Day 1 of 5 - Unwrap Your 2025 Wins: Iterable's Festive Five

An initiative we launched this year that I’m proud of is Follow This Topic. Rather than users only having the option to sign up for our flagship/curated newsletters we’ve worked to provide more niche newsletter offerings to users in an automated way. Users can now sign up to receive alerts for topics from our sites that they follow. For example, on Travel + Leisure you might follow Cruises, Hotels and National Parks, whereas you might follow Cryptocurrency and Retirement Planning on Investopedia, or Baking and Grocery News on Allrecipes. The beauty of it is that we’re able to automated the whole flow. Users sign up and enter a journey that runs daily. Then, we also have all of our content from each of our sites living in an Iterable catalog so we’re able to create a collection of articles that have been published in the last day and populate the email journey with that content. If there’s a day that no content has been published, the journey simply does a send skip. After the initial setup this can run with minimal intervention from our team. It’s been a nice addition to our normal offerings.

Playing with the experiments tool instead of only doing manual AB tests!

Perhaps our biggest accomplishment in Iterable this year was successfully completing our Iterable Migration! Prior to our switch, we were on an antiquated CRM platform for over 10 years. Our prior platform wasn’t as sophisticated as Iterable is, and we weren’t realizing our full potential due to our platform’s limitations. Once we went through a formal RFP process, we discovered we could do so much more with our CRM strategy by making the switch! We began this process in April of 2025, prioritizing our deliverability, data hygiene, and workflow automations. For instance, using the power of handlebars and catalog, we were able to roll out the use of predictive modeling to deliver personalized “top picks” at scale. We’ve already seen a massive uplift in email and engagement and sales from our testing phase alone. We can’t wait to see what 2026 brings for us, and we’re super excited for Iterable NOVA!

We recently celebrated one year on Iterable! We have made many personalization improvements to our campaigns, one of which was adding dynamic handlebars into our pre-trip emails.

Perhaps our biggest accomplishment in Iterable this year was successfully completing our Iterable Migration! Prior to our switch, we were on an antiquated CRM platform for over 10 years. Our prior platform wasn’t as sophisticated as Iterable is, and we weren’t realizing our full potential due to our platform’s limitations. Once we went through a formal RFP process, we discovered we could do so much more with our CRM strategy by making the switch! We began this process in April of 2025, prioritizing our deliverability, data hygiene, and workflow automations. For instance, using the power of handlebars and catalog, we were able to roll out the use of predictive modeling to deliver personalized “top picks” at scale. We’ve already seen a massive uplift in email and engagement and sales from our testing phase alone. We can’t wait to see what 2026 brings for us, and we’re super excited for Iterable NOVA!

 

Woahhhhhh. I would love to hear more about this! We’re trying to explore something similar with blog content. 

We’ve had so many Iterable wins this year! But the one I am most proud of involves essentially merging two different variables to be one unique variable for a Catalog. Our Warming email cadence has about 250+ possible combinations when we’re taking into account the number of products being referenced, the user segment, and the user’s industry. Our Analytics team was able to give us one or the other, but not a combination of two or three, without significant heavy lifting on their end.

With the #assign function and the power of Catalog, we were able to accomplish this feat without a major lift. I included the handlebar logic below. Essentially, we used the #assign function to create a new unique variable that combines the product name and the segment id from one Catalog. Then, in a separate Catalog, we uploaded HTML body copy for each of the emails to populate in the template that hosts the CSS, header, and footer. We've already seen a 5% lift since these new templates were launched.

⭐ My Iterable Win of 2025

This year, my biggest win was mastering Iterable Journey programs and getting several key journeys fully fixed, optimized, and back on track. I went from troubleshooting individual issues to understanding how every part of a journey fits together—data flows, triggers, filters, delays, exits, and channel logic.

By digging into the details, improving workflow logic, and correcting broken or outdated components, I was able to restore multiple high-impact journeys so they run smoothly, reliably, and in line with our customer experience goals. It’s been incredibly rewarding to see those programs performing the way they were meant to, and to feel confident managing and improving complex journeys going forward.
 

My win this year was further use of the location-based sort in collections. 

In 2024, I added a collection of assets that were sorted using location to our weekly email promoting auctions ending that week. By promoting items closest to the email recipient, we saw an average lift in conversions of over 300%, showing it was extremely valuable to our customers.

This year, I began adding FILTERED collections sorted by location, but also filtered to display assets that were not only nearest them, but also industry-specific. This boosted our conversions another 33%. 

That’s a win in my book! 

 

We achieved numerous wins with Iterable this year, but our most significant accomplishments centered on expanding our innovation efforts. We launched an entirely new channel (web notifications), broadened our SMS program, initiated MMS testing—which increased CTR by 33%—and introduced new product capabilities such as channel optimization and hold-for-reply. As we’ve continued to leverage Iterable to test and scale more campaigns, we’ve driven substantial growth in our HVAs, achieving double- and even triple-digit increases.

Perhaps our biggest accomplishment in Iterable this year was successfully completing our Iterable Migration! Prior to our switch, we were on an antiquated CRM platform for over 10 years. Our prior platform wasn’t as sophisticated as Iterable is, and we weren’t realizing our full potential due to our platform’s limitations. Once we went through a formal RFP process, we discovered we could do so much more with our CRM strategy by making the switch! We began this process in April of 2025, prioritizing our deliverability, data hygiene, and workflow automations. For instance, using the power of handlebars and catalog, we were able to roll out the use of predictive modeling to deliver personalized “top picks” at scale. We’ve already seen a massive uplift in email and engagement and sales from our testing phase alone. We can’t wait to see what 2026 brings for us, and we’re super excited for Iterable NOVA!

 

Woahhhhhh. I would love to hear more about this! We’re trying to explore something similar with blog content. 

I’d love to learn about this too, incredible work!

One of our primary 2025 wins was integrating a cleaner, more robust format in our weekly newsletter to our subscribers about class reservations. People can book a class anytime, utilizing snippets has been incredibly helpful in a lot of our automated, triggerd, personalized and blast ad hoc campaigns! Snippets are quite dynamic allowing you to create, pull, or generate content from several locations. In this senario, we reference some user data and catalog information which is pulled in from API based on if a member booked a workout class to then display the date, time, instructor, class and location at the top of the newsletter each week!

Hoping to utilize snippets for more personalized content in 2026 to our newsletter.

Our biggest win was also our migration into the Iterable platform! We just completed IP warming in October. Post-migration, a big win for my team has been setting up branded drag and drop template pieces and snippets. It has enabled content creators from across our company to be able to create emails and journeys, but leave the actual scheduling and launching of those campaigns and journeys to the experts on my team. Previously my team had had to create every email, with much back and forth with the SMEs.

The Washington Post was proud to join the Iterable community in 2025 and our biggest win was launching our first journey exactly -- to the day -- that was scoped on the day we signed the contract. 

IP warm-up went smoothly and we’re ramping up on the platform, starting with our Subscriptions Marketing needs.  But in addition to the business objectives, I’m incredibly proud of the work of our personalization science team and newsroom in relaunching a hyper-local focused newsletter called “For You.”  We didn’t just migrate this newsletter, we reimagined it and went to market with a new AI-powered experience that doesn’t just recommend personalized content but also has an AI summary of the article, prompts the user with a question, highlights the current conversation on the topic, and more:
 

My big win is simple. Launching Iterable during Black Friday week, you heard that right. We turned all of our flows on, finished IP warming and launched SMS during Black Friday week. Oh, we also enabled our app push. 

And nothing major broke and we saw amazing results from email and SMS. I call that the ultimate win. 

I hate to be too broad, but this year, I’m proud of everything in Iterable. I joined my company early this year to evaluate marketing automation platforms and to select and onboard us to one. Iterable won out of course, and everything we’ve been able to accomplish is amazing. We went from sending a handful of irrelevant marketing email blasts a quarter and disjointed transactional campaigns to an optimized, targeted marketing program and connected, designed transactional messages that are all based on real-time events and patient data. We’re still building out a couple of channels due to competing tech resource priorities, but I’m so proud of how far we’ve come.