Movable Ink Helps Marketers Leverage Data and Overcome Content Bottlenecks

Guest post by Dee Anna McPherson, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Movable Ink

Every day, we upload 1.8 billion digital photos. We like 4.2 billion Instagram posts And by 2021, video will make up 82 percent of all internet traffic. There’s no doubt about it: in this “Instagram Era,” visual is the language that moves people.

Dee Anna McPherson

Consumers crave those visual experiences at every marketing touchpoint. But not just any visual experiences: consumers expect visuals that are unique and relevant to them across every channel and every moment. And that leaves marketers with a huge—and all too common—challenge.

Leverage data-powered visuals to overcome the content bottleneck

Marketers understand the impact of unique visuals. For them, the challenge is creating those visuals for their customers at scale. Most marketing teams don’t have the time or resources to create countless variations of their campaigns. They could either create personalized experiences for small segments in a non-scalable way, or they could create generic experiences for a broad audience.

This is where Movable Ink comes in. We help marketers create compelling visual experiences based on all data relevant to the customer that is unique at every moment of engagement. To do this, we make it possible for marketers to easily source, integrate, personalize, and reformat content for email, web, and display from a variety of brand, product, social, and third-party sources.

The types of data can include products that customers have recently browsed on the brand’s website, real-time pricing and inventory, customer preferences, and much more. Depending on a customer’s behavior, preferences, or contextual triggers (like location or weather at the moment of open), Movable Ink can automatically generate the appropriate creative from any of these sources at the moment of open. This process incorporates large and unpredictable amounts of data from a wide variety of sources, making the scale, elasticity, and connected nature of AWS a logical fit. To meet these challenges, Movable Ink migrated its entire production environment to AWS in 2015, taking advantage of multiple regions and availability zones to provide redundancy, resilience, and scalability. As a result of the partnership between AWS and Movable Ink, we’ve seen $15,000 in cost-savings per month, and a performance increase of 50%.

With our platform being hosted on AWS, we store millions of files and serve them to hundreds of millions of users. This makes it incredibly easy for our clients to quickly deliver and scale these email experiences to their end consumers.

These moment-of-open capabilities are a necessity for elevating the customer experience. For example, imagine seeing a great low fare on a flight, only to click through to the website to find that the low fare has already expired. Not the best experience. Movable Ink can pull in pricing and inventory at the moment-of-open so the customer always sees accurate, up-to-the-second information.

Under Armour Product Recomendations

Activating data is another challenge we help our clients overcome. Our client, Under Armour, is a great example of this. Under Armour needed to not only activate their customer data, they also needed a way to use that data in their campaigns that would allow them to create personalization at scale. By partnering with Movable Ink, they were able to use their website as a content source and pull data directly from their ecommerce site where customers were interacting in real-time. Now they can automatically generate personalized creative for each customer at the moment of open. Their product recommendation campaign, which pulls personalized product recommendations for each customer based on recent purchases, saw a 132% lift in engagement.

And that’s just one of the many ways Movable Ink helps companies leverage their data to overcome the content bottleneck and create personalized visual experiences at scale.

Use automation to streamline campaign production

Because Movable Ink generates personalized creative automatically, one of the biggest benefits our clients see is streamlined campaign production. Not only can these marketing teams better leverage their investments in data, but the time they save on production also allows them to focus on higher-level, strategic campaign planning.

Sam’s Club, for example, used to have a manual production process that could take up to 16 hours to deploy a single campaign. Once they partnered with Movable Ink, they reduced that production time to under four hours. Now the marketing team can get campaigns out the door faster and have increased flexibility to meet the company’s ever-changing business needs.

Partnering together to ensure client success

Overcoming the content bottleneck is a widespread challenge for marketers, who are expected to meet their customers’ needs at every touchpoint. It’s a tall order for sure, but it’s something we help our clients achieve every day. Our partnership with AWS helps ensure that email campaigns reach their consumers in the most reliable, secure and efficient way possible. To learn more about Movable Ink and our partnership, email us at partners@movableink.com.