Your growth marketing partner, Ragnarok, combines technical, strategic, and marketing expertise to deliver effective personalization at scale across all marketing channels through the optimization of a modern MarTech stack. As a certified Iterable Changemaker partner, Ragnarok has implemented Iterable for over 100 clients since 2017. We have a highly proficient team with 30+ Iterable certifications and growing.
Marketing automation platforms are typically known for their inability to handle object data, meaning data that is not attributable to a specific user. The common use cases of available data in these tools involve traits, “facts” about your users and events, or “behaviors” that users do.
What if you wanted to maintain a data set that was more flexible than that, like a list of all your store locations with details about them, the availability of your staff to book an appointment with, or your entire product catalog? This is where Iterable is ahead of the curve through their Catalog, an advanced feature that stores object data that can be leveraged to personalize messages at scale.
Within modern marketing platforms, this concept would have historically been achieved through connecting to a hosted API and making calls to it every time the system goes to send a message; at first, that seems great, that’s something an engineering team can build and maintain, but when you’re sending 1M+ emails a day, it becomes extremely difficult and costly to scale. A catalog essentially serves as a data store that can be invoked when a message is sent to display the most up-to-date information.
Our team has integrated many Catalogs, but here are a few common use cases we see that provide a ton of value in the lifecycle marketing program:
- Up-to-date out-of-stock information for products:
When an item goes out of stock, it can be flagged in the Iterable Catalog and read from before recommending a specific item. Can you imagine presenting this fantastic item, only to have it not in stock when the user clicks on it? Talk about managing disappointment! - Physical location and hours of operation:
Often, physical locations are closed on holidays, yet your client communications may tell someone otherwise. Catalogs reference accurate data and inform when someone can visit a location. - Companion content to enrich messaging:
Catalog can also be used as a Content Management System (CMS). References to entire blocks of copy and images can be maintained to display on the fly based on specific user attributes. Imagine you are a restaurant with a list of flavors your customers like. You can create content for each flavor and automatically include that in your email or SMS. As an example, there is a user who likes savory flavors. This information can be used to inform what weekly special you should highlight or recipes that user would want.
Leveraging Catalog can be tricky for marketers, especially since it delves into data concepts that are not typically seen.
To get the most value, start by listing out areas of personalization you’d want to include in your content for each of your core segments, then clarify what that would look like for your welcome or winback series. Then, matrix out what areas you would personalize for each, you’d likely end up with a structure like this:
| Segment | Message | Header | SubHeader | Image |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Non-Subscribers
|
Welcome_1
|
Oh, you don’t want to miss this
|
It’s the best subscription ever
|
placekitten.com/300/400
|
|
Churned Subscribers
|
Winback_3 |
Remember how good it was?
|
It’s even better. We’ve improved our pricing and our product
|
placekitten.com/200/300
|
Now you can incorporate dynamic content into the messages Welcome_1 and Winback_3 by simply pulling in the customer attribute that matches that Segment.
Displaying the content can be a learning curve. Fortunately, Iterable gives you the tools to enable this for marketers of various skills. Think of Catalog as the content, but the index is through Collection; Collections filter the data in Catalog to present the most relevant content for that user. So if your Catalog looks like the one above, you’d create a collection that specifically looks for a Message that matches the one you want to personalize, such as Welcome_1 or Winback_3, then add in a dynamic lookup for the Segment the user is in. This will return the correct dynamic content to incorporate into your campaign. The collection outputs a set of code you place into the content, which is then referenced through Iterable’s Handlebar syntax. So, if I wanted to display that content above, I would have something that looks like this:
{{#catalogCollection
“WelcomeMessageContent” as |collection|}}
{{collection.[0].Header}}
{{collection.[0].SubHeader}}
<img src=”{{collection.[0].Image}}”
width=”100%” style=”width: 100%; max-width:
640px; display:block;” />
{{/catalogCollection}}
Now, instead of making a variation for every Segment, I can create one piece of content that dynamically picks the appropriate content, and I don’t have to store it all on the user profile.
Interested in learning more about how to better leverage Catalog into your Iterable campaigns?
About Iterable
At the heart of Iterable is a commitment to enriching connections between consumers and brands, empowering marketers, and fostering a united team. Guided by core values such as Trust, Growth Mindset, Balance, and Humility, these principles define Iterable’s journey.
