Marketing Automation Challenges Pt. 1: Personalizing email campaigns using custom-built automations, step-by-step

In email marketing there are generally two kinds of sends — there are journeys, which are automated lifecycle programs, and blasts, which are one-off emails usually sent on a schedule.

But there are instances when blasts can and should be automated. In this post I’ll explain when, why, and how we tackle automating blasts at Modular. And I’ll use a recent project for an app-based startup in the hospitality space as an example.

Sophisticated personalization can be challenging to automate. When it comes to blast campaigns, personalization is typically done at the level of segmentation: different content for different cohorts. The more cohorts there are, the more campaigns have to be built—and that’s where the custom automation comes in.

Lots of segmented emails, and fast

Our client needed to frequently send highly segmented sets of emails—up to 17—with a very short turnaround time (few hours).

At its most complex, the process of creating an audience, assigning an audience and conversion metrics, QA checking, and scheduling 17 different emails campaigns could take up to 3 hours to complete.

What tools we used

Complex marketing automation tends to be our sweet spot, so we have a number of tools that we draw on. Here’s what we went with in this case:

Airtable

Our client powered many of its internal processes with Airtable, a no-code database platform. We love Airtable’s ability to create a hosted JSON feed of data that can be accessed via RESTful API requests.

Iterable

This client used Iterable for all of its marketing automation. Iterable has a flexible and powerful API, and it’s possible for Iterable users to access external Data Feeds in JSON or XML format to dynamically insert data into messaging content.

Handlebars

Handlebars is a templating language utilized by Iterable. It allows developers to dynamically add content from the User Object, from Events, or from external Data Feeds and Catalogs into their messages. It also contains powerful functions such as “each” loops which greatly reduce production time and make emails more personalized and dynamic.

The Solution

The Modular team designed a system through which a user can identify information that needs to be sent in an Iterable campaign, then setup and schedule that campaign with no more than the click of a button. Here’s how it works:

1. Client data appears in an Airtable view that displays only qualifying data to be sent via Iterable.
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2. The user clicks a button that says “Generate Campaign” in Airtable. Our automation does the rest.
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3. Modular’s automation compiles the data provided by the Airtable database and sends it to an Iterable template, then creates a campaign and populates the content with the database information. The send segment is also determined by the Airtable data.
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4. Our automation sets up and schedules the Iterable campaign.
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5. Back in Airtable, our automation updates the status of each record to “Complete” so that it no longer shows up in the “To Send” view.

The Result

What was a 3 hour process of creating and scheduling campaigns became something that takes less than 3 minutes! This is a 98% reduction rate of time spent on each send. Even more important, this automation facilitates a more personalized customer experience even at the level of blast campaigns.

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Does your company need help with complex marketing automation challenges? Modular has a team of experts in marketing automation, CRM, growth engineering, and lifecycle marketing.