-to- subscription conversion rate for Iterable campaigns is 45% higher than that of a control group.
• Multivariate Testing and Performance Optimization showed that the addition of direct mail to the reactivation journey drove an incremental 3% lift in upgrades.
• Easy integration with other marketing platforms saves hours of engineering time and powers sophisticated campaign journeys.
• Automated campaigns triggered by individualized customer behavior are increasing reorders, expanding the customer base, and increasing revenue.

Read the full case study.

Maintaining Healthy Relationships

We’ve managed to collect a few health and wellness examples from our customer story repository, but there’s plenty more where that came from. Overall, some themes have emerged from even just these examples alone. Iterable helps health and wellness brands experiment, consolidate tech stacks, automate campaigns, and increase customer engagement. That’s just one industry, too. Iterable has helped a wide array of other industries that we’ll continue to roundup as part of this series—so stay tuned.

To learn how Iterable can help your retail brand save time and money, schedule a demo today.

The post Iterable Industry Roundup Pt. 3: Health & Wellness appeared first on Iterable.

We’ve already put together some industry-based roundups, like this list of retail case studies, so we’re continuing this series by compiling some cross-channel marketing case studies. After all, 72% of consumers say they would rather connect with brands and businesses through multiple channels.

Let’s dive into these examples that demonstrate how Iterable (and our partners) can help brands make an impact with their customers.

1. SeatGeek

SeatGeek, the live entertainment platform rethinking ticketing, struggled to deliver consistent, relevant cross-channel messages using separate email and push notification platforms. Besides being cumbersome, the platforms didn’t support the marketing team’s AI-driven, cross-channel strategy to reach customers through SMS, in-app messages, and social media.

SeatGeek adopted Iterable to consolidate communications, and now delivers highly-personal content reflecting users’ past purchases, location, online behaviors, and event-driven activities, which drives loyalty and repeat engagement. Combining communications with their unique entertainment suggestions, and connecting with customers where they are, SeatGeek produces better experiences for everyone.

Results

• Consolidation of all email and push interactions onto a single platform ensures consistent messaging across channels.
  • 3x increase in revenue from email and push
• Easy-to-use interface allows marketers to create highly granular customer segments and complex journeys without engineering help.
• Data feeds enable precise targeting and personalization of messages, which enhances customer loyalty and encourages repeat business.
• Testing provides insight into which campaigns and channels work best, improving decisions on how to allocate marketing spend.

Read the full case study.

2. The Athletic

The Athletic subscription news service delivers sports stories and analyses that bring fans closer to games, their favorite leagues, and teams. As their subscriber base quickly expanded, the manual, time-intensive email platform couldn’t support a hyper-personal, cross-channel experience.

Iterable’s segmentation, testing, reporting capabilities, cross-channel delivery, and scalability were a silver bullet for their teams (CRM, Editorial, Social, and Programming) to create campaigns that engage and make customers happy. To onboard subscribers, they use data feeds to send personalized welcome and follow-up communications. For all subscribers—whether they use the mobile app, podcast, free newsletter, or go online—unique emails feature season previews or real-time news for their favorite teams and leagues, and push notifications keep them informed during events or on the go.

Results

• Greater marketing efficiencies from improved data collection, analysis, and more automated campaign workflows means The Athletic is activating 10 new user journeys in 2022.
• Easy-to-execute campaign testing and creative capabilities support more personal, targeted user communications that increase click-through and conversion rates.
  • 2x click-through rates with personalized vs. non-personalized campaigns
  • 127% lift in subscriber click rate
  • 70% higher click rate between the welcome email and the next best performing email
• Stronger campaign performance from deeper user segmentation, communication scheduling tied to key moments, and more data-driven intelligence.

Read the full case study.

3. Box

Box, which enhances employee and partner collaboration with its cloud content management, collaboration, and file sharing tools, needed to scale and personalize communications from thousands of business administrators to millions of end users. Operating with a lean team focused on this goal, they wanted a solution that can execute campaigns at massive scale.

Iterable supported and increased Box user adoption by facilitating unique, data-driven onboarding campaigns. Iterable’s API and flexible data model makes it possible to create and send personalized messages as users also reach certain event milestones and take action.

Results

• Personalization engages customers more effectively, strengthening relationships with enterprise customers. Higher engagement among users has increased user adoption by 10%.
• Lifecycle Campaign Composition enables the team to get new campaigns ready for rollout to Box’s global user community
  5 times faster.
• Marketers have enhanced segmentation and personalization by combining Iterable data with data from Salesforce and other marketing tools.

Read the full case study.

4. Fender

Countless musicians use Fender equipment to ignite their songs, but inspiration fades for artists, triggering customer retention challenges. As a result, three mobile apps including Fender Play, Fender Tune, and Fender Tone, plus a direct-to-consumer business and e-commerce channel, were developed. Having different properties, Fender user data was dispersed, and with a siloed tech stack, marketing couldn’t easily track and use it for meaningful experiences to increase retention.

With Iterable, Fender unified its data and uncovered engagement opportunities or where customers dropped off. It now powers their cross-channel campaigns to influence offline behavior with online engagement, prompting customers to start free trials, use their apps, and purchase products.

Results

• Fender has seen improvements in retention of a month-to-month paying user because of engagement with videos.
• 89% of users watch a video on their first day.
• Through a personalized onboarding experience, Fender has seen an increase in engagement, encouraging people to watch more videos, learn more guitar, and then stick around as a paying member.

Read the full case study.

5. CoinStats

CoinStats is a popular cryptocurrency portfolio management platform, securely managing crypto and DeFi portfolios in one spot, which makes buying, selling, and tracking assets easier. But with inherent friction involved in onboarding to a new financial service, there’s often hesitation to start or reservation about sensitive data being secure. The result for CoinStats: high abandonment rates as timid new users dropped before connecting their portfolios.

Reducing drop offs takes real-time response so lifecycle marketing initiated a re-engagement campaign, powered by Iterable. It triggers personalized push notification minutes after abandonment occurs followed by email and in-app messages reinforcing CoinStats’ value. With cross-channel orchestration easier and real-time re-engagement more impactful, relationship-building moments happen more often, improving user satisfaction and activity.

Results

• With a tailored, cross-channel re-engagement campaign, CoinStats achieved a 35% decrease in abandonment rates and a 20% increase in user activity.
• Personalized push notifications resulted in a 2x increase in open rates compared to their non-personalized counterparts.
• Shifting the tone of their communications from promotional to transactional increased push open rates by nearly 50%.
• Integrating Iterable with Amplitude provided unparalleled visibility into A/B testing, down-funnel analytics, and campaign performance.

Read the full case study.

Creating a Cross-Channel Community

These brands’ challenges may sound familiar, but by embracing a customer communication platform that brings together customer data, they have the ability to design personal experiences. By delivering communications across channels they’ve seen deeper customer connections, empowered marketing teams, improved key performance indicators (KPIs), a stronger bottom line, and more.

To learn how Iterable can help your brand save time and money with cross-channel marketing strategies, schedule a demo today.

The post Iterable Roundup, Pt. 2: Cross-Channel Campaigns appeared first on Iterable.

Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategy is crucial for cutting through the promotional noise and staying ahead of your competitors. So to maximize the success of those campaigns, we’re sharing a list of top mobile marketing KPIs that should be on your radar in 2024.

Top Mobile Marketing KPIs to Kick Off Your New Year

1. Mobile E-Commerce Adoption

Mobile channels are already driving 60% of global e-commerce sales, so experts predict that mobile adoption will only increase in 2024. If more customers are shopping on their phones and tablets, then marketers must be able to track their online behavior across devices and communication channels.

Standard KPIs to measure mobile e-commerce adoption include sales attributed to mobile and average mobile order value, but another not to overlook is your company’s mobile cart conversion rate.

High cart abandonment on mobile may be indicative of a clunky checkout process, which can be remedied by partnering with teams in charge of e-commerce and user experience (UX). Marketers can also increase conversion rates by harnessing the power of AI-led features like Send Time Optimization (STO) for abandoned cart messages. That way, customers can be easily reminded of what items they left behind—regardless of which device they used.

Want to lift your retail and e-commerce lifetime value? Grab our guide on boosting retail LTV with cross-channel marketing.

2. Cross-Channel Performance

Let’s put it this way: customers aren’t going to be using fewer methods to shop and interact with their favorite brands online. Industry experts anticipate SMS and other mobile channels taking a front seat in 2024, especially as they become foundational means of communicating with customers.

KPIs to measure cross-channel performance run the gamut, but an initial place to start would be tracking the opt-in and/or engagement rates of each channel: email, SMS, mobile push, web push, and in-app notifications should be in every marketer’s toolkit.

But if your data is sending mixed messages, don’t be afraid to ask customers to specify their preferred communication method. Assuming what your customers want can never take the place of asking them explicitly.

Don’t have time to send a mass survey? No worries. You can take the guesswork out of your campaigns by using Channel and Frequency Optimization tools to automatically decide when to send messages and to which channel based on each customer’s individual behavior.

For tips on ways to uplevel your cross-channel personalization, download our guide on orchestrating your campaign messaging.

3. Gamification Impact

You don’t have to play Overcooked like you’re on the TV show “The Bear” to understand how effective gamification can be.

What marketers can’t forget, however, is measuring the success of their gamification strategies. One common way marketers include gamification is through loyalty programs, in which customers can earn points to level up and earn discounts and rewards.

So if you offer a loyalty program, make sure you’re tracking the engagement and conversion rates at each tier. That way, you can determine how best to communicate with each customer segment to drive increased purchases.

That said, you don’t need a formal loyalty program to benefit from segmenting customers based on brand sentiment. Iterable’s Brand Affinity, for instance, makes it easy to label subscribers as loyal, positive, neutral, or negative based on their engagement or lack thereof with your brand. Once you better understand your audience, you can use gamification more effectively in your campaigns.

Unlock customer loyalty and growth with our 2024 guide to lifecycle marketing, which breaks down the key steps you need to take to set your brand apart from the competition.

4. ROI on Mobile Ad Spend

Economic turbulence has continued to impact marketers, but experts are optimistic in 2024. Our friends at AppsFlyer report, “2023 saw an impressive 9% year-over-year increase in iOS non-organic installs (NOI)—an app download that happened as the result of marketing activity—after a 15% drop in 2022 compared to 2021.”

Moreover, AppsFlyer has surveyed marketers about the impact of Android’s Privacy Sandbox, which allows for testing and betas, and 53% said they will be spending more budget due to Sandbox.

This additional budget means that marketers will want to track their ROI on mobile ad spend to ensure their dollars are not circling the drain. A great way to get the biggest bang for buck is to set up Predictive Goals, as offered in Iterable’s AI suite, to identify customer segments that are most likely to purchase. By analyzing historical user behavior, you can mitigate churn and increase customer lifetime value.

Get the most out of your technology investments by downloading our checklist on how to maximize the ROI of your martech.

New Year, More Mobile Marketing KPIs

The name of the game in 2024 will be mobile marketing measurement. From e-commerce adoption to ad spend, the KPIs we’ve discussed in this post provide a way for marketers to gain deeper insight into the performance of their cross-channel campaigns.

But tracking isn’t possible if you don’t have a robust platform to make it happen. The new year is the perfect time to evaluate whether your martech is meeting your reporting and analytics needs. And if it isn’t, we’re here to help.

Want to test Iterable’s analytics for yourself? Reach out and schedule a custom demo today.

The post Top 2024 Mobile Marketing KPIs You Should Be Tracking appeared first on Iterable.

A customer is more than just a single sale. Turning a one-time shopper into a return buyer and boosting the value of each transaction is all part of increasing LTV—and it’s great for your bottom line. The key to making that happen is identifying your most valuable customers and ensuring you provide them with the best possible customer experience, to keep them coming back and spending more for a long, long time.

Why is Customer Lifetime Value Useful?

The cost of acquiring a new customer is higher than the cost of keeping one. Calculating LTV is a good way to see whether you are getting a return on your investments in customer acquisition—like what you’re spending on advertising, marketing, and special offers.

This allows you to allocate resources toward acquiring and retaining high-value customers. For instance, you may choose to dedicate an account manager for these clients (even if it’s just in the couple of months before their subscription runs out). LTV can also show you the best prospects to target with add-ons and upsells to increase their per-purchase revenue.

LTV can be a useful measure to predict your company’s growth potential and decide whether raising or lowering prices is sustainable. If lifetime customer value doesn’t exceed what you’re spending per customer, you might have to change your business model or pricing structure to sustain or expand. On the flip side, if LTV is significant, you may have the wiggle room to lower prices without hurting growth.

How Do You Calculate LTV?

There are different ways to calculate customer lifetime value— it can be based on your business model, order volume, or frequency of customer purchases.

For average customer lifetime value, you first need to figure out what your average customer spends per purchase. Multiply that by the average purchase frequency. Then multiply that by the average customer lifetime, or how long the average customer remains a client.

For instance, if you run a coffee shop, your average customer might buy a cup of coffee ($3) four days a week, 50 weeks a year, and keep coming in for five years. Your average LTV calculation would look like this:

LTV = $3 x (4 purchases/week x 50 weeks/year) x 5 years = $3,000

Segmenting customers into groups (like those who buy more expensive products, versus those who stick to basic offerings), or looking at individual user behavior, can give you more detailed information to allow you to target clients who create higher profit margins.

If your business runs on a subscription model, a simple way to calculate LTV for new customers is to use the churn rate, or how many customers you expect to lose in a subscription period. In that case you use the subscription price divided by churn rate:

LTV = money spent per customer / churn rate

How to Improve LTV

Customer lifetime value can tell you a lot about your business and inform you how to nurture your highest-value contacts and boost their value.

Here are some ways to increase customer lifetime value:

• Invest in customer experience. Customer relationships are key to boosting LTV. From the moment a customer makes a purchase or inquiry, every part of their experience with your brand can affect the likelihood they’ll come back. The more they come back, the higher their value.
• Prioritize high-value acquisitions. It doesn’t make sense to spend more money on acquiring new customers that don’t return to you in the form of sales. By isolating high value customers, you can focus retention efforts on those who consistently buy.
• Create a loyalty program. Loyalty programs boost customer retention. Consider offerings such as frequent buyer points, perks like free shipping and early access to sales, or special promotions for program participants.
• Improve ordering, returns, and customer service. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to impress a customer or lose a customer. When orders and returns are frictionless experiences, customers are more likely to buy again. Use customer service best practices to answer all complaints and issues promptly, fostering a positive long-term relationship.

How to Take Your LTV to the Next Level

Perhaps the most important action you can take to improve customer lifetime value is to integrate that data with your cross-channel marketing strategy. Cross-channel marketing takes data, such as customer interactions, and then personalizes the customer journey to each individual consumer. This automation allows for targeted campaigns to be sent on the platform and device that’s most likely to reach that particular customer.

Cross-channel marketing is the perfect way to increase the lifetime value of your customers. By prioritizing each customer’s unique interests and communication preferences, you can send messages, promotions, and upselling opportunities that are custom-designed to re-engage them and encourage them to make additional purchases. By making each customer relationship a priority, your customers will reward you with their brand loyalty.

To learn how Iterable can help you build a cross-channel experience to increase LTV, schedule a demo today.

The post What is Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)? appeared first on Iterable.

If you haven’t been waiting on the edge of your seat since April and need a little refresher on what exactly Embedded Messaging is, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

What is Embedded Messaging?

Consumers are bombarded by thousands of digital touchpoints from various brands each day. They therefore tend to prefer the touchpoints that occur natively within their user experience, are personalized, and offer clear value by anticipating their needs by guiding them along their customer journey. In fact, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences and native ads receive a 5-10x higher CTR than traditional ads.

An example of an embedded message and what it looks like in the Iterable platform.

Embedded Messaging, a new channel within Iterable’s cross-channel offering, allows brands to deliver marketing messages that are natively embedded alongside other content in a brand’s apps and websites, without interrupting the user experience.

What are the Benefits of Embedded Messaging?

Embedded messages are designed to meet customers where they are. With a low technical lift, real-time personalization, and non-intrusive design, Embedded Messaging was built from the ground up, keeping marketers top-of-mind.

1. Low Technical Lift

Allowing for marketer-friendly creation and developer friendly implementation, it’s easy to hit the ground running with Embedded Messaging. Once initial placements are built, marketers can create new Embedded Messaging campaigns with easy-to-use templates—no app store updates needed, making content creation a breeze.

With Embedded Messaging, marketers also have full control over the ordering of the messages. You can prioritize and sequence messages at the placement level, ensuring that important messages are shown first, or certain messages appear together.

2. Real-Time Personalization With Our Real-Time Eligibility Delivery Mechanism

Let automation do its thing. Iterable’s Real-Time Eligibility Delivery Mechanism watches for changes in the user state constantly. The moment a user becomes eligible, or ineligible, to see content—based on the set segmentation criteria—Iterable updates which messages a user has available to them in real time.

Example showing different stages of a customer journey and the messages that could be displayed as a result.

This real-time flexibility provides value across the entire customer lifecycle—from activation to retention. If a user is in your app and subscribes to a paid subscription, for example, their messages will automatically shift from urging them to subscribe to showing them messages related to their subscription. And, if you’re worried about defining user criteria, user criteria can be changed while a campaign is running. So if you decide you want to change the target audience for a specific message, you can.

3. Non-Intrusive Messaging Allows Customers to Engage With Content When They’re Ready

Customers prefer touchpoints that occur natively within their journey which is why Embedded Messages are designed to appear in-line with other content. These messages are nothing like the flashy pop-up banners of the early aughts. Instead, these messages are delivered to users without interrupting their flow.

On top of that, message placements within your app or on your website can be hyper-individualized, giving marketers the ability to fully customize the user experience based on the story the marketer is trying to tell each specific customer.

When Should I Use Embedded Messaging?

Embedded Messaging can be used for strategies across the entire customer lifecycle. Although there are essentially an infinite number of use cases, all revolve around the following three main objectives of activating customers, driving sales, and encouraging loyalty.

Activate Customers

Use Embedded Messaging in the pre-sale stage to help drive a customer’s first impactful interaction with your brand. You can also use this first interaction to learn more about your customers in order to personalize their experience and help guide their next action in the customer lifecycle.

Let’s say you’re a marketer trying to get a customer to switch from freemium to premium by offering a free trial. Using Predictive Goals, you could create a segment of users with a moderate likelihood of switching to a paid subscription to ensure you only target users who need a little extra nudge to convert. Targeting only these users, you could create an Embedded Messaging campaign in the top carousel on the homepage of your app that encourages visitors to “Try a 14-day free trial for a paid subscription!”

Drive Sales

Embedded Messaging is great for driving sales of a particular product line or feature during a set time frame. This is important because each time a customer makes a purchase, it’s one more step towards becoming a loyal customer.

As an example, say you work for a retail brand and, now that winter is almost here, you’re trying to boost sales for your brand’s remaining fall inventory. You target the hero banner location on both your app and website to spark interest and sales for their remaining fall line products with messaging saying “Get 20% off on our Fall merch through Friday only with code FALLING INTO WINTER.”

For customers who claim the offer and make a purchase using the code, you could replace the banner with another Embedded Message that offers a sneak preview of your winter collection. For customers who don’t claim the original offer, the message would remain until the deal ends.

Encourage Loyalty

Embedded Messaging is also beneficial when trying to keep customers engaged with your brand and increase the likelihood they remain a loyal customer. You can message customers who aren’t engaged with your brand to prevent them from churning. Embedded Messages can help re-engage customers who might otherwise not feel inclined to take any action with your brand.

In this example, you’re a mobile marketer and you notice that after customers use your brand’s app to achieve a certain goal, they often don’t re-open it for a while. To help increase app engagement, you could set up two embedded messages. One message could go on your brand’s website, letting customers know that the app has some new features available. The second message could be within the app, letting customers know of the new feature with a deep link that leads them to the feature.

Embedded Messaging Every Step of the Way

Embedded Messaging is another channel that allows marketers to create custom experiences for each and every individual customer. Rather than interrupting a customers’ journey, Embedded Messaging fits right in, helping to guide customers to the next step in a way that’s specific and unique to them. The best part? It can be automated and edited in real time to deliver the best results possible for both your team and your customers. We’re excited to see what you can do with this new feature.

Want to learn more about pricing and how to add Embedded Messaging to your existing channel mix? Reach out to your CSM or schedule an Iterable demo today.

The post Iterable’s Embedded Messaging is Here appeared first on Iterable.

Positive fingerprints contribute to emails being delivered to the recipient’s inbox, while negative ones might lead to categorization into specific tabs like promotions, or even the spam folder. For brands, understanding content fingerprinting is crucial to navigate the complexities of email deliverability and ensure their marketing messages reach the intended audience.

Attributes Tracked for Content Fingerprinting

As senders navigate the complexities of email deliverability, understanding content fingerprinting becomes a strategic move to position your brand above the rest. Mailbox providers employ a comprehensive approach to assess the legitimacy and relevance of each message. This section dives deeper into the various attributes mailbox providers fingerprint consider to determine both deliverability and sender reputation.

Headers and Metadata

Content fingerprinting heavily influences spam filtering. By including clear headers and metadata, you not only improve your email deliverability but reduce the risk of being tagged as a sender associated with unsolicited or harmful content. Having your content consistently flagged as spam can not only increase the chances of your emails being filtered into spam folders, but mailbox providers might also categorize your entire domain as suspicious, affecting the delivery of all your messages.

Mailbox providers scrutinize email headers and metadata for critical information that establishes the sender’s identity and validates the legitimacy of the message. They look at:

• Sender Details: The sender’s email address, name, and associated information
• Routing Information: Details about the email’s journey, including servers it passed through and the IP address used to deliver the message
• Authentication Protocols: Verification through protocols like SPF, DKIM & DMARC

Subject Line and Body Content

Crafting transparent, relevant, and engaging content contributes to a positive fingerprint and, in turn, nurtures a positive sender reputation. If your subject lines or body copy consistently exhibit characteristics associated with mass-marketing or deceptive practices, your sender reputation may plummet. Mailbox providers prioritize user safety, and being perceived as untrustworthy can lead to severe restrictions or blacklisting.

The wording, structure, and overall content of the subject line and email body are carefully analyzed. This includes:

• Relevance and Clarity: Recipient mailboxes assess whether the content aligns with the subject line and user expectations
• Language and Tone: The language used and the overall tone of the content are considered
• Deceptive Practices: Identification of potential phishing attempts or deceptive tactics

Formatting and HTML Structure

How an email looks is just as important as the content within it. Think about getting an email that just looks suspicious. Whether the styling didn’t render or it doesn’t fit your phone screen, there are certain red flags when it comes to emails. Mailbox providers think the same way.

Mailbox providers pay close attention to the HTML structure and formatting of emails to ensure a positive user experience. They consider:

• Device Rendering: Ensuring emails display correctly on various devices
• Broken Elements: Checking for broken links, images, or poorly formatted content
• Use of Responsive Design: Responsive design for adaptability across different screen sizes

Attachments and Links

We all know to stay away from suspicious links. Links can lead to malware or they can even look legitimate as a way to get personal information from the end user. Mailbox providers understand that bad links could be a sign of a bad actor—so links and attachments are examined when considering fingerprinting.

The nature of attachments and links within the email is examined for potential risks and relevance. Mailbox providers examine:

• Attachment Types: Identification of potentially harmful or suspicious attachment types
• Link Destination: Examination of links to ensure they lead to safe and expected destinations
• Consistency With Email Content: Links and attachments aligning with the overall content of the email

Engagement History

High engagement rates, a reflection of positive recipient interactions with your emails, contribute positively to your sender reputation. Conversely, if your emails consistently fail to engage recipients, it can result in a poor sender reputation. Low engagement rates signal to mailbox providers that your content might not be relevant or desired.

Both positive and negative recipient engagement history is a major aspect in content fingerprinting. This includes:

• Open Rates: Frequency and consistency of email opens
• Click-Through Rates: Interaction with links and calls-to-action
• User Responses: Direct user responses, such as replies or interactions with embedded forms
• Opt-Out Rates: The rate at which users are removed due to spam complaints or unsubscribes.

Consistency in Sending Practices

Mailbox providers track the consistency of your sending practices, evaluating how well they align with established patterns. If your emails consistently exhibit patterns associated with spam or unwanted content, your sender reputation can and will take a hit. Email providers may start flagging your emails as potential spam, leading to decreased inbox placement and a drop in overall engagement.

The regularity and consistency of a sender’s practices are tracked to identify patterns and potential deviations. Mailbox providers look at:

• Sending Frequency: How often emails are sent over a specific timeframe
• Send Time: Consistency or variation in the time of day emails are sent
• Changes in Sending Patterns: Identifying sudden deviations from established sending practices

Sender reputation is a long-term game. The impressions formed through content fingerprinting contribute to an ongoing evaluation of your sender identity. Long-term negative impressions stemming from consistent fingerprinting patterns can result in lasting damage to your sender reputation. Rebuilding trust with mailbox providers may become challenging, affecting your email performance and value for an extended period.

Why Updating Content Helps Avoid Fingerprinting

Regularly updating and refreshing your email content and changing elements within your emails can disrupt fingerprinting patterns, making it harder for recipient mailbox providers to establish fixed identifiers. This strategy not only disrupts fingerprinting patterns but also signals to mailbox providers that you are invested in providing fresh, relevant content, which positively influences both deliverability and sender reputation.

Incorporating dynamic content that adapts based on user behavior or preferences not only engages your audience but also adds an element of unpredictability to your emails. While leveraging dynamic content for increased engagement, ensure that the variability introduced aligns with your overall sender strategy. Consistent positive interactions contribute to a favorable sender reputation.

Implementing A/B experimenting for various elements of your emails, including subject lines, content, and formatting also helps optimize your campaigns and introduces variability in your email content. A/B experimenting is a valuable tool for optimizing campaigns and introducing new content. However, carefully interpret the results to maintain a balance between experimentation and consistent positive engagement.

Lastly, be cautious with predictable sending patterns, as they can contribute to the formation of consistent fingerprints. Varying your sending times, frequencies, and content can help to avoid being easily identified. While avoiding predictability, try to maintain some consistency that aligns with subscriber expectations. Striking this balance ensures that your emails are both recognized as trustworthy and engaging. However, you want to avoid too much change to avoid looking like a malicious sender trying to game the system.

Best Practices for Content Refreshment

Keeping content fresh isn’t always the easiest. But, to avoid fingerprinting and stay on top of the content you’re sending and what you’re planning to send, take the following best practices into consideration.

• Schedule Regular Audits: Establish a content audit schedule to assess the relevance and effectiveness of your email content. Use these audits to identify areas for improvement and adaptation.
• Align With Marketing Calendar: Plan content updates in alignment with your broader marketing calendar. Ensure that updates coincide with product launches, promotions, or relevant industry events.
• Leverage User Feedback: Actively seek and leverage user feedback to inform content updates. Understand what your audience finds valuable and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
• Monitor Performance Metrics: Regularly monitor performance metrics, including open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Analyze how content changes impact these metrics and refine your strategy accordingly.

Be Proactive When Creating Emails

By proactively incorporating methods to regularly update and diversify your email content, you enhance not only the chances of optimal deliverability but also mitigate the potential negative effects of content fingerprinting on your sender reputation.

Recognizing the dual influence of content fingerprinting on both deliverability and sender standing and adopting a holistic approach will fortify your standing as a sender respected for reliability and trustworthiness in the eyes of both mailbox providers and your recipients.

The post Email Content Fingerprinting and Its Role in Deliverability appeared first on Iterable.

Today, we are beyond excited to announce a massive leap forward in helping marketers overcome these challenges with our new Iterable Ingest Toolkit. This set of capabilities empowers marketers to bring all of their rich data into Iterable—without submitting engineering tickets or dealing with manual CSVs.

The Ingest Toolkit is highlighted by Smart Ingest, a free Iterable-native solution co-developed with Hightouch. Smart Ingest directly connects cloud data platforms to Iterable, making it easier than ever to bring user attributes, customer lists, product catalogs, and more into Iterable. The Ingest Toolkit also includes Data Schema Management, an intuitive user interface where marketers can manage and control their data schema. Together, these new features help marketers activate their data and drive richer personalization without engineering support.

In addition to the Ingest Toolkit, we’re making it easier for marketers to scale their impact across their businesses by updating how Iterable shares data directly with cloud data platforms to include AI-enriched user profile attributes.

What is Smart Ingest?

Brands have no shortage of data, but it’s often locked away in cloud data platforms and not accessible to marketing teams in the tools they use every day. Historically, getting that data into the hands of marketers has required filing tickets, waiting for engineers to build custom integrations, or simply giving up and abandoning campaign ideas altogether.

Smart Ingest, the Iterable-native feature co-developed with Hightouch, solves this by directly connecting Iterable to any major cloud data platform. It offers an intuitive, marketer-friendly user interface (UI) directly within Iterable for importing user attributes, populating customer lists, dynamically updating product catalogs, and using the latest data from cloud data platforms.

With Smart Ingest, marketing teams can bring all of their rich customer data into Iterable, enhancing their ability to segment and personalize campaigns—without having to deal with manual data uploads or waiting on technical teams.

“Iterable and Hightouch share a vision of democratized data, where every marketer has self-service access to all of their customer data and can activate it to deliver personalized experiences that create stronger customer connections,” shared Kashish Gupta, Founder and co-CEO of Hightouch. “We’re thrilled to partner more closely with Iterable to deliver our technology to marketing teams around the world.”

Smart Ingest will be available at no additional cost and will support all major cloud data platforms.

What is Data Schema Management?

Adding to the Ingest Toolkit is Data Schema Management—a visual experience empowering marketers to control and defend their data’s structure to drive faster activation, collaboration, and reporting across systems and teams.

With just a click in Iterable, marketers can lock their data structure, ensuring unmatched data integrity by preventing the addition of unintended data fields. This control not only maintains the consistency and reliability of their data but also makes the platform incredibly easy to use.

Data Schema Management also enables marketers to intentionally update their data schema, streamlining their data organization process without needing deep technical skills. With precise data management, campaigns become more targeted, measurable, and scalable. Marketers leveraging Iterable are not just organizing and activating data but optimizing their marketing impact.

Unleash AI Across Your Business with Iterable & Snowflake Secure Data Sharing

Our customers have fueled their cross-channel communications with our AI-powered Brand Affinity and Predictive Goals to make better targeting decisions, boost loyalty, and unlock business growth.

Now, it’s time to bring these powerful AI-enriched user attributes and augment their business data directly in their Snowflake accounts so they can scale their impact across their businesses.

For example, eligible marketers can now design better in-product experiences to boost loyalty for customers who are classified as “Neutral” by Brand Affinity. Similarly, by making Predictive Goals available in Snowflake, brands can now combine these user scores with other business or product data to clearly see how various in-product experiences influence engagement and conversion rates for specific custom events and customer segments.

This update enhances our Snowflake Secure Data Sharing solution by incorporating a complete set of user profile data into the already existing flow of campaign data—eliminating the need for custom pipelines and engineers.

Own Your Data Strategy

Iterable is built for marketers. With this newest release we’re building on this vision by empowering marketers to easily activate more of their customer data by reducing their reliance on tech and engineering teams.

The Ingest Toolkit and updates to our Snowflake Secure Data Sharing solution enable marketers to connect and activate their cloud data platforms, manage their data structure on the platform, and augment their Snowflake accounts with AI-powered user classifiers so they can truly unlock customer joy, all while reducing their dependence on tech teams.

To learn more about the Ingest Toolkit with Smart Ingest and the update to our Snowflake Secure Data Sharing solution, check out what’s new. For more info on Hightouch, visit hightouch.com.

The post Iterable’s Ingest Toolkit Empowers Marketers to Easily Activate Their Data appeared first on Iterable.

Machine Learning in Action

In an era where technology seamlessly integrates into our daily lives, the pervasive influence of ML stands as a testament to its transformative power. Many of our everyday experiences are powered by ML in ways we don’t even think about. ML stealthily operates behind the scenes, orchestrating experiences that range from effortlessly filtering out spam emails to delivering personalized recommendations on streaming platforms.

Machine Learning Filters Spam

Sometimes, the most valuable technologies are easily overlooked. Take the role of ML in spam filtering, for example. The value of spam filters lies in the ability to process vast amounts of incoming data, learn patterns from this information, and subsequently discern between legitimate and unwanted emails, all with lightning speed.

The model’s behavior involves analyzing email content, sender information, and user interactions to make split-second decisions, significantly reducing the burden of manually sifting through countless emails, all done in a way that users barely have to think about. While 10 years ago, one would frequently have to mark messages as spam or not spam, these days, the technologies have improved to the point where it’s only occasionally necessary.

Machine Learning Provides Video Recommendations

In the realm of video streaming services, the brilliance of ML shines through personalized recommendations. These platforms employ sophisticated algorithms that scrutinize user preferences, viewing history, and interactions with content to curate suggestions tailored to individual tastes.

When a user discovers enticing content aligned perfectly with their interests, it’s a testament to the iterative learning process of ML. These platforms continually refine their algorithms, gauging the success of recommendations based on user engagement metrics such as watch time, likes, and interactions. Through this iterative process, ML identifies patterns of user behavior and refines its suggestions, thereby enhancing the overall user experience. The viewer doesn’t have to think about the ML at all to benefit from it.

How Machine Learning Supports Predictive Marketing

Similarly, in the domain of marketing, predictive analytics—fueled by ML—revolutionizes campaign strategies. Predictive models can analyze multifaceted data points to forecast user behavior, enabling marketers to anticipate responses accurately. This predictive prowess eliminates the guesswork involved in targeting specific user segments for campaigns.

By learning from past campaign successes and failures, these models iteratively refine their predictions, optimizing the targeting criteria and enhancing the efficacy of marketing efforts. The value proposition of ML is profound—it not only saves time for marketers and users but also elevates the quality of interactions and experiences.

A Real-World Marketing Example

To illustrate how a predictive model operates, behind the scenes, we’ll walk through an example of building a predictive model using marketing data from a real Portuguese banking institution. The data is open-source, and the code is available in this notebook. The notebook contains a more detailed walkthrough of the code and how the model is built, while the explanation in this article is more high-level and focuses on the impact such a hypothetical model might have.

The Data
The dataset includes 16 features that give information about users, including demographic data such as their job, marital status, educational status, and marketing data like how many times they were contacted and the outcome of the previous marketing campaign. The goal will be to predict whether the client subscribes to a term deposit, which is the conversion event for this campaign.

Sample of the data used in this example.

Data Cleaning
The dataset includes data for 45211 contacts. The first step in building a predictive model is data cleaning. We have to wrangle the data into a format that xgboost, a popular machine-learning algorithm, can understand. In production model development, it’s not uncommon for this stage to take the longest. See the notebook for details about how we do the cleaning.

Sample data after cleaning.

Train/Test Split
Next, we split these contacts into a training set and a test set. The model will learn from users in the training set, while we test the model’s accuracy in the test set. (Note: the same user cannot be in both sets, since the model would effectively be cheating off the answer key.)

Different splits can be used, but here, we’ll randomly select 80% of users to be in the training set, with the remainder in the test set. Once we’ve completed this process, we see that we have randomly split our 45211 total users into 36168 users in the training set and 9043 users in the test set.

Model Training and Evaluation
Then, we’ll train the model using the xgboost algorithm. Afterwards, we’ll evaluate the resulting model. While xgboost is quite configurable, we’ll primarily use the defaults for simplicity in today’s example.

First, we look at the AUC (area under curve). This is a commonly used metric for classification models such as this one, which produces a number between 0.5 and 1. The higher the AUC, the better the model. In this case, our AUC was about 0.73, indicating that we have a medium level of model performance. This is to be expected in this type of use case because customer behavior can never fully be predicted.

The Confusion Matrix.

Next, we look at the above confusion matrix. The vertical axis represents the actual conversion outcome for users in the test set, while the horizontal axis represents the predicted conversion outcome. For example, 7638 users were correctly predicted not to convert, while 565 users were correctly predicted to convert. 314 users were predicted to convert but didn’t, while 526 users were predicted not to convert but did.

While this model is not perfect, it’s important to note that it could have been extremely useful, nonetheless, because we can use it for segmentation. Let’s examine this use case more carefully.

Segmentation
Segmentation is often not covered in introductory ML tutorials, but it’s essential to making the most of your predictive models for marketing. Let’s try ranking users into 10 deciles and seeing how likely each segment is to convert. The technical details of how we do this can be found in the notebook, but we’ll stick to talking about what we do with the results here. We divide users into 10 deciles, ranked by their likelihood of converting as predicted by the model.

Bar chart depicting conversion rate by decile.

As we can see here, the top decile, labeled “9,” has about a 60% chance to convert, while deciles 0-5 have almost no chance to convert. Since we know this information before sending the campaign out, this information is quite actionable. We can choose, for example, not to bother sending the campaign to deciles 0 through 5 and to send out a promotion to segments 6 through 9. We could even tailor our messaging to each of these segments.

The practical demonstration with marketing data from a Portuguese banking institution vividly illustrates the practical application of predictive modeling in marketing, showcasing its ability to enable precise segmentation and optimal resource allocation.

Machine Learning: A Marketing Game-Changer

Machine learning quietly revolutionizes our daily experiences, from filtering email spam to curating personalized recommendations on streaming platforms. Its prowess lies in learning from data, liberating us from mundane tasks, and enhancing our insight. As demonstrated in the example above, predictive analytics reshapes marketing strategies, offering insights that refine interactions and optimize resource allocation.

In marketing, predictive models equipped to analyze multifaceted data points accurately forecast user behavior, eliminating guesswork in targeting specific segments. This not only saves time but improves the quality of interactions. By discerning patterns in consumer behavior, ML empowers marketers to anticipate trends, personalize outreach, and optimize campaigns. This dynamic technology doesn’t just streamline processes; it refines targeting criteria, enhances customer experiences, and maximizes ROI.

Iterable’s Predictive Goals represents the next iteration of making your data work for you–what if you could predict what your customers will do instead of looking only at what they’ve already done? Predictive Goals, within the context of machine learning, sets the foundation for businesses to not only understand but actively engage and optimize interactions with their audience, marking a pivotal step towards a symbiotic relationship between technology and consumer engagement.

To learn more about Iterable’s Predictive Goals, schedule a demo or reach out to your CSM.

The post Getting Hands-On With Machine Learning in Marketing appeared first on Iterable.

Consumers are becoming increasingly aware—and wary—of how some companies track, sell, and buy their online data and use it to target them for aggressive sales and marketing pitches. Governments are cracking down by limiting how companies can collect and use customer data. And companies, including Apple and Google, are making it easier to opt out of being tracked.

As privacy becomes more and more important to consumers, intentionally proffered information is all the more valuable to marketers. Here’s what you need to know about zero-party customer data, how to collect it, and how to put it to use for your brand.

What’s the Difference Between Customer Data Types?

Various types of customer data can be collected. One of the most important distinctions is how data is collected, and those distinctions can be a little confusing. Here we’ll explain the difference between zero-, first-, second-, and third-party data.

Zero-party data: Zero-party data differs from the other types in that it is the only one that is collected directly—explicitly—from customers who voluntarily give you their information. Examples of zero-party data include:

• Communication preferences
• Purchase intentions
• Style preferences
• Self-identifiers
• Quiz responses

These are usually collected via surveys or user profile settings.

First-party data: First-party data is collected implicitly as users interact with your brand. It can include browsing history, purchase history, clicking and hovering behaviors, email engagements, downloads, and other actions. It can be collected automatically from all your marketing and sales channels, such as:

• Brand website
• Mobile app
• Emails
• CRM systems
• Subscriptions
• Social media
• Marketing campaigns

Second-party data: Second-party data collects the same information as first-party data—browsing, purchase, subscription history, etc. The difference is that instead of collecting the data on your own platforms from your own customers, you purchase the data from another brand. The data is considered the other brand’s first-party data, which makes it second-party data to you. It’s still specific to each user, but not specific to your site or app.

Third-party data: Third-party data refers to collecting and selling customer data. Information such as demographics, location, age, income, education, sites visited, and buying signals (that is, actions that indicate a person is interested in purchasing a particular type of product) are obtained by third-party data brokers and sold to marketers in large bundles of aggregated data.

Third-party data has been extremely valuable for learning what consumers are doing online, but it’s exactly the kind of data that makes consumers wary and causes regulators to crack down. Although it is still practiced, the future of third-party data is uncertain.

How to Use Zero-Party Data

Best practices dictate that you should offer something of value to your customers in exchange for their information—and then quickly deliver on that offer. For example, completing a short survey could earn them a coupon code, or a free download. Or, you might ask them to take a style quiz and then use AI to immediately serve up a list of personalized shopping recommendations based on their answers.

Whatever you do, be sure to put your data takeaways into practice immediately so consumers can see that you care about their preferences and want to build a customer experience to match. Acting on your user’s preferences will build trust and loyalty in the long run.

Benefits of Zero-Party Data

While consumers are less willing to let anonymous companies collect and sell their personal information, they are still interested in having personalized brand experiences tailored to their likes and preferences. Zero-party data is a great way to balance customers’ determination for privacy with their desire for personalization.

You can get valuable and reliable information directly from customers, without them feeling like they’ve been “tricked” into sharing personal data. Then, you can use that information to optimize their brand experience. Other benefits include:

Reliability: Because zero-party data comes straight from the consumer, you can feel confident that what you learn is reliably true.

Longevity: As companies and governments phase out third-party tracking and cookies and more users opt out of data tracking, zero-party data offers a lasting source of customer information.

Building trust and transparency: Asking users directly for their information—instead of obtaining it secretively—instills trust in your brand and shows that you are being transparent in your data collection efforts. Plus, being overt in how you use the collected data helps to establish trust. Be sure your users know what they’re getting in exchange for their personal information–an individualized experience. Then, when customers are willing to share personal information it demonstrates that they trust your brand with their data.

Getting the Most out of Your Zero-Party Data

The data you collect is only as good as the tools you have to take advantage of it. Integrating your zero-party data into a customer communication platform, like Iterable, helps centralize your data, synthesize its meaning, and allows you to automated personalized messaging for each consumer.

With zero-party data, marketers using Iterable can determine what type of message to send each customer, the best timing for the message, and which channel to use.

Rather than reaching out randomly and having your message lost amongst the plethora of information your consumer receives, you can reach your user’s preferred messaging platform (such as email or SMS) exactly when they’re most likely to see it and interact with it.

By personalizing marketing activities to each individual, you cultivate more connections to your brand. Better yet, each new user interaction is relayed to your cross-channel marketing tool, triggering even more tailored messages.

To learn how Iterable can help your brand use zero-party data effectively to create personalized customer experiences, schedule a demo today.

The post What is Zero-Party Data? appeared first on Iterable.

The latest Martech for 2024 report is that evidence. Published by ChiefMartec and MartechTribe, and sponsored by our friends at mParticle, Snowplow, and other leading marketing technology platforms, this 89-page analysis covers the state of martech and what to expect in the year to come.

You can see the full report for yourself, but these are the three things that stuck out most to me.

3 Major Martech Trends to Expect in 2024

1. Tech Consolidation Will Come—Just Not in the Way You Think

Experts have inaccurately suggested for years that the martech landscape has reached critical mass: after all, the Martech for 2024 report states that the current number of total martech solutions is now at 13,080— “a net increase of 18.5% in just the past six months since our last release in May.

Martech has evolved over the years. Source: chiefmartec.com.

The industry thought the pandemic and subsequent economic turmoil would decimate that number, but then the AI boom came along. “Generative AI is responsible for 73% of the increase,” according to the report.

And while 7% of vendors have been removed from the landscape from May 2022 to May 2023 due to dissolution or acquisition, most new solutions encompass what the report calls the “long tail,” or the companies that trail the industry leaders in market cap.

When you look at the industry leaders like Iterable, however, that make over $100 million in annual revenue, the report declares, “We absolutely see consolidation effects.”

“Not only are these companies still growing in their revenue—often by impressive double-digit percentages—they’re growing in their presence in most companies’ tech stacks. We see the same small set of ‘head’ martech solutions appear in the majority of martech stacks.”

Only about 260 solutions generate 80% of the mentions in the industry, which is proof that most martech stacks have consolidated to the best in the business. This leads to our next trend: the rise of composable architectures.

To make sure your martech stack is future-proofed, download our guide to the four steps of successful digital transformation.

2. The Future of Martech is Composable

Historically, the paradox of choice led to marketers choosing the monolith legacy martech platforms, but now that one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. The report explains that the modern martech stack is composable:

“Automations, apps, workflows, customer experiences, AI agents, and other kinds of digital solutions can be created by combining data and services from multiple products and data sources to serve bespoke use cases.”

This has led to the democratization of technology, in which marketers are seeking no-code solutions that don’t require as many engineering resources. With robust integrations and an API-first approach, platforms don’t need to do everything well—they just need to excel at their specialties and partner with vendors to fill any feature gaps.

Composability also takes the pain out of the marketer’s decision-making process. With a stack that’s easily adaptable, you can access a multitude of world-class technologies without the stress of worrying whether you’ve selected the perfect solution.

Composable architectures are inherently headless—meaning there is no singular point of failure. Tools can be added or replaced without system disruption. Legacy systems weren’t designed to be plug-and-play like modern stacks, but now platforms can integrate seamlessly together in no time at all. Flexibility is the name of the game for the future of martech.

An example of an integrated martech stack.

Find out how Iterable’s partner ecosystem of technology and solutions providers can support you in unlocking growth, engaging your customers, and creating joyful experiences.

3. Cloud-Native MarTech Makes Data Aggregation Possible

In addition to martech solutions themselves being composable, the data they harness has also become aggregated, thanks to the increased popularity of cloud-native platforms, such as cloud data warehouses, customer data platforms (CDPs), and data lakes.

This aggregation allows marketers to tap into their wide swaths of unstructured data and derive previously unseen insights about their customers. Cloud-native solutions eliminate the siloed nature of legacy systems and facilitate data sharing between departments to deliver a consistent customer experience.

“The ability to tap data from across the organization—sales touchpoints, customer service touchpoints, digital product interactions, lifetime customer value models from finance, etc.—for marketing use cases is a huge advantage being unlocked by this new aggregated data layer.”

And with the expansion of AI-powered solutions comes an evolution from basic business intelligence to cognitive analytics, where marketers are leveraging self-learning systems to understand how to engage with their customers in a more meaningful way.

Harnessing Data Analytics to Transform Your Business.

Investing in cloud-native martech that activates this customer data instantaneously will be the key to achieving the best marketing performance.

Want to get the most out of your technology investments? Download our checklist to maximize the ROI of your martech.

Make the Most of Your Martech in 2024

There is so much we didn’t cover from the Martech for 2024 report, so we encourage you to grab a copy for yourself. But all signs point to a year of technology democratization, composable architectures, and data aggregation.

And the ultimate goal of these trends is to make a better, more comprehensive customer experience available to marketers everywhere.

Want to know how Iterable can fit into your modern martech stack? Kick your new year off right and schedule a custom demo of Iterable today.

The post How the Martech Landscape is Evolving in 2024 appeared first on Iterable.

In this case, we can do you one better than a crystal ball—we have a plethora of incredible partners who can help forecast trends we expect to see in the world of marketing.

I reached out to our partners on mobile marketing predictions for 2024 and received many enlightening predictions from the likes of Ragnarok, AppsFlyer, Movable Ink, and Modular Marketing. Let’s get into it.

1. SMS and Mobile Channels Will Take a Front Seat

Steven Aldrich, Co-Founder and CEO at Ragnarok

Historically, marketing teams have internally built a separate muscle for the mobile channel, typically in the form of a Lifecycle Marketing Manager or a growth product role. As we’ve seen our clients start to drive equal to higher value from their SMS and mobile program compared to email, over the last three years, I predict we’ll see a shift in the foundational focus of marketing leaders and managers—mobile channels will not just be table stakes, but rather the primary means of communicating with their customers. This shift will mean adjusting the content and brand strategy that leans into the limits of strict character count to create digestible experiences.

I predict the savviest marketers will find ways to stretch out an engagement longer as they toe the line between volume of messages and channels necessary to drive desired outcomes and customer tolerance.

2. Increased Mobile Ad Spend

Shani Rosenfelder, Director of Global Content Strategy & Market Insights at AppsFlyer

Continued economic uncertainty will almost certainly impact mobile app marketers’ ability to drive scale in 2024. But, the good news is that there is room for optimism, as many economic parameters like GDP growth, inflation, and market performance were in a far better place in 2023 than they were in 2022.

Beyond that, AppsFlyer data showed that 2023 saw an impressive 9% year-over-year increase in iOS non-organic installs (NOI)—an app download that happened as the result of marketing activity—after a 15% drop in 2022 compared to 2021, when the impact of iOS 14.5 was still heavily apparent. In 2024, it’s likely we’ll see continued growth, especially with the major enhancements brought about by SKAN 4.0.

3. Focus on Testing

Shani Rosenfelder, Director of Global Content Strategy & Market Insights at AppsFlyer

On the Android front, Privacy Sandbox—which allows for testing and betas—will finally make its long-awaited debut in 2024, and marketers are feeling optimistic. According to a recent survey AppsFlyer held among 150 marketers, 53% said that they will be spending more budget due to Sandbox, while only 12% plan to decrease their budget.

Privacy Sandbox will lead to an increase in marketing spend. Source: AppsFlyer.

At AppsFlyer, we expect Privacy Sandbox to have a profound impact on NOIs. Just as Apple Privacy Changes (ATT) impacted NOIs due to the loss of signal on iOS (CPIs increase, budgets shifts from iOS to Android, shifts from some media sources to others), Privacy Sandbox will also impact NOIs as the industry adapts to the new paradigm. That’s why it’s critical for marketers to educate themselves about this framework and prepare their systems now.

As we’ve learned from the rollout of iOS 14.5, these types of significant changes require time for marketers to prepare, figure out, and ultimately drive positive business outcomes, so it’s vital to get ahead of the curve in the first quarter of 2024 to ensure success.

However, because operating system attribution (both SKAN and Sandbox) is still limited and incomplete, the ability to fill in the data gaps through modeling and unify multiple data streams into a single actionable reality for marketers will be paramount as well.

4. Increase in Mobile Adoption and Sophistication

Richard Trautwein, Product Marketing Specialist at Movable Ink

Mobile marketing will remain a powerful channel as consumers continue to increase their smartphone use. Mobile drives 60% of global eCommerce sales, meaning that if brands don’t optimize their marketing strategies to accommodate it, they risk falling behind.

In 2023, the majority of mobile marketing relied on either generic, batch-and-blast messages with little to no personalization, or basic triggers such as abandon cart notifications. Whether mobile marketing has been overlooked due to technology limitations or strategic misalignment, it’s likely that we’ll see more brands attempt to course correct and invest further in their mobile marketing execution for 2024.

5. Privacy-First Marketing Will Span into Mobile Retail

Julio Lopez, Senior Director of Strategy (Retail) at Movable Ink

With growing concerns about data privacy and the implementation of stricter data protection regulations worldwide, there will be a shift towards transparent and privacy-focused marketing strategies. As a result, marketers will need to be more cautious about how they collect and use customer data, and personalization efforts in mobile apps and email marketing will rely more on opt-in data and less on third-party data sources.

As this becomes the norm, consumers will seek tangible value in exchange for data sharing, such as hyper-personalization and an improved UX. Retailers will take a page from more regulated industries like financial services as they navigate uncharted waters.

6. Consolidated Tech Stacks to Include SMS

Kolby Yarnell, CEO of Modular Marketing

The adoption and integration of SMS into lifecycle journeys has never been easier or more impactful, thanks to new tools and features in the consolidated stack.

Consider, for instance, Iterable’s SMS opt-in feature, which makes number acquisition more efficient than ever. Coupled with this are AI-powered tools like Channel Optimization and Copy Assist, which are already helping lifecycle and CRM teams achieve new levels of sophistication and effectiveness.

For every brand that is heavily investing in SMS today (and being handsomely rewarded), 2024 is going to see even more success on SMS with ever more creative tactics. However, the real tipping point for SMS will be provided by brands that have long played it cautious with SMS but will finally join the party in earnest.

By this time next year, the exciting future of Rich Communication Services (RCS) will start to come into view. RCS promises to offer a more dynamic and interactive platform for marketers and consumers that will eventually reshape lifecycle marketing. So while SMS continues to gain momentum in 2024, it is also paving the way for the next revolution in mobile communication.

The Future of Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is no longer a “nice-to-have” channel. As of April 2023, there are more smartphones in the world than people—so it’s important marketers consider mobile marketing a top priority. Looking at the predictions listed above, a theme I’m seeing emerge is just an overall advancement of how mobile channels are treated by brands and continued commitment to invest more in the space.

Now that marketers have the ability to test Android applications and create betas for small sample audiences, we’ll see more brands get on board with creating mobile apps, which open the door to embedded messaging in apps, mobile push notifications and in-app messages. And, with these additional channels, we’ll see an increase in the amount of customer data that can be collected—which, in turn, will lead to more personalized overall marketing communications.

Email marketing—the tried and true—has been around a lot longer, so it feels like mobile marketing has been trying to play catch-up. In 2024, however, we’ll see the two converge in terms of how they’re being used by marketers. Mobile marketing is going to continue to evolve in 2024, so be sure your brand isn’t left behind.

If you’re interested in learning more about Iterable’s mobile marketing offerings, talk to your CSM. If you’re thinking about making the switch to Iterable, schedule a demo today.

The post 6 2024 Mobile Marketing Predictions appeared first on Iterable.

In this case, we can do you one better than a crystal ball—we have a plethora of in-house Iterable experts who can help forecast trends we expect to see in the world of marketing. Speaking of experts—not to toot my own horn—I’m Tom Corbett, Senior Email Deliverability Consultant at Iterable. I put together some thoughts on email marketing predictions so, without further ado, let’s see what 2024 has in store.

1. Yahoo and Gmail Changes

Last year, Iterable’s Head of Deliverability, Seth Charles, gave us a preview of what to expect with the major changes Yahoo and Gmail announced—but they’re going into effect early 2024.

As Seth put it, “Starting in April of 2024, both email platforms will begin to block and aggressively filter incoming email traffic that doesn’t meet new message authentication and procedural requirements. Additionally, they also included some infrastructure and performance thresholds associated with commercial email best practices.”

Why is it happening? Google and Yahoo want to provide a safer, improved experience for their users. Part of the change is to have a minimum of p=none for your DMARC policy. I think it very likely that by the end of the year they will require a stricter requirement of p=reject. P=none, according to Email on Acid, “tells mailbox providers to take no specific action on emails that fail authentication. They will most likely be delivered unless it is very obviously spam. A p=none DMARC policy leaves the decision up to mailbox providers.” P=reject, however, “is the strongest DMARC policy value. It ensures all malicious email is stopped dead in its tracks. If a message fails DMARC when set to “reject” will not be delivered at all.”

I also wouldn’t be surprised to see other mailbox providers follow suit.

2. Postmaster Best Practices are Top of Mind

This feels like a subcategory of Yahoo/Gmail changes, but with these changes and the emphasis on strict enforcement, we’ll see senders paying closer attention to the Best Practices published on the Postmaster site.

Some of these Best Practices include:

• The use of a DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signature (not a suggestion, it’s mandatory)
• Sending emails only to those who have opted in (or double-opt-in)
• It has to be clear who is sending the emails
• The recipient has to be able to unsubscribe—both quickly and easily

While these aren’t new concepts to email marketers, in combination with the changes from Google, Yahoo, and potentially other email providers, email marketers are going to start focusing on these requirements first, versus dealing with it later.

3. A Need for Centralized Data

With even more importance on monitoring metrics from Google Postmaster tools, email senders will want to/expect to see more granularity in their email marketing dashboards. For example, Gmail & Yahoo have stated to keep complaint rates below 0.3%. Currently, the only way to see this metric is within Google’s postmaster tools account. Senders will prioritize integrating with other tools over collecting siloed information. (Luckily, we have a stacked roster of solutions and technology partners that integrate with the Iterable platform.)

Centralized data will aid in the future of AI as well. Because data fuels AI, having centralized customer data will allow for easier, more seamless email automation—while maintaining personalization.

4. Embracing the Creative Renaissance

Back in 2013 we saw creative teams become more visual with email. Gone are the days of designing around images by default, instead, we’ve seen the rise of mobile optimization. I believe we are now at a critical changing point with AMP/markup schemas allowing for senders to create hyper-personalized emails where a brand can directly communicate with an individual customer.

I don’t think this change will happen instantly but opportunities that can drive this change are:

• Accessibility: How are emails reaching diverse audiences with different needs? According to the World Health Organization, “An estimated 1.3 billion people – or 16% of the global population – experience a significant disability today”
• Interactivity: How can audiences engage with the emails? (With AMP in Gmail, for example, users can edit Google Docs right in their inbox.)
• Social media (TikTok): What opportunities does social create that can lead to more user-generated content in larger campaigns?
• Minimal/visual storytelling: We’ve all heard “show, don’t tell.” How can dynamic images speak to individual customers?

5. AI Will Play a Central Role

I’m not talking about subject line creation or copy writing—that’s a given—but I’m more so talking about email service providers (ESPs) and/or tech platforms developing AI-powered functionality. These functionalities (some of which already exist) will help marketers spend less time relying on engineers and more time thinking about big-picture strategies.

As a completely, totally unbiased example…let’s look at one of the tools in Iterable’s AI Suite: Brand Affinity. “Brand Affinity uses Iterable AI to label your users based on their level of engagement with your brand. You can use these labels in segmentation, campaigns, journeys, data feeds, and Catalog collections to send personalized, relevant messages to your customers.” These labels can then help determine what journeys users are placed into. Should they be placed in a re-engagement journey? Should they stop receiving messages?

The Future of Email Marketing

As cliché as it is, the only constant is change. Email marketing has come a long way and it’s only going to continue to evolve as we head into the thick of 2024. There are two major themes that capture the six predictions mentioned above: automation and customer experience. In fact, the two go hand-in-hand.

With the Yahoo and Gmail changes, Postmaster Best Practices, a creative renaissance, and sustainability there’s a focus on what’s best for the end user. How can we be sure to deliver communications that resonate? Then centralized data, AI, and personalization (as part of the creative renaissance) speak to automation. Without data there is no AI. Without AI, personalization becomes tedious and near-impossible.

With automation reliant on customer data, end users are served with a better overall experience, strengthening your brand reputation and your relationship with individual customers.

Want more info on the Google and Yahoo requirements? Register for our webinar on February 13, hosted by Iterable’s Senior Director of Delivery Operations, Seth Charles.

If you’re an Iterable customer looking to learn more about email marketing, connect with our Deliverability Team. And, if you’re curious about how to make the switch to Iterable, schedule a demo today.

The post 5 2024 Email Marketing Predictions appeared first on Iterable.

Care.com, a leading two-sided marketplace where people can find caregiver jobs and high-quality family care, recognized the importance of creating a cross-channel experience and switched to Iterable to make that happen.

Why Care.com Switched to Iterable

Long story short: they needed to save time. Traditionally, marketers lose efficiency and time when their martech stack does not support cross-channel campaign building. In looking to manage multiple channels at scale while still personalizing, Ellen Rockdale, Senior Marketing Operations Manager for the CRM and Lifecycle team at Care.com, and team sought out a platform that could allow for both.

What stood out to Ellen about Iterable’s cross-channel capabilities, versus platforms they’ve used in the past, is how easy it is to manage multiple communication channels at scale, while still maintaining a positive user experience.

They can automate their lifecycle marketing program with Iterable Studio and manage over-messaging their users on different channels by seeing where and how each user is engaging. For instance, if they send a push notification, they can wait for a period of time to see if the user opens it. If they have, they can avoid sending that same message in an email.

“Iterable allows us to create harmonious touch points across all channels, all in one place, which has been a huge unlock for us in launching new products, where we rely on timely customer updates. We’re now able to build everything end to end without relying on third-party tools. Not having to jump between different tools to share multiple links to all of our different teams saves us a lot of additional work,” said Ellen.

How Iterable AI Made All the Difference

A huge factor in the Care.com team’s ability to save time is automation. Iterable’s AI suite provides tools that give marketers the ability to automate otherwise manual processes while simultaneously learning from existing customer data. Care.com is no exception.

As Ellen said, “The way that we’re thinking about cross-channel communications is by taking an individualized approach to how and what we send. If a user has our app, then we’ll send them push notifications or in-app messages, depending on the level of urgency of the message. If it’s a critical, time-sensitive message, we’ll sometimes engage them across all channels, including email, push, in-app, and SMS, to make sure that they see it. If it’s a targeted promotional message, we use Channel Optimization, an Iterable AI feature that takes the guesswork out of which channel a user is most likely to engage with.”

As a result of this automation, Care.com has been able to scale in a much faster way than if they partnered with a less powerful and less flexible platform. By keeping everything in house with Iterable, and with its automation tools, they gain back 25% of time. With these hours saved Ellen and her team can spend more time mapping out their long-term strategy with Iterable.

The Road Ahead

Looking ahead to the future, Care.com’s vision with Iterable is to ensure they’re taking advantage of its full platform capabilities, including new feature releases.

“That’s another great thing about Iterable—they’re constantly innovating for the needs of their customers. We’re excited about all of the AI capabilities coming out so we can continue to improve our campaigns, making them even more impactful,” shared Ellen.

To learn more about the Care.com story, check out the full case study. And, if you’re interested in getting your brand on the Iterable platform, schedule a demo today.

The post How Care.com Gains Back 25% of Its Time With Iterable AI appeared first on Iterable.

Over the years, Iterable has worked hard to help enable our customers’ compliance around GDPR, HIPAA, and a variety of geo- and industry-specific requirements. With continual changes in global privacy regulations our customers are faced with ongoing challenges to remain compliant.

The CBPR and PRP certifications proactivity solve for data privacy compliance and cross-border trust. The PRP ensures that we treat our customers’ end user data with the required care and diligence, while the CBPR ensures we’re treating your (our direct customer) data with the same level of care and diligence.

CBPR and PRP Overview

The Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) and Privacy Recognition for Processors (PRP) standards are a response to the fact that, despite data traveling quickly and easily across borders, privacy requirements in each country tend to vary, creating a complex system of requirements. This certification process examines those requirements and affirms that Iterable complies with the privacy principles outlined in the APEC Privacy Framework, aligning us with global privacy standards.

“The APEC Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) System, endorsed by APEC Leaders in 2011, is a voluntary, accountability-based system that facilitates privacy-respecting data flows among APEC economies.”

In short, it signals that Iterable’s privacy practices meet those standards and can better enable cross border data flow to these participating APEC Economies:

• Australia
• Canada
• Japan
• Republic of Korea
• Mexico
• Philippines
• Singapore
• United States

How Does the CBPR System Work?

According to APEC.org, “The CBPR system protects personal data by requiring:

• Enforceable standards: To join, participating economies must demonstrate that CBPR program requirements will be legally enforceable against certified companies.
• Accountability: To become certified, a company must demonstrate to an accountability agent—an independent CBPR system-recognized public or private sector entity— that they meet the CBPR program requirements, and the company is subject to ongoing monitoring and enforcement.
• Risk-based protections: Certified companies must implement security safeguards for personal data that are proportional to the probability and severity of the harm threatened, the confidential nature or sensitivity of the information, and the context in which it is held.
• Consumer-friendly complaint handling: Accountability agents receive and investigate complaints and resolve disputes between consumers and certified companies in relation to non-compliance with its program requirements.
• Consumer empowerment: Certified companies must provide consumers with the opportunity to access and correct their personal data. Further, by publicly certifying to the CBPR system’s requirements, consumers gain insight into the privacy practices on business with which they choose to do business.
• Consistent protections: While governments may impose additional requirements with which certified companies must still comply, all participants must agree to abide by the 50 CBPR program requirements, facilitating the implementation of the same baseline protections across different legal regimes.
• Cross-border enforcement cooperation: The CBPR system provides a mechanism for regulatory authorities to cooperate on the enforcement of program requirements.”

What Lies Ahead?

Our attainment of CBPR and PRP certifications is a testament to Iterable’s dedication to privacy and data protection. As we celebrate this achievement, we remain steadfast in our commitment to continually enhance our privacy practices to meet emerging challenges and evolving regulatory requirements.

To our clients, we extend our heartfelt gratitude for entrusting us with your data. We are committed to maintaining the highest standards of privacy, and these certifications reinforce our promise to be a responsible steward of your information.

Iterable continues to lead the way in prioritizing privacy, ensuring that your data is not just secure but is also handled with the utmost care in a globally interconnected landscape.

Looking for more information on Iterable’s privacy practices? Get all the info here. If you’re looking to make the switch to Iterable, schedule a demo today.

The post Enabling Global Business: Iterable Attains APEC Privacy Certifications appeared first on Iterable.

Why does Iterable dedicate an entire week to hacking, coding, and experimenting? The answer is simple: innovation.

Hack Week is our way of fostering a culture of innovation within the company. It’s about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, thinking outside the box, and turning wild ideas into game-changing solutions.

What to Prepare: Essentials for Hack Week

Here’s what you need for a successful Hack Week:

• A Killer Idea: This is your moment to shine. Think of a project that aligns with this year’s theme and can wow both your peers and our esteemed judges. (Our judges included Iterable’s CEO Andrew Boni, VP of Product, Bela Stepanova, and CMO, Adri Gil Miner…to name a few.)
• A Dream Team: Assemble a diverse team with different skills and expertise. Remember, it’s all about collaboration and learning from each other.
• A Plan of Attack: Once you’ve got that killer idea, make a plan. What’s the scope? What are the goals? How will you measure success?
• Embracing the Theme: Iterate for Impact! This year’s theme is all about building the next generation of marketing tech. Think AI, think reliability, think data-driven brilliance.
• Coffee Reserves: Stock up on coffee! Seriously, you’ll need it. Hack Week runs on caffeine.
• A Sense of Fun: This is not the time to be too serious. Embrace the fun, the craziness, and the unexpected twists and turns.

The Awards: Bragging Rights Galore

This year, we’ve got some epic awards up for grabs:

• People’s Choice: Let the people decide! This award is all about popular demand. Win the hearts of your colleagues, and you could be the People’s Choice.
• Most Innovative (AI-Powered): This award goes to the project that leverages the incredible power of AI to advance Iterable as a product. To win, you MUST utilize the Iterable AI LLM Library or capabilities.
• Reliability: In the tech world, reliability is gold. The project that stands the test of time and scrutiny will earn this accolade.

Hack Week Thoughts From Iterable Engineers

We’ve invited some of this year’s winners to share their experiences and insights. What worked? What didn’t? What inspired them to create award-winning projects?

Jeff Sing (Director, Quality and Engineering Operations • Engineering, Hack Week Program Owner)

Biggest takeaway—I’m always stunned by how talented our teams are every Hack Week. It makes me so grateful and humbled that I get to work with such a group of talented people.

Here are some things I’ve learned by watching teams participating in Hack Week:

• There are no bad hacks! Sometimes the learnings just from the effort is easily worth the cost to participate.
• Cool Hack + Business Narrative = $$$$. Understanding why your hack is important, how it changes the story, and why it’s gonna blow everyone away is how winners are crowned.
• Halfway through the hack, start thinking about how we could actually launch your creation (both internal reliability hacks or external ones). This helps ensure your legacy and work carries forward. Remote Hack Week is hard! Especially if you don’t know what you want to work on. Join hack pitches and use all the resources put together.
• Involve a partner outside of engineering. Some of the best and most impactful hacks had a product manager, support engineer, or solutions architect as a member. These folks have firsthand knowledge of the product or what ails customers. Uplevel your hack by including their feedback.
• Some of the best hacks were done in two days.

William Nyffennegger (Staff Software Engineer • Winner for 2023 Reliability Improvement Award)

Hack week gave us the opportunity to bring engineers together across teams and domains to understand and attack difficult, meaningful problems. For us, that meant providing insight into the performance of our core product journeys. In a week we built optimization tooling that is going to drive performance improvements broadly for our customers.

There were a lot of complex, quality features and improvements to vote on that were remarkably complete. More impressive is the number of hack week ideas that will reach production within the next month or even before this blog is posted. Given the scale and variety of our customers, taking something from an idea to product in a week isn’t trivial.

I’m looking forward to more hack weeks and more cross-functional collaboration which Iterable is actively driving towards.

Krisha Agatep (Senior Software Engineer- Winner for 2023 Most Innovative with AI Award)

What I love about Hack Week is it gives us an opportunity to think outside the box and ask the question, if I had no constraints, what would I build? We get to put our user hats on for a week and put focused efforts toward features we wish we had as users.

Having worked on two hacks this year, it was a ton of fun getting to collaborate with some amazingly talented engineers from other teams that I normally wouldn’t work with.

The best part of the week is getting to see what exciting hacks the teams can put together in just a few short days. Every year I am blown away by the amount of thoughtfulness and innovation put into these ideas. Truly impressive stuff! And these are not just ideas we throw to the engineering graveyard, in fact, we actually push some of these ideas into our future product roadmap.

The 2023 Champions

Now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for.

In the vibrant landscape of creativity and innovation, it is with immense pleasure that we extend our warmest congratulations to this year’s champions! From a pool of 28 remarkable pitches, 20 of which dazzled the audience during the hack week Demo Day, the winners have truly earned their moment in the spotlight.

These Iterators’ exceptional ideas and steadfast dedication have not only secured victory but have also positioned them as trailblazers in our community. This triumph is not just a recognition of hard work but a testament to the boundless potential that lies ahead. As these team members bask in the glory of this achievement, we hope it serves as a stepping stone to even greater heights in the exciting journey of creativity and excellence.

Well done, champions! Your success is an inspiration to us all.

People’s Choice

CMD + K Menu:Dylan Mahler, Elizabeth Mills, Geoff Kim, Lauren Li, Levi Campbell, Michael Seiden

The idea: In the current Iterable setup, there’s no comprehensive “Global” search feature available, making it cumbersome to locate specific resources amidst numerous campaigns, templates, snippets, and more. Introducing this feature would present a streamlined user interface, eliminating the need for an extensive index to support a consolidated view of various resources. This enhancement allows power users to effortlessly navigate different sections of the app, with the flexibility to add more functions over time.

Why is this Hack Awesome?

• Effortless Implementation: Thanks to the cmdk.paco.me React package, implementing this feature becomes a breeze. It streamlines the process, making it both efficient and user-friendly.
• Low Risk, High Reward: By seamlessly overlaying the existing interface, this hack mitigates the risk associated with tweaking the current UI. The transition is smooth, ensuring minimal disruptions.
• Tailored for Power-Users: This feature is tailored specifically for power-users, offering them enhanced functionality without impacting those who may not engage with it. It’s a win-win for both sides of the user spectrum.
• Proven Success: Drawing inspiration from successful Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) like Vercel, Linear, Raycast, and Framer, this pattern has already demonstrated its effectiveness. We’re tapping into a methodology that has stood the test of real-world applications. Get ready for an enhancement that’s tried, tested, and proven to elevate the user experience!

People’s Choice winners Dylan Mahler, Elizabeth Mills, Geoff Kim, Lauren Li, Levi Campbell, and Michael Seiden.

Most Innovative with AI

Generative AI journeys: Krisha Agatep, Greg Methvin, Thomas Kim

The idea: In the realm of marketing with Iterable, crafting customer journeys becomes an art of AI ingenuity. Marketers can seamlessly integrate artificial intelligence into the journey creation process, ushering in a new era of personalized and responsive campaigns. By utilizing AI, marketers gain the ability to predict user preferences, dynamically adjust content, and automate responses, ensuring that each step of the journey is finely tuned to individual behaviors. Iterable empowers marketers to not only streamline the journey creation process but also to elevate the impact of their campaigns by delivering highly targeted and relevant content. Dive into the world of AI-assisted journey creation with Iterable and witness how innovation can transform your marketing strategy into a dynamic, data-driven masterpiece

Why is this Hack Awesome?

• Reduced Errors: AI ensures a higher degree of accuracy by automating tasks prone to human error. Marketers can rely on the precision of AI algorithms to deliver campaigns without the risk of common mistakes, leading to more reliable and error-free outcomes.
• Customization at Scale: AI empowers marketers to customize customer journeys on a large scale. By analyzing individual preferences and behaviors, campaigns become highly tailored, resonating with each customer personally. This level of customization enhances the overall customer experience.
• Saves Time: AI streamlines the journey creation process, automating routine tasks and allowing marketers to focus on strategy and creativity. This time-saving aspect not only boosts efficiency but also frees up valuable resources for more impactful and strategic marketing initiatives.

Most Innovative with AI winners Krisha Agatep, Greg Methvin, and Thomas Kim.

Reliability Improvement

Journeys Optimization Detection: Will Nyffenegger, Nate Turner, Daniel Pugliese, Jenny Tan, Yueun Kim, Nishant Satpathy, Krisha Agatep, Sneha Dontireddy, and others

The idea: Read all journeys into memory and then search each journey for antipatterns. This will let us quantify how poorly journeys are organized and begin the path to developing best practices and suggestions in the user interface to improve journeys.

Why is this Hack Awesome?

• Spotting and Fixing Flaws: Recognizing that most journeys harbor significant flaws, this hack addresses common issues, like processes, that consume resources without any actual functionality or journeys laden with redundant tiles. It’s a powerful solution for streamlining and optimizing the user journey.
• Effortless Optimization: The beauty of this hack lies in its simplicity. It doesn’t necessitate intricate coding or complex development processes. In fact, achieving these optimizations is as straightforward as running a single Python script.

In essence, this hack is a game-changer, providing an accessible and efficient means to enhance and perfect user journeys, ensuring they are not just functional but optimized for peak performance.

Reliability Improvement winners Will Nyffenegger, Nate Turner, Daniel Pugliese, Jenny Tan, Yueun Kim, Nishant Satpathy, Krisha Agatep, Sneha Dontireddy, and others.

Hacking Our Way into the Future!

As we conclude our exhilarating 3rd Iterable Hack Week, the atmosphere is still buzzing with excitement. We’ve delved into a week of continuous iteration, innovation, and leaving our mark on the marketing tech landscape. So, hold onto your keyboards, rally your teammates, and unleash your boldest ideas because we’ve just wrapped up an incredible journey of hacking our way into the future!

The post Iterate for Impact: Our 3rd Annual Hack Week appeared first on Iterable.

What is Brand Affinity?

Broadly speaking, brand affinity refers to the emotional connection between customers and companies. When people share the values of a brand, they tend to buy their products and recommend them to others. This means that the entire buying journey becomes highly influenced by that emotional bond.

Iterable’s Brand Affinity^TM feature uses AI to help marketers measure customer brand affinity by scoring users based on their engagement with a brand’s messaging. In addition, leveraging insights within Iterable’s Brand Affinity allows for deeper analysis of engagement by the user.

As we mentioned previously, “This is where the Share of Voice rule becomes relevant. While a customer may initially have a negative Brand Affinity^TM score in Iterable, a marketer can dig deeper to uncover insights related to customer behavior to understand your brand’s SOV related to this segment. This enables more targeted segmentation and campaigns, ultimately driving engagement and revenue.” This is achieved through the extensive processing and analysis of data on a large scale, delivering invaluable insights and empowering data-driven decision-making to deliver personalized messages to the right audience.

Brand Affinity^TM can be used in a multitude of ways to help marketers better understand their customer. One way of using Iterable’s Brand Affinity^TM and insights, for example, is to pull in events like purchase or conversions for customers who have a “negative” brand affinity—meaning they didn’t interact with the messages being sent. By pulling in purchase events a marketer can uncover that this “negative” affinity group may actually make purchases, which would make them high value customers.

Once this insight is uncovered the marketers are able to better personalize and target their messages for these high value customers. Performance marketing campaigns might not actually resonate with this audience seeing they are high value and already have a strong view of the brand so instead, creating “thank you” campaigns for those customers who made a purchase and leveraging other channels like SMS would be a better way to engage with these customers.

One of the key strategies for sustainable growth is to focus on high-value customers in a meaningful way and personalize messaging based on the actions of the user. These individuals not only contribute significantly to your revenue but also have the potential to become loyal brand advocates. Crafting targeted marketing campaigns for this segment is crucial for maximizing their value and ensuring long-term success.

What are “High-Value” Customers?

We talk about focusing on high-value customers, but what does this really mean? High-value customers are individuals or businesses that consistently make substantial purchases, exhibit brand loyalty, and have the potential for long-term engagement. With all the data organizations capture and track, it can be difficult to identify and segment this group—but, Brand Affinity^TM can help.

Brand Affinity in Action

Dgtl Fundraising, a brand that focuses on building digital strategies for nonprofits, utilizes Brand Affinity to detect and categorize potential donors by analyzing engagement signals across various channels. Each donor or potential donor receives an affinity label denoting their general sentiment (loyal, positive, neutral, or negative). This labeling system proves instrumental in segmenting fresh audiences, crafting customized customer journeys, and dynamically personalizing content within templates through the application of conditional logic.

Leveraging Brand Affinity^TM allows marketers to easily identify and segment customers and lean into microsegmentation. Unlike broader market segmentation, which categorizes consumers into larger groups, microsegmentation drills down into finer details to create smaller, more homogenous segments. This approach allows businesses to tailor their marketing strategies, products, or services more precisely to the needs and preferences of each microsegment

Tips for Data-Driven Personalization

After pinpointing your high-value customers, you can leverage this insight to craft personalized and impactful communications. This tailored approach not only fosters loyalty but also translates into increased revenue for your business.

Exclusive Loyalty Programs

Rewarding high-value customers for their loyalty is a powerful way to strengthen the relationship. According to the Maigold Consumer Trends Index, 82% of consumers favor brand messaging that rewards them for loyalty—a 5% increase since 2022. To keep your high-value customers engaged, develop exclusive loyalty programs that offer special perks, early access to new products, or VIP events. These programs not only enhance customer retention but also encourage them to increase their spending to unlock additional benefits.

VIP Events and Experiences

Create memorable experiences for your high-value customers by organizing exclusive events or providing access to premium services. Whether it’s a private product launch, an invitation-only webinar with industry experts, or a personalized consultation, these experiences make customers feel valued and deepen their connection with your brand. According to a study by Bain & Company, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%. VIP experiences can contribute to customer loyalty and repeat business, leading to increased spending.

Tailored Content and Thought Leadership

Position your brand as an industry leader by delivering high-quality, relevant content tailored to your high-value customers. This could include exclusive research reports, in-depth articles, customer reviews, product release information, warranty information etc. In addition, thank you campaigns and campaigns rewarding loyalty are great ways to engage with high value customers. By providing valuable insights and engaging content, you not only showcase your brand but also demonstrate a commitment to your high-value customers.

Strategic Cross-Selling and Up-Selling

Identify opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell products or services that complement your high-value customers’ existing purchases. This can be achieved through targeted recommendations based on their buying history or through bundling offers that provide added value. Clearly communicating the benefits of these additional offerings will help encourage higher spending. Iterable’s customer Stanley Black & Decker does this effectively by leveraging Catalog to automate email content based on existing product information.

High Value, High Reward

In a competitive market, the success of your business relies on cultivating and nurturing relationships with high-value customers. The first step in connecting with high-value customers is recognizing them. That’s why AI-powered tools, like Iterable’s Brand Affinity, come in handy.

By implementing personalized, data-driven marketing campaigns and offering exclusive experiences and rewards, you can not only retain these valuable customers but also turn them into enthusiastic advocates for your brand. Keep evolving your strategies based on customer feedback and market trends to ensure that your campaigns remain relevant and effective in the ever-changing business landscape.

To learn more about how Iterable’s Brand Affinity can help you achieve your marketing goals, reach out to your CSM or schedule a demo today.

The post Understanding SOV Pt. 2: The Power of Brand Affinity appeared first on Iterable.

First, if you’re asking what inbox placement is, you’ve come to the right place. Inbox placement is a critical email marketing metric that tells you how much of your mail landed in the end-users’ inboxes.

Inbox placement is one of the things that keep marketers up at night. While metrics like opens, bounce, complaint, and click rates can tell you quite a bit about a campaign’s performance (and the sender’s reputation), it doesn’t quite tell you everything.

Information about inbox placement isn’t returned to the sender the same way those other metrics are. In fact, inbox placement is not reported on at all.

Now, back to that crystal ball…of course you’d use it!

What if I told you that you have the next best thing to a crystal ball available to you right now? But, instead of a crystal ball, we call it seed testing.

What is Seed Testing?

I admit, I might be slightly overpromising, but when done properly and strategically, seed testing can provide a deeper look into how mailbox providers (like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) feel about your brand’s emails before you send them.

At its most basic level, seed testing is the practice of sending an email to a group of email addresses for the purpose of observing whether it landed in the inbox, the spam folder, or went missing.

Anyone can do this with a handful of addresses that they manage. Since they are domains you own and control, you could even use those addresses for other forms of testing—checking that the campaigns rendered properly in your browser, clicking links to make sure they go to the correct places, etc. The problem with using test addresses like this is that you’re engaging with the emails and, therefore, creating a history with the sending infrastructure, which can then impact inbox placement.

Seed testing works a little differently when using a deliverability platform such as Everest. In this case, while you’re still sending to a group of email addresses to understand inbox placement at a given time, those recipients aren’t meant to engage with the mail, meaning they are not opening and clicking. This is an important distinction because they don’t build the same kind of history with your sending infrastructure that your regular audience (or even the addresses you own and use for the other testing) does.

Seed testing ultimately designs a neutral playing field, allowing you to gain insight into inbox placement. If your inbox placement is strong, you can carry on with your email marketing strategy as intended. If your spam placement is strong, it’s time to make some adjustments to audience or frequency (or both).

Future Inbox Placement Based on Past Behavior

Mailbox providers have their own specific criteria when deciding whether to let an email into a customer’s inbox. For many, engagement history is a vital factor in determining if any given user will receive an email. If a user fails to open an email from a sender over a long period of time, for example, mail from that sender will often start to go to that user’s spam folder.

Conversely, if a user regularly opens and clicks, that user will reliably receive email from that sender in their inbox even despite other potentially negative factors. However, many users will have little to no engagement history, especially if they are recently subscribed, thus creating a window for you to see into how mailbox providers treat users with no engagement history.

If a large percentage of your audience regularly engages negatively with your mail (for instance, ignoring or deleting the mail without reading it, or marking it as spam), the likelihood of a majority of that mail (or even all of it) going to the spam folder in the future is high.

Future placement is based on past behavior and when a large portion of your audience is behaving a certain way, mailbox providers take note and take action. This is why it is vital that the sender puts their best foot forward even when sending to previously engaged users.

How Often Should You Seed Test?

Mailbox providers are watching senders’ practices and user interactions to determine what to do with mail sent to users with little or no history—like new subscribers. This is why using seed addresses that have no history of engagement with your sending infrastructure is important—it’s meant to represent those new-to-file email addresses.

Because seed testing provides placement feedback for a particular sending infrastructure, it’s not necessary to seed test every day. It’s rare that placement changes drastically day-to-day. Performing one test per sending infrastructure/mail stream once every week or two is usually sufficient.

There are times, however, when one send can upset inbox placement and more frequent testing is suggested. One example is after a large mandated email is sent to your entire customer base. These types of emails don’t often have CTAs calling for engagement of some sort so they can often be ignored or deleted without reading, so it’s a good idea to perform a seed test following a send like this to see if anything in your inbox placement changed as a result.

Understanding Seed Testing Results

Generally, seed test results are straightforward—the mail either went to the inbox, the spam folder, or went missing (usually due to a block). Sometimes, though, partial inbox delivery and partial spam filtering occurs and can indicate that the recipient’s mailbox provider has doubts about the sender.

In this case, they’ll watch closely to determine if users retrieve it from the spam folder and/or interact, as well as watching for other indicators of positive or negative engagement. When this happens, pay close attention to list engagement and segmentation to reassure mailbox providers and filtering companies that you are a responsible sender.

If you’re already an Iterable customer, reach out to your CSM for more info on seed testing. If you haven’t joined the over 1000 brands using Iterable, schedule a demo today.

The post Using Seed Testing to Predict Inbox Placement appeared first on Iterable.

The first “robocall”—automated phone soliciting—was documented in 1977. Robocalls were rebranded as “Dinner Hour Marketing.” This was when real people, not bots, would call landlines during dinner time to try and sell products or services.

With the introduction of emails, this type of solicitation quickly expanded. Yep, that’s right, we’re talkin’ spam. In fact, the first unsolicited email was sent by Gary Turk in 1978 to 400 people. As spam emails became more sophisticated, email phishing emerged. In the 90s, bad actors started sending emails disguising themselves as others to trick the recipient. Today, phishing attacks are highly advanced—email senders are disguised as businesses, employees, relatives, etc.

And now we’re back to the present day where these phishing attempts have breached messaging apps. So, what does a smishing attack look like? How do they work? Let’s explore SMS phishing a bit more to shed some light on this new type of attack.

SMS Marketing

We can’t talk about smishing without first talking about SMS marketing. With SMS marketing, brands can send customers texts sharing promotions, order updates, etc. So, as a result, people are starting to get used to text messages coming from unknown numbers with links to promotions.

There’s a catch, however. To receive marketing text messages, customers have to opt in and explicitly agree to get these types of messages. There also needs to be a way to opt out. Just as easily as customers can sign up, they can remove themselves from your SMS marketing list. That’s one way to distinguish between smishing and legit SMS marketing, but there are some other ways too.

What Does Smishing Look Like?

Smishing is one of those things that you recognize when you see it. At this point, most of us have probably experienced a smishing attack. When you open a text and think “Hm, this is a little weird” or “They probably have the wrong number,” it could be a smishing attack.

The goal of a smishing attack is to try to get some information from the recipient. So, generally these messages ask the user to complete some sort of next step. Whether it’s clicking a link, responding with a password, or sharing your name, the scammer is looking to collect data that helps them access protected information. These attacks can be incredibly sneaky as the sender can disguise themselves as a brand or a person and it’s hard, as the recipient, to ensure the sender is who they say they are.

And, as IBM points out, “It’s also harder to spot dangerous links on cell phones. For instance, on a computer, users can hover over a link to see where it leads, but on smartphones, they don’t have that option.”

Take this text from an unknown number, for example. I received this message around 3:30pm on December 19th (conveniently right before I wrote this post) while sitting on my couch. My first thought was, “What did I order?” Then, “Wait, what’s Tabit?”

A text from an unknown number I received.

After some research, I learned that Tabit is a POS system for restaurants. So, one of two things could have happened: someone who actually was at a restaurant accidentally used my phone number when placing their order or someone is disguising themselves as Tabit to try to get recipients to click on the attached link.

Either could still be possible but, to play it safe, I didn’t click the link.

How to Combat Smishing

With sneaky senders, it’s hard to know what’s smishing and what’s not. So how are we supposed to know? From personal experience, it’s better to be suspicious. When in doubt, don’t respond, don’t click any links, and don’t send any personal information. If someone is trying to contact you with important information, they’ll find another way to do so.

IBM also provided a list of common smishing scams to be on the lookout for. These include pretending to:

• Be a financial institution
• Be the government
• Be customer support
• Be a shipper
• Be a boss or colleague
• Text the wrong number
• Be locked out of an account
• Offer free apps

With any of the above examples, there are other ways these actual senders would contact you if it was truly necessary. Your bank would probably email you before they text, your boss would probably Slack you, etc. These smishing attacks have been so prevalent that our CEO, Andrew Boni, once said to the entire company “I’ll never text you about gift cards.” That cleared that up.

Feel free to ignore, report, and block any numbers you’re not familiar with. Like we said, any legit marketing text message will give users the option to opt out. So, if you get a message from a brand and aren’t given that option or don’t remember opting in in the first place, use caution.

SMS Isn’t All Bad

In the words of Olivia Rodrigo, it’s brutal out here. These bad actors aim to take advantage of vulnerability. They often use fear and urgency to scare the recipient into acting immediately. Remember, if something is truly an emergency, you’ll know about it outside of text messages.

All that being said, you shouldn’t fear signing up for marketing text messages. SMS marketing is highly regulated with rules in place to make SMS marketing extremely beneficial for the customers. Don’t let smishing scare you out of connecting with the brands you love.

If you’re a marketer looking to expand your brand’s mobile marketing program to include SMS, schedule an Iterable demo today to see what’s possible.

The post What is Smishing? appeared first on Iterable.

We perused the content we published in the past year and gathered resources from across the web to compile a list of the biggest mobile marketing changes we saw in the last year. These changes, like those changes in email marketing, aren’t going anywhere, so let’s get to it.

1. Automation

Yep, automation is on the mobile marketing list too. Mobile marketing channels like SMS and push notifications can be highly effective (SMS, for example, has a 98% average open rate), but marketers are hesitant to include them in their overall marketing strategies. There’s a misconception about how difficult these channels are to implement.

Mobile marketing automation, however, makes a world of difference. The right mobile marketing platform will have the following features built in:

• SMS smart opt-in that allows users to confirm their written consent in just a click
• Phone verification for enhanced security and list hygiene
• Configurable quiet hours to comply with regulations and retain brand trust
• Verified contact cards that users can add to their contacts for improved deliverability
• Frequency capping to limit the number of texts (and other message types!) a user can receive within a certain duration
• Opt-out attribution for automated tracking for every SMS campaign

2. Operating System Updates

When Apple or Android release new operating system updates, it tends to shake things up in the mobile marketing world. But, these updates are meant to benefit the end user which, at the end of the day, makes the overall customer experience better. In August of this past year we covered iOS17—specifically the link tracking update.

As stated in our August post: “With this new release, Apple announced Link Tracking Protection which, in a couple of key scenarios, will strip away the parts of the URL that Apple identifies as tracking parameters.

The good news, however, is that “at this point, Iterable’s links don’t seem to be impacted by this update. So, if a customer opens an Iterable link via Apple Mail, for example, Iterable’s tracking parameters are still intact and Iterable customers can still see click metrics.”

3. Gamification

It’s no secret that games are fun. So, when trying to engage customers through mobile channels, gamifying the experience helps make the experience more interactive. In our June article, Top 5 Strategies to Successfully Grow Your App User Base, we specifically mentioned push notifications and in-app messages.

We shared, “Now that you’ve optimized for the app store and acquired high-value users, it’s time to encourage customer engagement to drive actions within your app. When it comes to engaging and re-engaging users, two of the greatest channels at your disposal are push notifications and in-app messaging.”

What does this all mean? Consider how you can make the experience more playful to engage users while you have their attention (i.e., when they’re already engaging with your app). Take loyalty programs, for example. Maybe you offer points towards rewards if customers complete certain actions within your mobile app. Or, maybe it’s as simple as completing levels in a learning app and making strides towards an overall goal. Get creative with it!

4. Cross-Channel

You knew it was coming. Cross-channel is incredibly important when thinking about mobile marketing. What’s special about mobile marketing is that there’s an inherent link between users’ phones and the real world. Because people carry their phones with them everywhere, there’s the unique opportunity to link physical channels to mobile channels.

One way brands can connect the physical and the digital (aka phygital) is through QR codes. In our article from November we wrote, “QR codes are especially helpful in bridging the gap between digital and physical when it comes to retail. While shopping, customers can use QR codes to gather more product information, add the product to their digital shopping carts, or even get digital coupons.”

Customers always have their phones on them, so think of ways to use this to your brand’s advantage. Offer them multiple ways to connect with your brand—both online and offline—while simultaneously creating a seamless experience.

5. Mobile KPIs

Integrating mobile channels into your cross-channel marketing strategy requires an understanding of what success looks like. But, to measure success you need to define KPIs. Luckily a lot of the metrics we know and love—open rate, click-through rate, etc.—translate from email to mobile channels. But, there are also some new metrics to consider.

Because SMS regulations require customers to opt in to receive communications (and also require brands provide customers the option to opt out), metrics like opt-in rate and opt-out rate will be important to keep an eye on. A good opt-out rate, for example, is below 5%.

It’s not just SMS metrics you need to keep an eye on. With push notifications, for example, customers have to enable notifications from your brand to even see the messages you’re crafting. Consider how many customers are allowing notifications and keep an eye on that metric to ensure your messaging is engaging and relevant to your app users.

What a Year It’s Been

Mobile channels (SMS, push, and in-app) have solidified their spots in the group of necessary marketing channels. We’ll have some 2024 predictions regarding upcoming mobile marketing trends early next year—maybe even some new channels—but it’s important to take time to reflect, level-set, and understand the changes that have emerged in 2023 to set yourself and your team up for greatness in the coming year.

With automation, operating system updates, gamification, cross-channel, and mobile KPIs taking a front seat, the way mobile marketing programs are designed going forward will need to take all of these elements into consideration. Luckily, these changes benefit both marketers and customers, and only help to create a holistic, consistent customer experience.

To learn more about how Iterable can help you achieve your mobile marketing goals in 2024, schedule a demo today.

The post 2023 Mobile Marketing: A Year in Review appeared first on Iterable.

Voted a top 10 AI Influencer by AI Time Journal, Katie King has a 30-year career in consulting and marketing and has published two books. So, when we say she wrote the book on AI marketing, we mean…literally. She currently serves as the CEO of AI in Business, a future-focused consultancy dedicated to helping organizations gain a competitive edge in the age of AI, and Zoodikers, a content marketing, business strategy, and thought leadership agency built for the digital age.

It’s safe to say that when it comes to AI, Katie knows her stuff. So, let’s get into what she covered in her recent webinar with Iterable.

Want to watch the webinar? It’s available on-demand right now.

Defining AI

To kick things off, Katie went back to basics and defined what AI really means. Because 87% of global organizations believe that AI technologies will give them a competitive edge, it’s important to understand exactly what AI is in the context of business.

According to Katie, “AI is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.” This is the broad, all-encompassing definition of AI. There are subsets of AI, however, that connect more to how we understand AI today. Machine learning (ML), for example, is “a current application or subset of AI, using pattern recognition and algorithms to enable machines to accelerate learning through experience.”

Katie shared this graphic that defines narrow, general, and super AI.

Katie also broke down what AI is and what AI is not—a helpful distinction to help users overcome some initial hesitation to adapt the use of AI technology.

What AI is:

• A specialized technology capable of amazing things
• Better and more efficient at certain tasks than humans are, like data collection and analysis
• A tool and ally

What AI is not:

• An all-knowing, all-capable, superintelligent technology
• A total replacement for human intelligence, creativity, and skill
• A threat to every job and human worker

The Different Forms of AI

Of course, AI can look different depending on how you intend to use the tool’s capabilities. So, Katie then covered the different forms of AI.

Interactive AI

Interactive AI refers to developing AI systems that can engage in human-like conversations and respond dynamically to user inputs.

Common Examples: Chatbots, Smart Personal Assistants
Real World Use Cases: Amazon’s Echo devices, Apple’s Siri

Visual AI

Visual AI is an aspect of computer science that teaches machines to make sense of images and visual data the same way people do.

Common Examples: Computer Vision, Augmented Reality, Facial Recognition
Real World Use Case: Some insurers use Visual AI to assess the damage from vehicular accidents to draft a claim

Functional AI

Functional AI also scans huge amounts of data and searches for patterns and dependencies in it. However, instead of giving recommendations, functional AI takes actions.

Common Examples: IoT Solutions, Robots, Iterable’s Send Time Optimization (STO)
Real World Use Case: An IoT sensor on a manufacturing line notices a malfunction, and sends a command for the machine to shut down before further damage is incurred

Analytic AI

Powered with machine learning, analytic AI scans tons of data for dependencies and patterns to ultimately produce recommendations or provide a business with insights.

Common Examples: Sentiment Analysis, Risk Assessment, Market Insights, Iterable’s Brand Affinity
Real World Use Case: Various retailers use analytic AI to forecast demand and make smarter inventory recommendations

Generative AI

Generative AI is the process of AI algorithms generating or creating an output, such as text, photo, video, code, data, and 3D renderings, from data they are trained on.

The purpose of generative AI is to create content, as opposed to other forms of AI, which might be used for other purposes, such as analyzing data or helping to control a self-driving car.

Common Examples: ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E, Iterable’s Copy Assist
Real World Use Case: A marketing team could use generative AI to craft copy for websites, social media, emails, etc.

You might be thinking, “All of these different types of AI are great, but how do they relate to marketing?” We’ve got you covered.

AI in Marketing

There are a variety of ways AI can be used in marketing that help both the marketing practitioner and the customer on the other end.

Crafting Experiences

Marketers can use AI to bridge the gap between online and in-person experiences, differentiate, and build loyalty.

Real World Use Cases: AI-powered tailored emails based a website or store visit, loyalty programs, ‘Smart Mirrors’ in fitting rooms

Smarter Targeting

Marketers can use AI to better understand their customers, build more detailed personas, and segment their audiences more effectively.

Real World Use Cases: Audience insight platforms, CRM, lead generation and scoring

Personalization at Scale

Marketers can use AI to better understand their customers, build more detailed personas, and segment their audiences more effectively.

Real World Use Cases: Audience insight platforms, CRM, lead generation and scoring

Campaign Generation

Marketers can use AI to make sense of their data and translate it into customer-focused campaign ideas.

Real World Use Cases: Creative campaigns for brands such as Coca-Cola, Lexus, Heinz, Stradivarius, and Kit-Kat

Content Creation

Marketers can use AI to craft engaging copy for all of their channels and modify it for different audiences, geographies, languages, etc.

Real World Use Cases: Social media copy, website content, AI-generated artwork, video closed captioning, etc.

Automated Engagement

Marketers can use AI to automatically engage their customers with messaging to keep the pipeline warm throughout their entire journey.

Real World Use Cases: Push messaging, abandoned cart reminders, etc.

Reputation Management

Marketers and comms pros can use AI to keep tabs on customers’ perceptions and attitudes, success of their campaigns, and discussions of their brand across platforms.

Real World Use Cases: Social listening tools, sentiment analysis platforms

Check Out the Full Webinar

Looking for even more AI info? In addition to covering all of the above information in her webinar, Katie also explores some real life applications. These include examples from Barbie, Delta, Jaguar, and more. Plus Katie covers macro issues and AI regulations and also covers top AI vendors, including reviewing Iterable’s AI Suite.

Don’t miss out, stream the full webinar now.

The post Unlocking AI’s Potential: A Guide for Success in the Experience Age appeared first on Iterable.

The popularity of the search term “AI” in the U.S. from January 1, 2022 to December 14, 2023. Source: Google Trends.

As marketers, we’re finding new ways to incorporate AI tools into just about every aspect of what we do every day. Whether it’s generative AI or using AI to better understand customers’ affinity towards your brand, AI can make a huge improvement in how efficient and effective a marketing team can be.

Throughout 2023 we’ve published a slew of AI marketing content. As a quick refresher, and handy guide, we’ve decided to compile a dozen of our 2023 AI-related blog posts in one spot. Whether you bookmark this or Slack it to a colleague, we’re hoping this serves as a helpful resource as we all lean into AI heading into 2024.

1. AI’s Role in Marketing, According to ChatGPT

In this article Iterable’s, Director of Brand & Creative Services, Michael Huard, wanted to see what ChatGPT was all about and hear it from the source. So, he asked ChatGPT what it thinks its role in marketing is and got…surprising results.

2. 3 Things You Can Do With Email Marketing Automation

You already know the importance of deploying a welcome campaign or triggering abandoned cart emails, but in this article we cover three modern benefits of email marketing automation you can take advantage of today. And of course, AI and Automation go together like peanut butter and jelly, salt and pepper, mac and cheese…you get it.

3. Busting the 3 Most Common AI Myths in Marketing

In 2018, we posited that we were only a few years away from a turning point, in which most businesses will use AI in some form. And with the recent skyrocketing popularity of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, it’s safe to say that the turning point has come and gone. However, misinformation continued to stymie the conversation around real-life, practical AI applications, especially when pertaining to digital marketing, so we re-evaluated the three most common AI myths we encountered five years ago and weigh in on whether they’re still debunked in 2023.

4. Great Examples of AI in Marketing…and Some Not So Great

We thought it’d be fun to highlight some great examples of AI in marketing…and some that are not so great. That said, we all could end up on a “not so great” list at some point so we aren’t here to judge. Instead, this article is here so you can hopefully leave with some inspiration and guidance to heed in your AI endeavors.

5. How AI in Localization & Translation Impact Global Marketing Strategies

AI-powered generative tools for translation and localization will likely have a huge impact on global growth marketing strategies because they make it easier, faster, and more accessible. Marketing teams can adapt content more efficiently without using up all their time or making a huge dent in their budgets. In this article Rachel Wolff from Iterable partner, Lokalise, explores the global potential of AI in marketing.

6. The 5 Ws of AI Marketing

But there’s another useful framework for understanding an emerging topic: the five Ws (who, what, when, where, and why). If asking these questions works for reporters, detectives, and elementary school teachers assigning storytelling prompts, then it can be valuable for us.
In this article we get back to basics and cover the 5 Ws of AI marketing.

7. Mastering Iterable’s AI Suite

It can be hard to know where to start, and, depending on your organization, you will have different priorities and needs for your AI solutions. At Iterable, we focus on three main categories for AI: message optimization, generative content creation, and AI-driven audience insights. In this article we break down each of these Iterable capabilities.

8. Is AI in Marketing Worth the Hype in 2023?

It’s apparent that incorporating AI in marketing may offer a lot of perks, but understanding these tools’ abilities and boundaries should always remain top priority. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the pros and cons of AI in marketing and provide tips for effectively implementing AI into your marketing strategy.

9. Ethical Considerations of Using AI in Marketing

As anyone who was raised on Marvel movies knows, with great power comes great responsibility. While AI-powered campaigns promise efficiency and precision, they also bring forward a set of ethical considerations that cannot be ignored. This article has five things to consider when confronting the ethical quandaries of AI in marketing.

10. 20+ AI Marketing Stats You Wish You Knew Sooner

The research shows that AI marketing is achieving greater results than businesses thought possible and could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2023. In this post, we’re sharing the latest stats from AI marketing analysts and experts to give you a better sense of how AI can improve your team’s performance and make your work easier and more efficient.

11. 5 Tips for Building Better AI Prompts for Marketing Campaigns

While we’re not all AI Prompt Engineers, when it comes to AI-generated marketing copy, there are some tricks for optimizing your prompts and getting to the finish line faster and more effectively. This article has five tips to enhance your AI prompts and seed copy to build better AI marketing campaigns.

12. Key AI Terms to Familiarize Yourself With

In this post, we cut through the confusion, clarifying essential AI terms we, as marketers, should start to familiarize ourselves with. Whether you’re new to AI or just need a quick refresher, these AI terms will provide you with a clearer understanding of key concepts, especially as they relate to using AI in your marketing campaigns.

There’s More Where That Came From

AI is here to stay so we’ve all got to start getting used to it and start embracing the ways it can help supplement our jobs, versus being afraid of being replaced. We’ll, of course, keep publishing our perspectives on AI in marketing so if these topics didn’t quench your AI thirst, be sure to check out all of the available resources we have.

Want more AI content right now? Head over to our AI Hub for webinars, downloadable content, and more.

The post Top 12 AI Marketing Articles to Bookmark for 2024 appeared first on Iterable.

We took a look at the content we published in the past year and gathered resources from across the web to compile a list of the biggest email marketing changes we saw in the last year. These changes likely aren’t going anywhere, so let’s get to it.

1. Artificial Intelligence

Yeah, big surprise, AI is on the list. Artificial Intelligence really took off in 2023—specifically, generative AI. McKinsey, in fact, referred to 2023 as “Generative AI’s Breakout Year.” In the same article they mention, “The most commonly reported business functions using these [generative AI] tools are the same as those in which AI use is most common overall: marketing and sales, product and service development, and service operations, such as customer care and back-office support.”

So how did AI impact email marketing? While generative AI can and did help email marketers write the copy for the body of the email itself (like Grammarly’s professional email writing tool and Iterable’s Copy Assist), email marketing is impacted by AI beyond just the content creation. Take Iterable’s Send Time Optimization (STO), for example. With this tool, AI is employed to examine historical customer behavior—like engagement—and that data is used to dictate the best time for sending future emails.

2. Privacy

In 2023 email authentication quickly rose to the top of the priority list for email marketers. Back in September, Iterable’s Email Deliverability Consultant, Steve Duff, wrote about the importance of email authentication. He said, “Email authentication adds layers of security that bolster trust, safeguard personal information, and preserve the integrity of digital interactions in an effort to make email safe for both senders and recipients.”

Then, in October, Iterable’s Senior Director of Delivery Operations, Seth Charles, covered the upcoming Google and Yahoo email policy updates that hinge on email authentication. “Starting in February of 2024, both email platforms will begin to block and aggressively filter incoming email traffic that doesn’t meet new message authentication and procedural requirements.” While the impending changes don’t occur until next year, email marketers should start putting procedures in place to ensure their emails are viewed as authentic by senders.

3. Automation

This probably doesn’t come as a shock either, but automation had a moment in 2023 and it’s not stopping anytime soon. Automation takes the guesswork out of email marketing. While we don’t recommend a “set-it-and-forget-it” mentality (good to keep an eye on things and audit regularly), automation does help free up your time to focus on the bigger picture. With automation, instead of zooming into each email and thinking about when you’re going to hit “send” you can take a step back and think about what each individual customer’s journey will look like as a whole.

Take A+E Networks, for example. With a variety of different channels—including A&E, Lifetime, The HISTORY® Channel, LMN, FYI, VICELAND, and Crime+Investigation—A+E Networks still manages to send highly personalized welcome emails via Iterable. Because each channel has a unique website where users can opt-in to receive emails, A+E uses this information to automate which welcome email goes out to which customer.

4. Cross-Channel

It wouldn’t be an Iterable article without a mention of good ol’ cross-channel marketing. This isn’t a new concept, but we’ve seen it take a front seat in the past year. Email has often been touted as the marketing channel with the highest ROI. While this still holds true (with an ROI of $36-$42 for every $1 spent), email marketing is best when used as part of a multi-channel marketing strategy.

So, something we’ve seen in the past year is a re-balancing of marketing channels. Because customers’ inboxes are getting more and more cluttered, finding ways to incorporate other marketing channels has been critical for brands’ success in the past year.

5. New KPIs

New tools means new measures of success. As email marketing evolved in 2023, new KPIs started to become more important for determining whether or not a strategy is working. Back in June we published an article featuring some email marketing KPIs to keep an eye on. Our list included some less-common metrics like: inbox placement rate (IPR), email forwarding rate, and list growth rate.

While these metrics aren’t necessarily new, they are becoming more important to email marketers as email marketing continues to evolve. For example, IPR is the number of emails that successfully land in a customer’s inbox versus being marked as spam or bouncing completely. This particular metric goes hand in hand with the prioritization of privacy and authentication mentioned above.

What a Year It’s Been

We’ve seen a shift in email priorities in the past year, and it’s not stopping any time soon. While we’ll have some 2024 predictions regarding upcoming email trends early next year, it’s important to take time to reflect, level-set, and understand the changes that have emerged in 2023 to set yourself and your team up for greatness in the coming year.

With AI, privacy, automation, cross-channel, and new KPIs taking a front seat, the way email programs are designed going forward will need to take all of these elements into consideration. Luckily, these changes are all extremely beneficial to marketers and help improve efficiency and effectiveness—so nothing to fear.

To learn more about how Iterable can help you achieve your email marketing goals in 2024, schedule a demo today.

The post 2023 Email Marketing: A Year in Review appeared first on Iterable.

Establishing a relevant and engaging social presence requires a deep understanding of who your customer is and how they like to be reached, while also tailoring your efforts to the nuances of each social channel. It’s definitely hard work, but it’s worth the effort when the result is a community of devoted and engaged fans that are eager to consume your content, share it with their friends, and sing your brand’s praises on and offline.

1. Know Your Audience

Understanding your audience is the first and most important step when building out your social media strategy. You likely have created brand personas when defining your brand’s overall marketing strategy, and these personas will be a great starting point for tailoring who your online social audiences will be and how they like to be reached.

Review your brand and describe the typical customer:

• Who are they?
• What stage of life are they in?
• What kind of job do they have?
• How do they spend their free time?
• What are their main pain points?

Once you have identified a few of your key buyer personas, do some research on what social platforms that persona uses and what kind of brands they are following. This will help you understand what kind of content that audience is actively engaged with.

Did you know? You can use your personas to build your perfect audiences in the Iterable app using User Segmentation.

A Generational Divide

One major factor when it comes to identifying digital preferences and typical behavior of your target audiences is understanding the differences in generational social media behavior. According to research conducted by ComScore, Baby Boomers are most active on Facebook, while Gen Z favors video content on YouTube and TikTok. Millennials and Gen X spend the majority of their time on the same platforms: YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

These nuances are key when developing your content strategy. Each platform has specific dimensions, format, and content preferences that are important to keep in mind when sharing content.

2. Know Your Platforms

Once you understand who you are talking to on social media, the next step is understanding the best way to communicate your message.

Facebook

Facebook started out with status updates and has shifted to more of a photo and video focus, with the capability to share direct links within captions. Additionally, Facebook has tools like business pages, stories, Reels, Facebook Live, offers, events, and community groups to help build an online community and manage offline event logistics.

Did you know? Iterable has an integration with Facebook that allows you to export static and dynamic lists from Iterable and create custom audiences in Facebook Ads Manager. Learn more on how to connect your brand’s page here.

Instagram

While Facebook and Instagram both sit under the Meta umbrella, Instagram’s engagement rates are four times higher than Facebook, with a focus on photo and video content. Instagram has tools like stories, Instagram live, Reels, broadcast channels, simple direct messaging, and highlights to make connecting with your audience in real-time a breeze.

TikTok

TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform that focuses on short form video content, paired with trend-driven sounds from both native users and recording artists. The “For You Page” (FYP) algorithm of TikTok leads to increased opportunity for virality and allows any user, regardless of current audience size, to have their content served to a massive audience.

TikTok has tools like in-app editing, filters, templates, TikTok live, and a robust music library to allow brands to lean into their experimental content creation side.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the online hub for career building and professional development. Content like industry articles, awards, job postings, education tips, and user case studies are a great fit for the audience on LinkedIn, and B2B companies tend to find that their target audience is very active on this platform. LinkedIn has tools like robust business pages, job boards, article publishing, and LinkedIn live to help connect users with businesses.

Threads/X

X and Threads are primarily text focused platforms that serve as a news source for many of their users. Both Threads and X are great for short updates, polls, breaking news, and photo and video content sharing from brands and users alike. Threads and X have tools like trend tracking, direct messaging, live streaming, and polls to help connect audiences with the content and information they want to see.

After reviewing the type of content that is best suited for each platform, review your buyer personas and business goals. What platforms are your audience already engaged with and how can you provide value with your content on those platforms?

3. Create a Social Strategy

You’ve established the platforms that make sense for your brand, and now it’s time to build out exactly what kind of content you want to share with your audiences.

All social media content should serve the purpose of one or more of the four E’s:

• Educate: Providing educational content to your audience will always be a high-value content strategy. Share best practices on how to use your product, new innovations in your industry, or solutions to common pain points that will be helpful and informative to your audience.
• Engage: Engaging posts help to connect your audience with the brand in a relatable and fun way, while continuing to build a community around your brand. Engaging posts can be anything from polls or quizzes to holiday digital bingo cards.
• Empower: Empowering posts drive your audience to take action and are coupled with strong CTAs. Examples of empowering posts can include registration links to webinars, updates about an upcoming event, or resources for continued professional development.
• Entertain: Entertaining posts are a necessary and often overlooked aspect of a brand’s social strategy. Humor, relatability, and fun are essential to an engaging and long-lasting social presence, so lean in to trend-driven memes and poke fun and the common pitfalls of your industry.

While you may feel inclined to ask which “E” is best for each platform, the four E’s are great for any platform, so I would hesitate to assign a “best platform” for each.

4. Be Responsive

Once you hit “post,” you might think you are finished with your social media duties. But, one of the most important aspects of a social media presence is timely social response. Inevitably, your audience members are going to turn to your social media channels as the first line of customer service, sending inquiries about shipping or services to your social media inbox or comments section.

There are two types of social response: reactive and proactive.

• Reactive: Reactive engagement is what we think of when we imagine basic social response. Engaging with your audience through responding to comments, direct messages, tagged content, reposts, and mentions all falls into this category and is an extremely important form of digital customer engagement and service.
• Proactive: Proactive engagement is when your brand makes the first move and comments or shares content from other creators or brands in the space that have a similar following and audience. This is a great strategy for first interactions with influencers you would like to work with down the line, as it sparks a relationship between your brand and the influencer in a casual way.

It is extremely important to foster these relationships across all of your social media channels as it’s one of the first places your customers will go to connect with your brand. Make sure that you’re replying to all questions in your inbox and are engaging with users in the comments of your posts to build community and demonstrate that you are available to help with any issues your customers are having throughout their lifecycle.

Don’t Be Scared to Be Social

While the social landscape might feel vast and daunting, it is imperative that all businesses show up consistently on the social platforms that make sense for their audiences and their business needs. Having an updated social presence will not only build trust in the legitimacy of your brand, but will also offer a space for easy updates, education, and entertainment for your key audience. So grab your tripod and ring light, it’s time to bring out your inner digital star.

Need inspiration? Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, X, Threads, and Facebook.

The post 4 Tips For Growing Your Social Media Presence appeared first on Iterable.

If you want to take charge next year, consolidate your martech stack. You won’t regret it or the outcomes! Let’s explore four reasons to do it, ways to start and complete the process, and stories of organizations reaping rewards.

What It Means to Choose a Lean Stack

The modern martech stack is powerful, but each application must be thoughtfully chosen to create a stack that works in unison towards your business goals. When you prioritize a holistic view of your stack and consolidate to a leaner, more efficient, and results-driven infrastructure, these perks can be achieved.

• Maximize ROI for a stronger bottom line: When marketing invests time and resources to adopt a tool and onboard staff, you better be sure the added technology is used for more than just one feature. If not, there’s an opportunity to simplify. Streamlining your stack in alignment with top business goals ensures every marketing tool is used at maximum efficiency and enhances your organization’s bottom line. It’s smart to first define benchmarks for tooling use to ensure full value When they aren’t hit, you should seriously consider what to cut.
• Reduce or eliminate redundancies: There are several marketing tools that overlap in features and capabilities. According to Gartner, only 42% of the capabilities available in martech stacks are used by marketers. By rethinking your martech stack, it’s possible to experience cost savings of 30% to 40%, shares Bain & Company. Start by eliminating tool sets with redundant features and functionality that don’t regularly benefit your team, customers, strategic goals, or value drivers, and use tools that best enhance the customer (and marketer!) experience, blending specialization and simplicity.
• Scale impact: In the “do more with less” environment, marketers must help their brands engage and scale for immediate, lasting impact. A martech stack with all functions in one place that integrates end-to-end, streamlines expenses, and improves the customer experience enables you to scale with the pace of growth and demand.
• Improve collaboration: A disconnect between tools creates silos in and outside of marketing and silos hinder performance and results. However, a centralized platform with an extensive partner ecosystem and easy-to-use integrations is advantageous for collaboration. Some pieces you should be looking for in your centralized platform include:
  • A data warehouse integrating behavioral data with the orchestration platform.
  • A unified identity solution that brings data together.
  • Content creation tools that expedite campaign creation and execution.
  • Web optimization tools that maximize external presence for audience attention, and which integrate with the orchestration platform.

This list of benefits isn’t exhaustive. Just remember the golden rule is to consider your most important use cases and choose a modern platform that supports seamless execution and maximum performance for each. The burden is lifted, time and money is saved, and your customer experience will be future-proof.

Helpful Steps to Consolidate

The next logical question is: “ok, now how do I consolidate?” Well, we’ve got a list of some steps to help you do it.

Take inventory of the tools you use to ensure your stack foundation is solid and can handle key areas like campaign orchestration, audience targeting, and analytic insights. A few practices include:

• Documenting the current ecosystem.
• Mapping tools to strategic drivers.
• Defining KPIs that allow for consistently tracking and measuring success.
• Measuring value based on delivery versus expected performance against KPIs.

When you uncover redundancies in this process, it’s time to cut some fat. As marketers, we can use more simplicity, am I right?

Centralize governance to put ownership and responsibility in the hands of stakeholders who can guarantee consolidation happens quickly and effectively.

• Choose an ecosystem owner in marketing with an empowered perspective who will set boundaries for decision-making.
• Develop a cross-functional steering committee to establish shared goals and resources and reinforce adoption throughout the organization.
• Set a schedule to evaluate performance metrics and utilization, and ensure maximum efficiency in resources spent.

Finally, consolidate (where you can) to experience the key benefits mentioned.

• Map tools to your customer journey for a more seamless experience, from beginning to end, with your brand.
• Eliminate the tools that have overlapping features and functions.
• Seek out a platform that has a strong partner ecosystem, flexible data model, and proven experience working with brands similar to yours or experiencing some of the same challenges.

Enterprises that Consolidated and Now Thrive

Iterable has helped numerous customers consolidate their martech stack for great benefit. For instance:

• Furniture brand Joybird streamlined their disparate platforms for email and event tracking in Iterable. Now, they benefit from maximum data flexibility, robust segmentation, and real-time event streaming. The measurable business value included a 93% reduction in engineering time and marketing being able to spin up new campaigns in an hour instead of two weeks.
• The Body Coach fitness app relied on two platforms for customer emails and push notifications. Choosing Iterable, they gained one solution that delivers individualized, automated, cross-channel communications to attract new members, keep them in a renewal cycle, and support their pursuit of health and fitness goals. Now, 60% of members who interact with voice messages from founder and trainer Joe complete a workout in a few days and more consistent, personalized customer engagement increases the odds of stronger retention and member renewal.

Visit Iterable.com to schedule a demo and learn how we help marketers elevate customer engagement, w and explore resources like this more extensive, downloadable checklist to maximize your martech stack.

The post 4 Benefits of Streamlining Your Martech Stack appeared first on Iterable.

For decades, retailers have relied on third-party data as the backbone of their customer engagement strategy. It’s been the fuel driving everything from targeted ads and personalizing customer experiences, to improving campaign performance, and ultimately, increasing sales and profitability.

But a backlash against the misuse of consumer data has spurred new privacy protections from big tech and governments alike. Google, whose Chrome browser accounts for nearly two-thirds of the world’s internet usage, plans to phase out cookies completely in 2024, while Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari have already done so. In addition, 137 countries now have national privacy laws in place that regulate how consumer data can be collected and used, with new state bills in the US seeming to pop up weekly.

All of these factors are resulting in a shift away from third-party data in favor of zero- and first-party data collected directly from consumers that’s both privacy compliant and offers deeper, more meaningful consumer insights. First-party data, as Neil Patel puts it, is “information companies collect from their own sources about their customers,” and it’s increasingly becoming the backbone of the most effective, targeted marketing campaigns for retailers in the U.S. and Europe.

While first-party data offers a number of benefits, one of the biggest barriers to harnessing its full potential is understanding the distinct ways it can be used to reimagine customer engagement and drive business growth. While the possibilities are endless, here are five fundamental ways retailers can make the most of their first-party data.

1. Strategic Email Marketing

Email marketing remains a potent tool for customer engagement. In fact, data shows email drives an average of $36 for every dollar spent — higher than any other channel. But to be truly effective, email campaigns must be strategically segmented based on the unique needs and interests of different customer groups.

When unified into comprehensive customer profiles, first-party data provides granular insights into individual purchase histories, browsing behaviors, product preferences, and more that retailers can use to create robust multi-dimensional segments. Their ESPs can then use these segments to personalize content, such as recommending products based on past purchases or sending exclusive offers tailored to specific customer segments. This targeted approach not only fosters increased customer engagement, but can significantly increase open and conversion rates.

2. Real-Time Personalization Across Channels

Modern consumers expect a seamless and personalized shopping experience across all marketing channels—not just email. In fact, data shows 75% of shoppers are willing to pay more for personalized online shopping experiences.

With access to unified, actionable first-party data, retailers can dynamically adjust website content, product recommendations, and promotions and employ targeted cross-channel strategies based on individual preferences and behaviors. For instance, if a customer opens an email but doesn’t make a purchase, retailers can use this data to trigger a follow-up SMS or push notification with a more compelling offer. This cross-channel engagement can help increase conversions and foster a deeper, more personalized connection with consumers.

Online retailer RevZilla was able to boost revenue by 35% simply by creating a more cohesive experience across email and SMS—their two main channels for keeping in touch with customers.

3. Lifecycle Marketing Campaigns

Modern consumers not only expect personalized and relevant interactions across channels, but also at different stages of their journey. By building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with customers, retailers can boost their profitability by as much as 75% on average.

By collecting first-party data—including the likes of data on website visitors’ browsing habits, email engagement, social media activity or in-store shopping tendencies—retailers can tailor communications and promotions to specific stages of the customer journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase loyalty. This approach ensures that marketing efforts are highly personalized, fostering meaningful connections with customers at every touchpoint and optimizing marketing effectiveness throughout the entire lifecycle.

Take Bob’s Discount Furniture, where leaders are using their first-party data to support both short- and long-term lifecycle marketing strategies. For instance, because their purchase history is persistently stored in profiles, the Bob’s Discount Furniture is able to promote toddler beds to customers who purchased a baby crib two years earlier.

4. Enhanced Loyalty Programs

First-party data can also play an instrumental role in optimizing and personalizing loyalty programs. Armed with information such as the frequency of site visits and preferred products or services, retailers can tailor loyalty programs to offer personalized rewards, discounts, and incentives that resonate with each customer. This not only strengthens customer loyalty but also encourages repeat business.

Additionally, by analyzing data from loyalty programs, retailers can gain insights into customer behavior, enabling them to refine marketing strategies and further enhance the overall customer experience.

5. Optimized Media Spend

A more competitive advertising market coupled with privacy-related changes to ad targeting have driven digital advertising costs upwards of 60% over the last five years. To mitigate these costs, retailers need to find ways to allocate their advertising budgets more efficiently.

With access to unified customer profiles, retailers can create highly targeted and personalized advertising campaigns. This precise targeting not only enhances the effectiveness of digital marketing efforts, but also maximizes the return on investment (ROI).

Unlocking Your First-Party Data Potential

First-party data has become pivotal for navigating the challenges of the post-cookie, privacy-first era. By embracing the strategies above, retailers can adapt to the evolving industry landscape while delivering unparalleled value to their customers.

But success also depends on getting your first-party data house in order. By pairing a customer data platform (CDP) that makes first-party data accessible and actionable—like BlueConic—with a customer communication platform that enables personalization at scale—like Iterable—retailers can take a more holistic approach to customer engagement that not only optimizes marketing efficiency and effectiveness, but also fosters trust, loyalty, and lasting customer relationships.

The post 5 Must Have First-Party Data Strategies for Retailers appeared first on Iterable.

This year, Iterable users sent over 4 billion emails over Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend—a 36% increase in volume since 2022. Since Iterable users are not the only brands sending marketing communications, just imagine the huge increase in overall email send volume.

Beyond brands, think too about the increase in emails your customers are about to receive. Are they wanting (or even expecting) all of those emails?

If you want to make sure you don’t land on mailbox providers’ (and your customers’) naughty lists, follow our deliverability suggestions to make this season a joyful one.

Ensuring Consent-Based Sending

Many brands feel the pressure to contact all of their subscribers—hoping it will maximize potential sales opportunities—without realizing the long-term impact it can have on deliverability.

A mailbox provider’s role is to protect their ecosystem and keep their users safe by ensuring users want the emails they receive. Here are just some of the ways providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Apple, amongst many others) evaluate a brand’s reputation:

• Measuring how much mail is marked as spam
• Keeping tabs on how many unknown users you send to
• Sending messages to spam trap networks
• Paying attention to whether your mail is read or just deleted

When a brand exceeds certain thresholds, such as spam complaint rates, this is a clear signal to mailbox providers that the user doesn’t want to receive these communications, which results in more of the brand’s emails being sent to the spam folder.

It may sound obvious, but make sure your brand is only sending marketing emails to people who have made it clear that they want your email—whether through a recent opt-in or positive engagement.

Weathering a Flurry of Emails

Mailbox providers want their users to receive legitimate mail. However, with a surge in holiday volume, bad actors try to hide amongst all the noise. This results in stricter filtering from mailbox providers being applied to inbound messages.

It is important to note that some mailbox providers’ infrastructures aren’t capable of handling the increase in email volume. What does this mean for marketers?

• Delayed delivery times
• Increased in spam placement
• Increased bounces

While these are not guaranteed to happen to your brand, it’s worth keeping an eye out for these changes during heavy send periods like the holidays.

Tip: Shifting your campaign send times to avoid the top of the hour is known to help avoid rate-limiting delays and, ultimately, blocking. This shift can be five, 10, 15 etc. minutes after the start of the hour.

Tips and Tools to Make the “Nice” List

Knowing how to segment your customer base is important. What times of the day have been proven to drive a lot of engagement? What campaigns have shown the most success? What learnings were gained from those that we can use for the holiday season?

Sending to Engaged Users

From a deliverability reputation standpoint, you want to make sure that the segmentation gives you a better chance of sending to engaged (as defined by you) customers, to protect your reputation with ISPs.

Re-sending emails to customers who haven’t opened emails in the past can be effective sometimes, but remember that these recipients are typically less likely to engage and might start to shift your deliverability down. Consider past purchase behavior and perhaps “clicked but not convert” as an engagement metric.

On the other hand, If a user is clicking, you can assume the content was relevant for them and maybe a slight tweak to the content can get them to convert.

Fine-Tune the Volume

If you do have a large shift in volume from your normal sending, you’re better off breaking it up into smaller blocks that are more similar to your usual sending patterns, even if it means spreading them across multiple days.

Tip: Try to avoid large volume spikes. If you usually send to 50k recipients, don’t change from that too drastically and suddenly decide to send to 150k. Mailbox providers frown upon sudden spikes like that and will immediately defer or block the mail as a result.

Tools That Can Help

You’re not alone when it comes to making email deliverability easier this holiday season. There are tools in and out of Iterable that can help.

Segment Analysis

Within Iterable, if you click to see an individual campaign performance, you can see more granularity at the recipient domain level through a Segment Analysis. Here, you can see your metrics in gmail.com (Gmail), yahoo.com (Yahoo) or hotmail.com (Microsoft), for example. Some metrics might be declining overall (Opens rates), but when it’s through one mailbox provider, it typically means that your reputation with this mailbox provider has diminished.

If old users, never-engaged users, or users hitting the “spam” button are being targeted in large numbers, you will see your successful delivery rate go down exponentially.

Brand Affinity

If you are not sure how to segment your list, try leveraging the Brand Affinity feature within the Iterable platform to help identify who wants your email.

Brand Affinity uses advanced AI to automatically calculate customer engagement and sentiment based on cross-channel behavior. Brand Affinity then dynamically converts these signals into user profile affinity labels for use in smarter segmentation and more meaningful customer experiences.

Third-Party Tools

Outside of Iterable, getting feedback directly from two major mailbox providers can also provide valuable insight into sending behavior. Take advantage of two free reputation systems you can sign up for to monitor your IP/Domain reputation: Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS (if sending on dedicated IPs).

Abide by New Privacy Requirements

“Starting in February of 2024, both Yahoo and Google inboxes will begin to block and aggressively filter incoming email traffic that doesn’t meet new message authentication and procedural requirements. Additionally, they also included some infrastructure and performance thresholds associated with commercial email best practices.” 

To learn more about these updates, check out the full post.

Avoid a Lump of Coal

Mailbox Providers have to decide which brands are “good” and “bad” quickly, so making sure you continue to implement trustworthy behavior will allow you to maximize your inbox during the holidays. The potential short term revenue gains from sending high volumes are not worth the negative long-term impact on your email campaigns.

Take the time. Check your lists…twice. And utilize the tools at your disposal. If you need or want help, schedule a demo today to chat with the Iterable deliverability team to uplevel your email deliverability success.

The post Holiday Email Deliverability: Make This Season a Joyful One appeared first on Iterable.

This year, B2C marketers plan to increase their marketing budget by more than 25% to continue investing in innovative technologies, such as modern marketing automation platforms that harness the power of email marketing to influence consumer spending.

But they must use their allocated resources wisely. Fortunately, you don’t necessarily need a huge budget to create head-turning campaigns. With some design inspiration (and A/B testing), you can boost engagement and drive customer loyalty during these unpredictable times.

Thanks to the following examples from Really Good Emails, you’ll find a curated list of eight email design trends to get your creative juices flowing.

(And for those keeping track at home, yes, while these emails may not have been created this year, we believe that these are the design trends that are sure to persist in 2021.)

Let’s dive right in!

Eight Email Design Trends to Inspire You in 2021

1.

Clean, Simple Design

The Nue Co. believes in providing customers with clean, preservative-free products, and this philosophy is reflected in this campaign.

The judicious use of white space, crisp lines and neutral colours exudes sophistication without distracting the reader from the core message.

Source: Really Good Emails

Calm, a mindfulness and meditation app, uses alternating visuals and text and soothing colours to create a relaxing effect for its sleep-challenged reader.

The images help the reader visualise a good night’s rest while the instructor’s bio lends credibility to the course and encourages the reader to sign up.

Source: Really Good Emails

2. A Pop of Colour

Airbnb’s brand personality is typically more subdued, but this thank you campaign proves that a splash of colour can liven up a message without losing brand identity.

The attention-grabbing rainbow award card inspires joy, happiness and gratitude without overstimulating the reader.

Source: Really Good Emails

You Need A Budget (YNAB) is personal budgeting software that makes financial planning less intimidating and more fun with its use of colour.

While the soft purple background makes the message stand out, the blue sky arouses a sense of peace and security, both of which can be achieved through careful money management.

Source: Really Good Emails

3. Bold Typography  

Dunkin’ uses a bright, sans-serif headline in this coronavirus-related email to maintain its brand identity and provide maximum readability for the reader.

The message about health protocols and safeguards ensures people’s safety, which helps earn the reader’s trust.

Source: Really Good Emails

Outdoor Voices uses its, well, outdoor voice to get people to shop for a charitable cause.

The big, blue headline provides excellent readability across multiple devices and also evokes feelings of selflessness in the reader.

Source: Really Good Emails

4. Playful Shapes

Delightful messages come in all shapes and sizes, and Iterable’s Activate Live announcement campaign is one of them.

The animated, colourful shapes are strategically placed to highlight the message, and the reader can’t help but take action to learn more about the upcoming virtual event (or at least we hope so!).

Save your seat for this can’t-miss event.

Blu Dot, a contemporary furniture shop, understands that ottomans aren’t just for storing extra blankets.

To highlight their versatility, they arrange them in fun, playful ways with the help of models to inspire the reader to purchase this multifunctional item for their home.

Source: Really Good Emails

5. S-Curve Layout 

Feather, a provider of furniture rentals, strays from the standard one-column layout to create a modular or “S-curve” design.

Its use of negative space helps distinguish the modules and the featured items, and the descriptions invite the reader to mull over the details before deciding which pieces they want to rent.

Source: Really Good Emails

UK home improvement and DIY retailer B&Q delivers an email campaign with a sleek, modular look that’s hard to ignore. Each block literally paints a picture of how the featured shades, ranging from white to bright turquoise, can transform someone’s walls.

Overall, the layout, minimal use of bright colour, and clear CTAs make this message compelling for the reader.

Source: Really Good Emails

6. Action-Based Animations 

In this re-engagement campaign, project management app Asana uses an animated running figure to convey speed and agility, both of which are essential to completing a project on time.

Aside from bringing life to this message, this animation also creates a sense of urgency for the reader and prompts them to take immediate action.

Source: Really Good Emails

Online dating app Tinder uses animations in this onboarding campaign to educate a new member about its services, and each animation represents a different action.

Whether it’s inviting the reader to upload a picture, set preferences or enable notifications, the message is clear: the sooner they complete their profile, the sooner they can start swiping and connecting.

Source: Really Good Emails

7. Value-Illuminating Illustrations

SeatGeek often uses illustrations to add an element of storytelling to its messages.

In the example below, the marching band, magnifying glass and stadium highlight the main benefits of using its ticketing service, which include getting the best deals on live music and events from one source.

Source: Really Good Emails

Aspiration, a socially-conscious digital banking alternative to traditional financial institutions, makes this campaign warm and inviting by including a benefits-driven message and a relevant illustration to match. The mountain background on the credit card illustration depicts “your chance to reach the pinnacle of bank accounts”.

While the image adds a touch of lightheartedness, the message instils a sense of purpose for the reader, enticing them to sign up and “do good at the same time”.

Source: Really Good Emails

8. Back in Black

Whether you’re a designer creating beautiful prototypes or an engineer building a chatbot via an API, Marvel (not associated with Marvel comics) has you covered.

Thanks to stay-at-home orders during the pandemic, the average screen time has increased dramatically, and dark-designed emails can provide some much-needed relief while engaging the reader.

Source: Really Good Emails

Harry’s knows how to highlight its product in razor-sharp focus. Its dark design creates a sophisticated look that appeals to its target audience.

It’s important to note that users don’t need to have dark mode enabled to recognise the benefits of a dark colour palette. Not only can it help reduce eye strain, but it can also offer unique depth and dimensionality that stands out in the inbox.

Source: Really Good Emails

Closing Thoughts

As you go about this year, think about how you might incorporate some of these email design trends into your campaigns. What speaks to your business – is it minimalism? Bold typography? Bright, colourful shapes? Whatever you choose, make sure it not only aligns with your brand personality, but also delivers value to every customer.

Want to give your email marketing a makeover? Reach out and schedule a demo with Iterable today.

The post Watch Out For These Eight Email Design Trends in 2021 appeared first on Iterable.

In previous years we’ve been able to make reasonably accurate predictions based on industry patterns. But in late 2020 those predictions are harder to make: the COVID-19 pandemic has upended nearly all facets of marketing strategy, sending marketers back to the drawing board.

After the roadblocks presented in 2020, what do marketers expect in 2021 when nobody knows what to expect?

To get a better sense of the year to come, Iterable set out to capture what’s on the mind of today’s marketers. We surveyed 500 business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers across the US and UK to gauge their plans for 2021 and identify what really matters to marketers.

Here’s what we found.

1. Martech stacks will leverage more data and automation for customer acquisition

Marketers’ top three business priorities for 2021 are to increase new customer acquisition (65%), improve data management (44%) and optimise marketing automation workflows (41%).

These priorities align with the top three technologies respondents plan to add to their martech stacks next year as well: marketing automation platforms, data warehouse/customer data platforms and data analytics platforms.

The alignment of business priorities and martech stacks shows that marketing teams are trying to streamline customer engagement through better use of data. We expect this initiative to stick throughout 2021 and beyond. If leveraged properly, marketers only stand to benefit from reaching customers more efficiently through automation and tailoring messages to unique customer data insights.

2. Marketers will go all-in on AI and zero-party data

The vast majority of marketers (83%) said they’re likely to include artificial intelligence (AI) as part of their 2021 marketing strategy. And 84% are currently developing or planning to develop AI capabilities in-house. 78% of marketers also plan to use zero-party data – data given explicitly to a brand by customers – to better personalise messaging experiences in 2021. The focus on these technologies indicates that brands are doing everything possible to earn precious market share through personalisation as consumers continue to spend less during the pandemic.

Marketers can leverage AI to better measure customer sentiment and curate more meaningful customer brand experiences. For example, most marketers currently use queries of never-ending customer signal sources or sift through billions of rows of engagement data to build a personalised brand experience. With AI, marketers can automatically calculate and classify customer sentiment to deliver effective messaging at scale.

While it’s clear why brands want to invest in AI technology, marketers should consider the cost factors of developing AI capabilities in-house. Given the high shortage of AI talent, hiring an in-house expert comes at a steep price. Furthermore, tasking an in-house expert with building a custom AI solution can be a significant financial burden. For a more cost-effective and viable way to use AI, marketers are likely better off leveraging existing AI martech technology.

Zero-party data is also ready for a big jump in utilisation as brands identify new customer data sources to leverage in place of third-party cookies, which Google plans to eliminate by 2022. And even though consumers consider data privacy to be important, they still expect an individualised experience from brands.

Marketers can navigate this challenge with zero-party data by collecting data from consumers transparently and directly. Additionally, zero-party data gives marketers a chance to welcome consumers into a conversation with their brand as well as give them a share of voice and sense of partnership.

3. Almost 90% of B2C brands will have an app by the end of 2021

More than 60% of marketers we surveyed said their company has a mobile app and nearly 28% plan to build one in 2021. Only 11% of companies without an app don’t plan on building one next year.

Additionally, we found that marketers plan to increase their use of in-app channels (+7%), web push notifications (+5%) and mobile push notifications (+3%) from 2020 into 2021. This shift could be a result of the significant boost in mobile usage from consumers during the pandemic.

The emphasis on in-app and push notifications further solidifies marketers’ plans for AI and zero-party data in 2021, two components that lend themselves well to mobile consumer engagement. AI helps marketers better identify opportunities for customised push notifications, and zero-party data can be acquired more easily through in-app offerings.

With marketers heavily investing in zero-party data and elevating in-app as a marketing channel, 2021 will solidify brand apps as a marketing standard as companies aim to create an ultra-personalised customer experience with more nuanced customer data.

4. COVID-19 concerns aren’t going away

Nearly one third (29%) of marketers said “the growing demand for convenience and safety” is their primary business concern for 2021.

Top three business concerns for 2021 according to marketers

The second and third-biggest concerns for 2021 – brand empathy perception by customers and the disruption of customer loyalty – are also related to the pandemic. This heightened concern indicates that customer preferences around COVID-19 aren’t going away from marketers’ plans any time soon.

Given that many consumers have been advised to stay home during the pandemic, the fact that 60% of 2020 marketing budgets increased or stayed the same suggests a greater reliance from brands on martech solutions to spur creative customer offerings.

Marketers, in turn, had to innovate their customer experience to meet this stay-at-home need. As a result, many marketing teams likely shifted to martech solutions to better reach customers at home and provide safe, convenient offerings like kerbside pick-up, delivery and in-home entertainment.

What Does This All Mean for Marketers?

2020 propelled marketers to take back ownership of the customer experience and push the boundaries of their digital capabilities.

Evolving tech like zero-party data and AI can improve customer apps with a more personalised experience. And with customer acquisition top-of-mind for 2021, it’s imperative that marketers set themselves apart from competitors with increased personalisation as consumers limit spending amid the pandemic.

If you’re looking to build a more personalised customer engagement strategy driven by automation and data, reach out to schedule a demo of Iterable’s cross-channel marketing platform.

The post 2021 Marketing Trends: Dissecting the Unexpected appeared first on Iterable.

But in all reality, as a marketer, it’s really difficult to understand how someone feels about your brand and then actually use that in campaigns.

And even if you know today, tomorrow it may change. It’s an evolving relationship that hopefully grows and deepens, but it isn’t totally linear.

Dove ran a video story in 2013 where a former FBI-trained sketch artist was brought in to draw two pictures of people. First, a picture based on how they describe themselves and second based on how another person in the programme described them. There were some staggering differences, and more importantly, some big smiles and feelings of joy that swept over the individuals (and me) as I watched the video.

It’s just an example of how stories, and marketing, can make us feel specific emotions towards a brand. These feelings can directly impact our purchasing decisions, and as marketers, we need to understand this behaviour and appeal to how consumers feel.

How Feeling Impacts Consumer Behaviour in Marketing

What’s the last emotion you felt right before reading this? According to Rober Plutchik, emotions exist on a spectrum, and this spectrum ranges from love and joy, to fear and boredom. As you go through your day-to-day, it’s likely you feel a range of these emotions based on what’s happening at work or at home.

And your audience feels the same way. In fact, the way your brand creates and communicates content can directly impact these feelings.

According to Psychology Today, consumer behaviour plays an influential role in purchasing decisions, including:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (experiences), rather than information (brand attributes, features).
• Studies show that positive emotions towards a brand have a far greater influence on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgements, which are based on a brand’s attributes.

Even just a quick search for any terms that tie together feelings and marketing results in an overwhelming amount of resources.

Gauging Your Relationship with Your Audience

So why is it still so hard for marketers to understand how consumers feel about a brand?

Let’s be real – because feelings change, and they change often. But beyond just that, if you want to understand how people feel about your brand, then it seems like a massive undertaking.

First, it means gathering all of your cross-channel engagement data. Generally, you’ll want data over a time period of six months or longer to avoid any seasonal impact, but this means information on email, mobile messaging and more.

Once you have this data, across all your different channels you want to measure, then you need to normalise it and ensure all these data points tie to specific individuals.

At this point, you may want your data science team to help gauge how engaged individuals are based on the data you collected.

But here’s another challenge – from marketers I’ve spoken with that have built manual programmes like this – this data just gives them a snapshot of feelings about the brand. Unless it’s an ongoing programme or analysis, it’s insightful to your business, but not practical to actually use in a marketing campaign because what someone felt a day ago, or longer, may not be the case any more. Even just beyond what they felt, actually operationalising it into a campaign is a whole other arduous undertaking.

But now, there’s an easier way.

Understand and Easily Reach Your Audience With Brand Affinity

Understanding how customers feel about your brand, in real time and across channels, can inform smarter strategies and help build an emotional connection with your audience. That’s why we’re excited to announce Brand Affinity, an intelligent personalisation solution powered by Iterable AI.

Using Brand Affinity, marketers gain a unique advantage by being able to intelligently translate customer engagement across channels into deeper, more meaningful connections with their customers – transforming the way you market and connect with your customers in a more authentic manner.

Marketers are now empowered to tune into their customers’ feelings and harness the versatility of Brand Affinity across the Iterable platform to personalise the customer experience at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

From discovering the perfect audience in segmentation, to tailoring customer journeys in Workflow Studio, to enriching the user experience with templates through dynamic content, brands can leverage Brand Affinity – at a click of a button – to match their customers with personalised experiences for each individual based on their affinity.

And best of all, Brand Affinity’s scores are calculated and updated on an ongoing basis, so there’s no need to manually pull data or get your data science team to evaluate all your engagement. It’s all available within Iterable – without any of the headache – giving you real-time insights to better understand and contextualise content and messaging to your audience over time.

Ready to start building campaigns based on how your audience feels? Iterable customers can now utilise Brand Affinity wherever contact properties are available.

If you would like to learn more about Brand Affinity or any of our Iterable AI solutions, please contact your Customer Success Manager or visit Iterable AI for more information.

The post Brand Affinity: Bring the Power of Sentiment to Your Campaigns appeared first on Iterable.

Unlike welcome and promotional campaigns, abandonment campaigns – whether designed for shopping carts, browsing or form-fills – seem to be stuck in a content rut. They’re almost stale.

Since the core purpose of an abandonment campaign is conversion, this uniformity somewhat makes sense. The messages feel almost transactional in nature, and we can all attest to the frequent blandness of a transaction/confirmation/verification message.

Today’s consumers have different expectations. They want more from the brands they deem worthy of their time and money. Consumers want from brands the same thing they want from their friends: someone who listens and pays attention.

The abandonment campaign is arguably the most direct way to signify that you are paying attention to your users, their wants and what makes sense for their journey with your brand.

Below, we’re going to walk you through three ways to flip the script and turn your abandonment campaigns into something unique and memorable. But first, check out this quick video to get a foundational understanding of what is needed to build an ideal abandonment campaign.

Wonderful. Welcome back! We won’t beat around the bush any longer. Here are the quickest – and easiest – ways to begin setting your abandonment campaign apart from the crowd.

Create a Dialogue

Understanding intent is integral to the abandonment campaign. After all, your user has shown interest in an item and got within a few clicks of actually completing the purchase! The intent was there at some point, but what exactly is that intent?

Did the user want to purchase the product? Was this purchase for them or was it a gift? Maybe they used the cart as a chance to save an item for later?

Part of the intent can be shown in your data, yes, but sometimes it’s easier to go straight to the source. Ask! Ask your users what they were shopping for and why they decided to abandon the interaction.

Ugmonk, a designer clothing and lifestyle brand, openly asks users to contact the founder about the products they had browsed and abandoned. This level of one-on-one customer service shows consumers that the brand is more concerned with the customer’s experience than completing the sale. It’s one that gives users a voice and a say in the matter that isn’t present in most abandonment campaigns.

A comforting, personable tone humanises the experience for consumers. Source: Really Good Emails

Baking a conversational element into the abandonment experience adds a level of humanity that would otherwise be replaced by strict sales tactics.

Take Real-World Context Into Account

The topic of intent above extends beyond just creating a conversation. There can also be reasons as to why a person might forego the completion of a purchase. In a year like 2020, there could be a host of reasons why someone might not be able to add another purchase.

Take this into account. The world outside the singular transaction at the heart of your abandonment campaign matters and is a big factor in influencing the ultimate decision of your consumer. Ignoring these factors shows neglect and a lack of interest in understanding the user on their own terms.

Google’s shopping function, Google Express, touches on this concept in their cart abandonment campaign. The phrasing “We’re ready when you are” is not pushy. It shows the consumer the brand is listening but isn’t going to force a transaction on their terms. Rather, it’s up to the user to make that final decision.

This is a simple yet successful example of more inclusive messaging. Source: Really Good Emails

Purchases don’t happen in a vacuum. Use your data to understand each user’s buying behaviour to inform if any changes have occurred that might line up with impactful current events.

Put Your Products in Action

Developing a deep relationship with and understanding of your customer base requires a level of empathy that many brands don’t currently express and must put in work to attain.

With that in mind, we thought we’d close this list with a tip that most businesses can implement more quickly. When building out your abandonment campaigns, consider imagery that gives your products a place in the real world.

Abandonment campaigns as we often see them – if they include imagery at all – put the abandoned item in a white or black void as if to say, “Here it is. Want it or not?”.

When considering a purchase, though, users aren’t thinking about the item in a void. There’s a purpose. This purchase will fill a need (let’s be honest, probably a want). Help them see this!

Luxury leather goods maker MCM leans towards this concept in their abandonment campaign. While they don’t explicitly include the abandoned items in their contextualised imagery, they provide a closer enough approximation that you as the consumer can begin to see yourself walking around town with one of their stylish bags.

Contextualised imagery also helps in promoting brand identity. Source: Really Good Emails

As you can see from this MCM example, it doesn’t have to be a direct comparison. As long as the user gets the feel of taking the product off the screen and into their own life, you’ve achieved success.

Buck the Trends

The abandonment campaign doesn’t have to be rote. The elements outlined in the video above may stay the same, but the ways in which you connect with your customers can be uniquely your own.

Taking the time to give your abandonment strategies a refresh shows your customers you are listening and paying attention. Adopt the strategies above and you’ll catch their attention too.

Don’t let your campaigns lose their lustre. Plan ahead and learn more about 2021’s top marketing predictions! 

The post Three Ways to Turn the Abandonment Campaign on Its Head appeared first on Iterable.

Starbucks goes all-in on mobile ordering to enhance customer loyalty

After ramping up its digital innovation spend, Starbucks can thank its redesigned app for boosting its Starbucks Rewards membership and increasing mobile purchases: nearly 30% of sales are now generated through the app. The Starbucks app, which had over 19 million US users as of 2016, streamlines the transaction process with order, pay, tipping and rewards tracking capabilities. Customers can view and reload their rewards card by app, website, phone or store with instant account updates. The app even connects the in-store and mobile experiences with a song identification feature that saves the song you liked to your Spotify account. By incentivising customer behaviour – offering rewards for visiting at slower times, for instance – the app can gather a wealth of data on each customer’s order and visit history, which can be used to shape future marketing efforts. “Our digital flywheel is a powerful proprietary asset that is driving deep customer engagement, revenue and profit growth around the world,” CEO Kevin Johnson proclaimed in a 2017 investors’ call.

Disney uses beacon technology to provide purchasing and navigational support

From planning a trip to managing one in progress, Disney champions the omni-channel approach with wearable technology that works in tandem for holidaymakers from start to finish. My Disney Experience is a digital component that allows visitors to plan their park activities, manage hotel and dining reservations and add other travellers to a family and friends list. Users can access their My Disney Experience account from the web or their mobile device. Once visitors arrive at their Disney destination, they can link their My Disney Experience account to a MagicBand, a smart wristband containing a touchpoint sensor. The MagicBand grants access to theme parks and hotel rooms, locates attractions, facilitates purchases and allows the wearer to view photos they take along the way. Beacon technology tracks visitors’ every move, helping them make their way through the parks while simultaneously providing Disney with valuable data about crowd traffic trends that can be leveraged to improve the customer experience over time. “The whole system gave Disney a way of understanding the business,” Nick Franklin, who served as Disney’s executive vice president of next-generation experience, told Wired. “Knowing we need more food here, how people are flowing through the park, how people are consuming the experiential product.”

Apple activates real-time customer data to offer personalised music recommendations

Apple is the worldwide pioneer in downloadable and streaming music, with a library of more than 40 million songs that can be listened to across any of its devices. By tracking your listening behaviour, Apple can surface highly customised playlists and recommendations for new releases that should be on your radar. Using its social networking platform, iTunes Connect, artists can also share new music and updates directly with fans that are following them, allowing for a more personalised and authentic layer of communication. Apple’s recent acquisition of Shazam, a music and image recognition app with over 1 billion downloads, hints at some exciting integrations to come. Shazam enables users to immediately identify audio and visual content; this wealth of data could help Apple curate real-time content recommendations that its customers are sure to love.

Nike brings its brick-and-mortar locations to life with interactive sport experiences

Nike has been at the forefront of omni-channel retail, from its Nike+ app with personalised recommendations to its custom-made NIKEiD line. In recent years, the leader in athletic wear has been making headlines with brick-and-mortar locations that elevate the customer experience, including women’s-only stores that offer bespoke services like trouser hemming and bra fitting. The brand’s latest New York location turns retail on its head: the five-storey, 55,000-square-foot space contains a mini basketball court, enclosed soccer area and running simulations – with dedicated staff on site to analyse performance, suggest the right products for each customer and provide frictionless checkout using the store’s app and handheld point-of-sale systems. “With Nike Soho, we can realise the promise of personalised performance […] Because it’s more than a store – it’s a personal sport experience,” said Heidi O’Neill, president of Nike’s direct-to-consumer business.

Benefit Cosmetics hits the road to bring its beauty brand to customers on the go

Known for delivering its brow services to women around the world, the San Francisco-based beauty brand took this strategy up a notch by launching several brow bar experiences to serve its customers in the UK – including its BrowMobile tour, which travelled thousands of miles to surprise competition winners with VIP treatment, and its GlastonBrow beauty drive-thru, which provided free eyebrow waxes and product samples to music festival attendees. Benefit already owned 50% of the UK’s market share for brow products, and these experiential campaigns helped increase this share to 60%. Now the country’s top five most popular products are owned by Benefit. Experiential marketing enables powerful ripple effects across digital channels as well, since customers can share their exciting moments on social media and purchase tested items on its e-commerce site. Kyra White, head of brand activation for Benefit Cosmetics UK, commented on the BrowMobile’s success: “It shows our customer that we’re happy to go to them anywhere. Plus it’s really Instagrammable, which is great for a brand like ours which doesn’t do traditional above-the-line advertising.”

Calvin Klein partners with Amazon to deliver an exclusive collection to shoppers – both online and offline

In a strategic effort to bypass department stores and respond to consumer buying behaviour, Calvin Klein launched an exclusive underwear line with Amazon during the 2017 festive season, both online and at two pop-up locations in Los Angeles and New York City. This partnership brought omni-channel marketing to the next level: shoppers who visited the pop-ups could receive fitting room assistance from Amazon Echo devices, customise their underwear with personalised embroidery, share social media clips and purchase items either in-store or via the Amazon app. 55% of those who were polled by RetailWire believe that exclusives will become a bigger part of Amazon’s fashion push, and many are applauding Calvin Klein for its trend-setting relationship with the tech giant. “We want to reach consumers wherever they are shopping,” Cheryl Abel-Hodges, president of PVH’s underwear group, told the Wall Street Journal. “Digital is one of our fastest-growing channels, and Amazon is a really important part of what is happening in digital.”

theSkimm expands into commerce with curated gift boxes for newsletter subscribers

Dubbed “Oprah’s favourite email newsletter” by Forbes, theSkimm reaches over 5 million subscribers worldwide, targeted toward millennial women who need their daily dose of digestible news. Major brands like Chase, Buick and Starbucks have sponsored content in editions of theSkimm, leveraging the publisher’s “enviable 40% email open rate.” Within the past couple of years, theSkimm has found innovative ways to engage subscribers across all channels, including launching its paid mobile app Skimm Ahead, which automatically adds important events and announcements to customers’ digital calendars. During the 2016 festive season, theSkimm also entered the world of subscription retail with its Skimm the Season gift box. With two packages at different price points, the boxes contained recommended products, like wine, books and gadgets. Naturally, each box also comes with a subscription to its mobile app – an omni-channel integration that provides both brand and consumer with a wealth of information. “Skimm Ahead, theSkimm’s app, is a featured product in the gift box,” said co-founder Carly Zakin. “The app makes it easier to be smarter about the future by staying on top of major events coming up, like State of the Union, major sports events, new show premieres.”

Emulating a best-in-class omni-channel experience

These seven world-class brands exemplify true omni-channel relevance by creating highly integrated, personalised experiences. Achieving this level of success doesn’t happen overnight, but our own customers can attest that the right technology can make all the difference in elevating engagement. For more insights on how to transform your marketing strategy and accelerate the growth of your business, download Iterable’s Six Principles of Building a Memorable Customer Experience. 

The post 7 Best-in-Class Examples of Omni-Channel Marketing appeared first on Iterable.