Why Movable Ink is Essential, Even with an ESP

ESPs Can Personalize. But Is it Enough?

Without an ESP, businesses come to a grinding halt. And when marketers hear that their ESP can deliver personalization on top of deployment, it can feel like they’re getting a convenient 2-for-1 deal.

But here’s the thing. While ESPs do offer a level of personalization, it’s inherently limited. With just rules-based segmentation and images that lock in at send-time, rather than data-driven, dynamic personalization, an ESP alone is not enough to drive true impact for your engagement, revenue, and loyalty.

But don’t take my word for it—here are five clear ways Movable Ink’s personalization stands apart from what your ESP delivers. 

Power Infinite 1:1 Personalization, Not Just Segmentation

In many cases, ESP personalization could be better defined as segmentation. You know the drill: marketers create a handful of versions for their campaign and deploy it to a few audiences with different basic demographics. And while some ESPs do allow conditional content based on user segments or behaviors, they do not dynamically transform data into millions of unique experiences in real-time.

Every customer’s activity is a unique collection of behavioral events and contextual data points, giving most brands the opportunity for infinite campaign experiences—they just need the right content creation engine to turn that dream into a reality. Just take a look at how Ulta Beauty created a fully individualized campaign with countless versions:

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In their mobile year-in-review, Ulta Beauty used Movable Ink’s image personalization and data visualization to showcase the customer’s progress and send a reminder that showed how many dollars their current points balance was already worth.

The carousel also featured the customer’s best moments from the year, such as favorite beauty category, the amount of points they earned and dollars they redeemed, the number of times they shopped, and their current loyalty tier information. This campaign helped to demonstrate the benefits of the Ulta Beauty Rewards program and keep loyal beauty enthusiasts engaged through relevant, personalized content.

Trade Static Scripts for Real-Time Experiences

If you’re sending a major promotion to your full file, a static send from your ESP may seem sufficient. After all, every once in a while you’ll need to prioritize alerting customers to an important update over completely tailored content—right?

But that’s not wholly true. Even if every customer is seeing the same sale, as time goes on that information is bound to change. Inventory levels will fluctuate as customers purchase items, and limited time prices need to revert to their original cost once the promotion ends. And even when ESPs do pull in “real-time” data at send time, that content is still static once it lands in the inbox.

Ensuring accuracy no matter when the email is viewed protects customers from unnecessary disappointment, making in-the-moment relevance critical. Virgin Atlantic knew avoiding negative experiences for their flyers was a key priority, so they updated their seat map with real-time availability:

Using APIs, Virgin Atlantic’s seating availability was always up-to-date whenever customers opened the email. When another flyer booked a seat, the chart would refresh to show the spots that were left—without any extra backend work or additional assets needed. This not only resulted in a 20% lift in engagement, it turned an email that once took weeks to build into an automated campaign that updates on the fly.

Leverage Multiple Data Points Per Asset

ESPs limit teams to text-based personalization or only using single data points as is, and it often requires nested logic, custom coding, or pre-built templates for each variation. With automated personalization, however, marketers can easily access, activate, and transform any data from any source.

Not only can it layer multiple data elements from multiple sources into a single image, but different levels of targeting logic can be combined within the same campaign as well—such as location and location’s weather—rather than using only a singular data source. This is especially important with the onset of iOS 18.2, where above-the-fold content is all some recipients will see without clicking “see more.”

‍Citi transformed their Thank You Summary emails right in time for this software change:

The hero image pulled in and transformed multiple data points into a compelling image, including points earned, points redeemed, and the customer’s current balance. By providing the three most important stats in the hero image, recipients were immediately engaged and motivated to scroll further to find personalized charts and graphs that broke down their activity. With this striking visual summary, Citi saw a 22% lift in click-through rate. 

Lean on Automation for Every Step of the Campaign Process

While ESPs excel at automating deployment, content creation and personalization requires far more steps. Real-time updates require constant re-coding and creative updates, while personalization involving multiple data points and iterations for different customers is virtually impossible. But with a personalization solution, marketers can dynamically produce content variations without template duplication, re-coding, or versioning.

This is why personalization solutions are such a game-changer. Whether it’s APIs, web crops, or something as simple as a CSV file upload, they can continuously transform and update data-driven content without additional effort. United Airlines traded their manual process for an automated approach with their promotional emails, resulting in 2 days saved in production time. 

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Their team used personalized, real-time pricing in their emails using a custom app that connected to the EveryMunco FareWire API to always pull in the most up-to-date fare prices at the moment of open. The app also allowed for quick changes between multiple creatives, offered various sorting options, and supported dynamic fare linking with filters like flight, such as domestic vs. international, and journey type.

Create a Presence on Every Channel

Since nearly 70% of online shopping orders are completed using smartphones, it’s clear that marketers relying on a single channel need to rethink their approach. From push and in-app to SMS and WhatsApp, marketers have a lot of channels to cover that their ESP can’t serve. But with an omni-channel content personalization engine, marketers can easily deploy tailored campaigns at all of customers’ favorite touchpoints—and that’s exactly what TurboTax did:

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For their filing journey, TurboTax added interactive, data-fueled campaigns across email and mobile. Each customer received a personalized nudge based on their activity in the year prior, localized data points based on their state, and A/B tested progress bars that kept them in the loop on what tasks were left to complete. By taking this data-driven, multi-channel approach, TurboTax saw a 106% lift in responder rate and a 92% lift in conversions. 

Personalize Beyond Your ESP

By taking your personalization tactics to the next level, you’ll see a real lift in engagement, conversions and revenue—so what are you waiting for? Book a call with us today.