Activate Win a Trip Post 5: The Agenda just dropped! What can Fabletics teach us about AI-powered messaging?

Do I need to choose only one? ;-) In any case, any of the items listed above can be improved when it comes to our internal processes. Technology is not the issue here, it is the time it takes us to develop new email template (or the fact that we still develop email templates from scratch when we could automate a dynamic template is a prime example). 

I would improve personalization and automation by letting people know the first message is AI-driven and inviting them to a more personal chat. In that chat, an AI would start building a profile based on the conversation, like how a CRM works. The AI could send events to Salesforce to help improve future messages.

Being honest and clear about automation matters. People trust brands that are upfront and real. This approach keeps automation helpful while making conversations feel more human. It also ensures messages improve over time, creating a better experience.

I’d really like to improve both personalization and expanding to other channels more!

We’ve developed a great foundation for our lifecycle program, and we have very clear segments with different behaviours. I’d like to get to a place where our content reflects these behaviours - but - like everything else - there is a resource constraint on our end! 

In terms of expanding to other channels, I have low faith in the introduction of Whatsapp for our comms (since we operate only in Canada. Personally, I’ve never been contacted by a business on Whatsapp. That said, I’d like to work more on building out our SMS strategy. We do send texts to our clients, but really only at the beginning of their “financing experience” with us. We should be introducing this channel at various points in their process. 

Healthcare is personal, and the marketing for it should be, too. As we stand up our Iterable instance, I’m really excited to get all of the channels firing between email, SMS, and in-app messaging. We’re leveraging our Segment integration to share data and events, but also to help produce the most relevant touch points based on patient activity. I’m also looking forward to having Iterable’s Ai monitor how our patients engage with messages over time so that we can start serving those messages in the channel that’s proven to be the most effective for each patient.

Iterable’s AI suite has been a great resource along with the course offered from Iterable’s learning. If our team could improve one part of our messaging strategy, I would choose optimizing messaging frequency. While timing, automation, personalization and new channels are all very important, as our organization has many aspects within that we market, it can get lost in the process of how many communications each customer is getting per day, week, and how they’re getting those communications.

By utilizing Iterable’s send time optimization, and adjusting for frequency within Iterable, we can determine just the right amount of touchpoints per user. Some customers may not respond until they’ve seen 6 touchpoints, while another may get one email or push notification and that’s enough for them to convert. Each person has their own unique goals, attachment to the brand, likes + interests, and freetime in their day. By understanding how each member reacts to communications and being able to understand trends on a personal level to optimize timing based on where they’re located in the world, and how many communications they recieve in a given week can reduce churn rate and over communication which can dull the efforts of our marketing output, and increase conversion rates! Would love to learn and collaborate with others more to discover how brands are using this strategy.

If I could improve part of our messaging strategy, it would be personalization and message frequency. Though really it’s all the above (timing, automation, personalization, optimizing message frequency, channels, etc). 

I already use Send Time Optimization for ad hoc sends, and I’m interested in exploring Frequency Optimization, but right now, it feels too global. A lot of what we have in place is intentional to maintain a consistent customer journey, so adjusting frequency too broadly could impact both user experience and our support team. Channel Optimization is another tool I’ve leveraged, but again, it has to fit within the overall lifecycle flow.

My biggest challenge? Resources and data access. I’m a team of one, and deeper integration with Iterable features often requires custom data fields or events, which means Eng support (and they have their own priorities and sprints 😩). And of course, anything whatever we need to implement has to align with both business needs and the user experience.

Ultimately, the goal is simple: don’t spam users but enhance their experience. Every message should feel like a natural part of their journey, not just another email in their inbox. Easier said than done though. I look forward to learning how I can better leverage these AI-driven tools!

Louder for those in the back: Optimizing message frequency! I want to improve this for not only my company, but for so many other companies…

While I might prioritize automation and personalization, sometimes that those changes require bigger lifts than a small or midsized company can easily implement. However, small tweaks to message timing and frequency can make large impacts in a pretty small way with minimal lift. Over time, very few companies are going to benefit from a strategy that prioritizes frequency over quality. Message me when you suspect I might actually buy and hit me with a small burst of messages to build your message foundation. If I don’t take the bait - like going to your site or putting something into my cart - change the strategy. Sending the same message, at the same time, over and over will only leads to lower satisfaction scores and higher opt-outs. 

For us, in Ed Tech communicating with teachers, time optimization is key! Our user’s days and schedules are busy busy busy, and no one teacher’s looks the same. Over the year we’ve been leaning into capturing send optimization data in Iterable and are slowly rolling it into our email sends (both manual and event triggered). It’s been exciting to get this feature going and we know it will help deliver results and really resonate with our users. Personalizing is important, timely and relevant information is important, timing both with time optimized sends = FIRE 🔥! (Layering with frequency is also our focus, we make sure to set up message prioritization and also send limits to users - not here to bombard, here to help!).

We are also a small and mighty team (I noticed that in other posts, common theme), mainly myself and the lead marketing op for setting up and designing in Iterable. Thankfully we’ve got some great engineers that are supporting us and ensuring we are building out our catalog correctly and capturing key events in product that we know we want to capture. There’s a lot of focus on Iterable at my company because it has the ability to help us in so many pain areas, so even though the team is small, the support of the company/leadership is large (and that sure helps!). 

For my company, I would say personalization. We send quite a few generic emails that look the same to everyone, which can be a negative thing in this industry and can bore the reader. We started to introduce some new personalization with site behavior being tracked and it has improved our conversion and session total so I am trying to build on that. 

For me, I’d say personalisation and automation. Automation to reduce manual load and deliver messages as timely and relevant as possible, and improved personalisation to deliver true value to each recipient

My holy grain right now is channel diversification. We are very reliant on email in a space where push notifications may be the best way to engage our high intent users. There are a ton of challenges standing in our way though:

1. App adoption by our user base: not something we’ve actively driven before
2. Testing into the right strategy: how do we not oversaturate the channel and only send users the most important messages and notifications, only the things they care about.
3. Resources: of course, there’s always going to limited resources, so finding the justification and the data that says this is worth it would be critical.
4. Organizational buy-in: getting buy-in from stakeholders would be no small feat.