Small Team Efficiencies for Outsized Results

Bandwidth Is Tight

Fancy new tools and consumer trends come and go, but if there’s one perennial problem marketers face, it’s bandwidth. Marketing teams are often described as small and mighty, but it can often feel like the low headcount gets in the way of truly “mighty” campaign personalization.

Limited resources mean marketers need to think creatively to achieve bigger and better results in the year ahead. By using data-driven automation, small marketing teams can tackle bigger personalization projects on a scale they never imagined.

Generate Infinite Creative Variations With Automation

Did you know that two out of every three marketers believe that creative personalization has the most potential to drive brand growth and improve business outcomes for their organization this year? But because it takes marketers between one and six hours to create each piece of content within a campaign, only 35% believe their company has enough personalized content to effectively engage today’s consumer. 

Add that to the fact that 77% of consumers will choose, recommend, and even pay more for brands that provide personalized experiences, companies are leaving upwards of $20M on the table each year by failing to solve the personalization problem.

Luckily, there is a solution—it’s data-driven creative automation. Rather than forcing creative teams to manually (re)create each content variation, Movable Ink Studio empowers marketers to build layered composite images, each of which is personalized to an individual customer in real-time.

For example, the first layer could include a personalized headline with a customer’s first name via your CRM and a customized product recommendation based on their browsing behavior—all stylized in your custom brand font. Another layer could bring in real-time loyalty information to help that customer visualize where they are in relation to a goal or a next step, as well as an offer associated with their particular tier.

You can use APIs or CSVs to bring in real-time product information and all of the associated metadata like pricing, as well as up-to-date ratings and reviews. All of that sits on top of a customized product image that displays the product the recipient is interested in purchasing.

No-Code for Editing on the Fly

These days, many marketers have already moved away from hard-coding every email. After all, creating a tailored campaign for each customer through that process would make 1:1 personalization impossible. 

However, even if some marketing teams have begun embracing templates, they often lack the dynamic flexibility they need to make strides with campaign efficiency. When updates are needed from various stakeholders—and there’s never just one—marketers often find themselves caught in a frustrating back-and-forth with creative teams. And when the message is out in the world, it’s liable to quickly become inaccurate. Deployed a promotion for sweaters at 50% off? Customers that are late to the game will click on the link only to be disappointed when they see that every qualifying item is out of stock.

Marketers need a solution like Lenovo’s. By leaning on automation, their team saved 200+ hours during their busiest time of the year: Cyber Week.

By tapping into their Doorbuster API app—a customized blend of data sources built with Movable Ink—Lenovo’s marketing team could automatically generate endless amounts of product blocks within a single send. Not only that, but the products displayed were personalized to each of Lenovo’s different customer segments for a hand-picked feel. Any essential information, such as sales prices, savings in dollars or percentages, brand name, images, and descriptions were all subject to dynamic updates at open-time to keep things relevant no matter when customers clicked in. 

Instead of repeatedly working with their creative team to build variations for new customers or channels, Lenovo used Movable Ink to design their content once and seamlessly populate each section when the customer chose to engage. Plus, by using a single code snippet, marketers could modify as needed—if those changes weren’t covered by automation and set rules already—even after deployment. 

Reuse Creative Investments

Another common blocker that marketers face on the road to personalization is the lack of creative resources. As new assets typically involve a costly and time-consuming process, marketers may feel limited in their personalization efforts. Even creating new background images is a task they simply don’t have time for during busy seasons.

But you don’t need to constantly create net-new resources to achieve engaging and efficient personalization. In fact, most marketers have more creative resources than they think, whether it’s within their website or product repositories. All marketers really need is access to automation. Take a look at how Ulta does it:

By simply using product images already available on their website—pulled into the email seamlessly using Movable Ink’s Website Data Source—Ulta gave their emails a personalization makeover with a few API add-ons. Each product image was paired with star ratings and reviews, and inventory was always updated in real-time. Additionally, customers’ individual loyalty statuses were used to calculate the number of points they could earn by purchasing different products. 

One image can achieve a lot more than marketers think. In Ulta’s case, it drove a 95% reduction in production time and saw a 34.1% increase in conversion rates.

Not only that, but marketers can also create out-of-the-box apps that they can reuse for future messages. Gamification plays like scratch-offs, countdown timers, or local maps expand the impact of marketers’ content library. Best of all, it involves little to no work, as the app does all the heavy lifting.

Expand the Team Without Increasing Headcount

If marketers already work with an agency for their email program, they’ll often hesitate to onboard a new platform, even when the personalization potential looks promising. If campaigns are getting out the door, they don’t want to throw a wrench into existing workflows and unintentionally create even more work for their team. 

But that doesn’t mean throwing in the towel for a personalization solution. It just means that marketers need to prioritize a personalization platform that has a track record of effective partnerships and integrations. In both cases, platforms like Movable Ink exist to enhance your tech stack:

• Optimize existing campaigns created by agencies by simply adding a layer of real-time, 1:1 content personalization. In the same way that Ulta included automated data-driven content, marketers can brainstorm new ways to add elements of personalization throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
• Maximizing data usage is made possible with Movable Ink, as the solution integrates seamlessly into existing tech stacks and partners. This makes creating reusable modules or deploying real-time testing and optimization quick and effective. 
• Analyzing performance is a critical step to discover what works and where to pivot. Using a solution like Movable Ink allows marketers to do so at scale, unlocking far more insights than what would be possible from a small team manually scrutinizing mountains of data.

With automation and data-driven personalization a small team can get a whole lot done. A solution like Movable Ink is truly the key to creating low-lift campaigns that drive undeniable results across clicks, conversion, and revenue.

Ready to explore what else Movable Ink can do? See it in action for yourself here or check out the related resources below.