Day 4 of 5 – Rockin’ Around Moments: Iterable’s Festive Five

Choosing Scenario 2, it’s best to catch customers right in the moment. With many brands pushing for mass conversions this time of year, we don’t want them to slip away! Regardless of if they are a repeat customer or new to file, I would want to use event-based triggers to deliver personalized content based on how they were interacting with us. For instance, let’s say a customer was browsing a product on our site, and abandons the page. I would trigger an embedded message on our site with either an offer (if applicable) or “This product is going fast!” messaging. I would also utilize our abandoned cart journey to capture those who are on the brink of converting. In this journey, I would choose the platform they are most engaged with (email, SMS, push) and trigger the message there. Lastly, I would supplement this all with our propensity-to-buy email that I mentioned on Monday. While we don’t take into browsing behavior quite yet in our predictive model (though that is on the way!), I would trigger a personalized email with content that the customer may enjoy based on their past purchase behavior at the end of the week. 

Other things we are doing as a team in our holiday campaigns this year are coming up with some creative angles that we can share with our emailable audience. Some of my favorite “creative” campaigns we have done are a “holiday quiz” where we recommend a show based on what a customer chooses as their “favorite thing about the holidays.” Another angle I enjoyed is we have done “don’t forget to treat yourself this holiday season,” utilizing that personalized model. 

Going with senario two, see this one often! When people are poking around to register for a class or participate in a program or subscription, there maybe supplemental marketing, branding or awareness that goes into play. This puts them into consideration from awareness. Closing the gap in the marketing funnel you need to create desire by increasing relevance. In moments based marketing, we need to hit them at the right time when they’re confident and ready to convert.

Leveraging audience insights based on past behavior such as web, SMS, in-app, push, or email clicks and monitoring their on-site time, add to carts or activities to determine the threshold in which someone is on that higher end to choose from. Similarly signs such as multiple sessions, add to cards, registered but backed out or repeated visits could indicate high intent. Now you have that clue to move into tactic.

Tactics can vary from smart ingest strategies such as Next Best Action, to journies that utilize timely relevance such as a triggered message a few minutes post activity by follow up which chooses the most engaged platform (SMS, email. in-app) “We saw you checking out Warrior Sculpt at 3:30pm. Want us to hold a spot for you?”. For the immediate nudge, we may want to overlook any communication frequency caps to remain relevant.

Making the communication easy and quick, with features such as ‘add to calendar’, ‘reserve spot’ driving right to the landing page with clear CTAs, enhances that. 

Creating urgency based on inventory, timing or price points can be added to the flow. For example: there are only 3 open spots remaining in that Warrior Sculpt class, save your spot! In compliance with this journey, featurin copy and content that the user has historically interacted with.

I’ll take scenario three chatting through winback. This is a mix of campaign, driven, and event based triggers. The key here is to lean on all of the data that you currently have on your customers to win them back. The campaign emails will of course be set up with send time optimization along with channel preferences if available. For the campaigns, I’m gonna target by different cohorts focusing on RFM. Within the emails, I’ll try to get as personal as I can with content and products that I’m sure the inactive customers will be interested in. At this point, I’m not tying in any promotions or urgency, I’m just trying to give them relevant content to get a. “ I’m alive and still interested signal “.

That’s when the event base triggers kick in and based on the pages they visited or if they added something to cart, I’ll have a several touch journey, including multiple channels across email, SMS, app push… With all messaging growing in urgency and growing in promotional strength.

Also going with Scenario 2 - but from a B2B angle. At MongoDB we're selling to developers and technical teams, not holiday shoppers. When someone spends 3 hours reading our sharding documentation at 11pm, they're not shopping - they're trying to figure out if our aggregation pipeline handles their specific edge case. So instead of pushing them to convert, I'd help them validate. 

• Signal stacking: Look for pattern combos that reveal their actual blocker. Pricing page + security docs + competitor comparison = procurement concerns, not price concerns.
• Human intervention: When someone's been in technical docs for hours, trigger an invite to our community Slack or office hours. Not a sales call - actual engineers answering "will this work for my weird use case?"
• Show, don't sell: Send them a case study from a similar company with their exact stack. Or better - spin up a demo environment with their data model already configured. No "hurry, limited time!" just evidence it works.

The metric that matters isn't conversion - it's whether they start building a proof of concept. Everything else usually follows from there.

Scenario 1: Peak-Season Slowdown (Engagement Dip)
 

I know this is becoming more common for brands over the last few years but one thing we launched this year to help with end of year traffic slowdown is a fun Spotify-Wrapped type of message. Some of our brands have more data than others so we picked MyRecipes, a brand/tool where you can save recipes across several of our food sites. We loaded user profile data through Iterable’s partner, Hightouch. And then used handlebar logic to display different variations of the data within the messages. It displayed things like total saved recipes, registration date, total collection counts, the brand you saved most on with a percentage and a roundup of some of your favorite dish types. We then had calls to action to bring users back to the site and save even more. This feels like a good way to blend brand identify with user personalization while also driving engagement. It had it’s own cute designed template and stood out against our normal newsletter deployments.