Steven

I’m Steven. 

Spencer

And I’m Spencer. Welcome to Ragnarokast, your podcast for all things marketing and MarTech. 

Steven

Hello everyone. 

Both

We’re the Co-CEOs of Ragnarok. 

Spencer

Hello. Hello. 

Steven

Hey, 

Spencer

We’re back again. Welcome, Heather. 

Heather

Hi there. Thanks for having me. Very excited about this. 

Spencer

We’re excited too. We’ve, we’ve been wanting to have an Iter Iterable light. What? Iterable Light

Heather

 We call ourselves Iterators. Actually, 

Spencer

Iterators, we’ve been wanting to have an iterator on the, on the, on the podcast for a while. So, or, or, you know, when they do the robot, they call themselves the Trons. 

Trons. Love it. So, Heather, do you mind giving us, you know, intro into yourself, a little bit of your background? 

Heather

Not at all. Not at all. All all. Very excited to be here. Thanks again. So, I’m Heather Blank. I head up the go to market strategy and partnerships at Iterable, which is one of the market leading AI powered customer engagement platforms, which is a mouthful, but yet nice and descriptive for what we do. 

I’ve, I’ve been in the space for a long time, so I about, I’ve been I’ve run the gamut on my career and started as a, as a practitioner and a marketer with hands-on keyboard, running the email program for Petco Animal Supplies too many years ago, I won’t say how long. And, and fell in love with the, the space at that point. And then so much so went to work for an ESP at the time, that’s what we called it back then, what called responses. And so I worked there for many a years and helped grow that business to a point where we went public and then we’re acquired by Oracle. So most of you know, the responses product probably now as the Oracle Marketing Cloud at some point, I, I took a turn and decided to try my chops at the ad tech side too. 

So I did some work with Datalogix, which was a data company that was also acquired by Oracle. I like to say Larry bought Oracle ’cause I went there after responses, but it’s never been confirmed or denied. And then did some work at the ad tech space leading their product and go to market for data. But my heart’s always been with the MarTech side and the first party data. So I’m fortunate enough to come back over to, to that part of the marketing techs world and are now working with Iterable. So, very excited. 

Spencer

And so what we’ve decided, you know, based on planning for this specific podcast is that we’re gonna do like a mini series on MarTech marketing, digital transformation. And for this one with you, we’re gonna focus on customer engagement platform as the, and maybe we’ll do one about CDPs and, you know, data warehouses and stuff. Kind of the, the core building blocks of the, the modern stack, the customer engagement platform is, you know, the primary tool for communication in the modern MarTech stack. Heather, you’ve already elucidated why you are a great person to have discussed this and, you know, illuminate us, and which is why we’ve invited you here to, why should somebody use a modern customer engagement platform versus other options that are out there? 

Heather

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I, I have been watching this evolution for a long time, and I think what, what, what, not only like my personal, you know, of course my personal perception of the market, but what we see from our customers and whatnot too is there is a modernization going on with the stack. And I think what we see is it’s caused by a couple of things, right? So the first thing is there’s a lot of disparate different places for brands to store and collect data at this point. They have data warehouses, they have CDPs, they have product information, like all the things, right? 

And we as a, you know, as an industry overall, have built all kinds of great tools for collecting and storing data. So that puts a lot at the hands of the marketer, which is amazing. But, and then on the other side, we’ve also developed a lot of capabilities around how to deliver those communications. Not just in email anymore, but broadening it across all kinds of different touch points, SMS in app, web, social, all the things, right? Where we see at Iterable and where I personally see in our customers and talking to them is that that whole evolution of all of those different capabilities has created what we call the activation gap. 

And the activation gap is a place that like, where there’s no like really good tool to consolidate data from all your different places and then also deliver to all the different channels in one centralized place, right? So if you think about how, where do you go to decide who gets a message, what that message says and what channel do you deploy that message? That’s the activation gap, right? And so what we’re solving for and what the modern customer engagement platforms are solving for is a single place where marketers that’s marketer friendly, you don’t have to write SQL code, et cetera, et cetera, can do that in a single platform and can do that with a infrastructure and an architecture that is faster than with the legacy systems from a data querying and segmentation and realtime eligibility perspective. 

And it’s AI powered because that’s a new thing that we’re all infl in, infusing into our ca our capabilities and then is also flexible so that it can integrate with both sides of that activation gap, bringing data in and then deploying data across different channels. And so that’s what we see as the modern, you know, stack overall and like where we’re going over time. 

Spencer

And Steven, where do you see, you know, based on like some of these, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say quote unquote enterprise, but really it’s legacy platforms, you know, what do you, where do you see the difference and why is it, it’s not, it’s not always that new is better, but in this case new is better. 

Steven

Yeah, you know, I liken it to, and I, you know, I think a lot of what Heather said is, is spot on, right. I liken it to like a, to like a car before, before, you know, you know, in, in cars back in, you know, I think before 1997 didn’t used to have what you call anti anti-lock brakes. So when you, you know, when you hit the brakes in the car, if you were skidding on water or try and drive over snow, right? You would just kind of slide and then, you know, hope to, hope to whoever you know, that you believe in that you didn’t, you didn’t crash. And then they sort of change that model to like a grip and release, grip and release. 

So when you hard brake, you realize that like, like your car rumbles a little bit and that’s intentional because it’s not like holding the brakes really hard. I unfortunately had a car, you know, Spencer, of course, you know, the story that I drove that was a, an from 1985 and I, I skidded on some, some wet leaves that got, that got stuck in my, stuck in the, the tread of my tire, which probably should have been, you know, replaced maybe several months before I got into this accident. But I, I slammed on the brakes, which was the right thing to do, you know, coming around a corner and to like basically stop for a light. 

And boy did I not stop, I just skid and kept skidding and kept skidding and kept skidding. So I had to, you know, turn the wheel and crash myself into the curb, which seared the tire off the axle. But, you know, thank god I didn’t hit anybody or get hurt. But it was the sort of, that’s what I sort of look at when I see these legacy platforms, right? They are infrastructurally set up to work really, really well at the beginning and they have a lot of acceleration and you can do a lot of stuff, but they break down over time and there is no replacement parts for them, right? Essentially you have to rebuild the entire engine if you want it to actually work in the case of, you know, antilock brakes, right? 

That’s a whole system. It’s not just replacing the brake pads or something like that. And that’s kinda what these platforms have and that’s their mentality, right? Is they find a gap and they buy another product or they build a solution, try to integrate it into the existing structure because that’s cheaper, faster, easier for them to quote unquote modernize. But it’s still underneath, it’s like putting a fresh coat of paint on an old car, right? It’s still an old engine, it’s still not gonna operate smoothly. I think in this case, when we talk about new is better, we’re almost comparing like a Tesla to a, to a Ford Pinto, you know, like it it, like you can make a Ford Pinto look like a Tesla, but it’s still not a Tesla underneath, right? 

I think that’s, that that, that over that’s the overarching theme here, right? Is 

Heather

Such a good analogy. I mean, and you know, I I was, I was building those, you know, those, those Ford Pintos back in the day, you know, and that that was revolutionary back in, you know, 15, 20 years ago. But like, to put it in perspective, we were building responses before cell phones were even like, I mean, somebody somewhere had built a cell phone, but like I, I didn’t have a cell phone. Like it wasn’t something that you, you know, and I don’t think any of us in general could comprehend the amount of data that was gonna become available and need to be activated and leveraged in these types of platforms. 

You know, when we were building those, and you, you made a really good point, Steven, like there’s not really good placement parts, right? And the pain that our customers have, you know, when they, they’re on these legacy systems, it equates to, you know, waking up it early. I’m sure there are people listening to this podcast today of practitioners that are hands on keyboard and you’re waking up super early in the morning to let your queries run so that your message will compose, you know, and get in the inbox by the time that you need it. Like this is real problems that these legacy systems are creating as far as just like quality of life for marketers these days. 

You know, like let’s, let’s make their jobs and their days better on, on a more modern data infrastructure. 

Steven

Yeah. It’s funny you say, I remember having to hire a contractor back when I was working brand side to do just that, to basically, you know, in, I think they were based out of India or, or somewhere, you know, other side of the world because at their like 1:00 AM or at our 1:00 AM when we needed the query to run was in the middle of their day and we just needed them to go in and literally push a button to refresh the data. What a nightmare. 

Heather

Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of people listening who like that can fully relate to that. For sure. For sure. 

Steven

Oh yeah. 

Spencer

And you know, I did want to talk about, I guess some of the other channels, but before we get into that, like is there anything other than channel additional channels, you know, that some of these, some of these older tools may not have that a modern engagement platform does 

Heather

From our perspective. And I’m sure you guys have a a good perspective too, based off who you work with. But the other, you know, big thing is we do see like consolidation being a big thing, right? We’ll talk about probably channels in a minute can talk all day long about that, but also the tech channel and just the efficiencies on the data, right? So when you have these more modern customer engagement platform like ours that can, you know, store a lot of data relatively cost effectively, certainly more than they can on the legacy systems, you can start to streamline your overall stack and remove like, duplicative storage of data, right? 

So you don’t have to store your data, you know, in multiple places, which then creates not only efficiencies on costs, but efficiencies around data latency and then just privacy concerns all the things, right? And so centralizing the data is another big key thing of like closing that activation gap overall. It’s just a lot of efficiencies there, which just then makes it more readily available for things that I said earlier, real time efficiency, all the things when you wanna start to compose and target people with your communications. 

Steven

Yeah, I was even gonna add on that some of these legacy providers, they technically are multi-channel quote unquote, but what they really are is there are other tools embedded or indirectly connected to the platform where you might be logging into a separate UI in order to activate it or doing any number of other activities to kind of kinda actually go in and, and, and deploy those messages. Which, you know, it doesn’t really, to your point, like it’s, it’s so inefficient and, and and, and impossible to actually get the, the leverage out of, you know, having it all within one platform, not just from a data perspective, but even just from like a, like a person logging into the platform and actually using IT perspective, which, you know, adds quite a bit to, to headcount and, and, and inefficiencies there. 

Heather

Yes. I mean it’s such a good point. The number one reason that we hear from our customers of why they move off of legacy and come to us is time savings, right? Like we have, we have a recent customer example of a large publishing customer, you know, hundreds of different titles, different newsletters sending out. You can imagine the scale of personalization they need to do, right? And they were struggling with just having enough human hours in the day to be able to, you know, run the queries, build the content and target at the personalization level that they wanted to. And so when they moved off the legacy system and came on to Iterable, they just recently spoke at our, our like employee kickoff meeting and they came and did a case study for us there for our like 700 iterators. 

And they talked about how the big win that they had was in moving, you know, onto a more our modern platform. They were able to reduce their production team by one FTE, like redeploy that resource somewhere else. 

And then they were also able to send 25% more campaigns in the year because they not only, they were more efficient, which gave them more opportunities to set up new journeys, new campaigns, and like more better touch points for their customers. And like everybody in the audience at, at Iterable was like cheering. ’cause that’s literally what all the iterators are getting up to do every day is like help to make time more efficient, right? And then they were able to also, like in that process of removing, you know, all qu what’s equal to one FTE, like their engineering team was able to also come off of a lot of marketing requests. 

This is another thing we hear, right? Like our customers want their engineering teams to focus on like innovative things for their own brands. And a lot of them are like constantly addressing marketing needs, which is like annoying to everybody. It’s annoying to the marketer, it’s annoying to the engineering team. It’s annoying to everybody, right? And so with our, some of our, our personalization tools that are not sql, you don’t have to be, you know, an a software engineer to write the code. They were able to really get personalization into the hands of the marketers as well. 

And so that’s just, you know, one little example of really what we’re doing in our platform every day of trying to modernize our, our capabilities to save time and effort and, and create joy. Like it literally is our brand create joy for our marketers and using our platform. 

Spencer

And I think, you know, for, for our, our mutual clients, I, I feel the efficiency isn’t just the time back, it’s the, if you’re sending out 25% more campaigns, that’s, you know, definitely, I would assume as long as they’re planned out well, like more effective and a better ROIA 

Heather

Hundred percent. 

Spencer

Like even, even if the new platform isn’t cheaper, if you’re able to make 25% more potentially off of the platform. I mean that’s, you know, that’s pretty huge lift there. 

Heather

Yeah. And I mean that goes, that goes back to, you know, the channel piece too, right? So 25% more campaigns that, that can include adding new channels, right? And bringing, bringing more channels to, to centralized location and of a platform that you’re orchestrating from one place. And Steven, you were talking about this earlier, like legacy systems, you know, they’re sort of bolted on solutions for different channels and oftentimes you have to log into different UIs, you know, and different platforms. And not only is that cumbersome from just like a production standpoint, but it also is completely limiting in being able to drive a good customer experience, right? 

Because there’s no really good, at least real time and efficient way of, you know, coordinating and orchestrating what channel somebody gets a message in and optimizing all of that when you’re working with disparate systems, right? Like then you gotta put it centralized that data somewhere else and then recreate the audience. And like, there’s just no way to have a joyful customer experience. And so that’s the other thing we said, and Spencer, you were sort of alluding to this earlier, is like, what about channel consolidation? You know, and that’s another big reason. Not only are you getting efficiencies and time on the production and the data, but you’re delivering a better customer experience because you can orchestrate all of these channels to the end user and you can have a user specific experience in your communication strategy. 

So if I am an SMS person and Spencer, you’re more of an old school emailer, you know, the, the platforms that have all channels centralized on one in one area can make those optimization decisions powered by AI at the individual user level, you know? And so I get an SMS you get an email and you know, away we go. And we’re both getting a joyful experience that’s curated for our own personal preferences overall. So that’s a really good piece too. 

Spencer

And I know Steven loves a good web push, like that’s his favorite form of communication. 

Steven

Oh, I was gonna say, I Love, I love a direct mail, you know, send me a postcard, you know, gimme, gimme something more joyful than, you know, the latest coupon from a furniture company around the street or selling you blinds this week. 

Spencer

Hey, don’t knock direct mail. It, it is still very effective. 

Steven

Oh, yeah, 

Heather

Yeah. I mean, and that’s, that’s, that’s a channel that we integrate with for sure. You know, I mean it definitely is. I mean, direct mail retargeting is a real thing on our platform and for our customers, so Yeah, sometimes the old snail mail works for sure. So don’t knock it for sure. 

Steven

Oh, I’m a I’m a big believer in it. Absolutely. I, I prefer it myself, honestly. You know, I mean, I mean, 

Heather

You still kind of want mail, you know, like you feel a little Yeah, yeah, I 

Steven

Hear you. Like joyful mail, that’s what you really want, you know? 

Heather

Yeah. Well the, it interval’s here to do that for sure. Yeah. 

Spencer

Yes. I, every email must give me joy or I delete it. 

Steven

Yeah. If I’m like, this is, I mean, that’s how we Kon does it, you know? 

Spencer

Yeah. 

Steven

She’s hitting spam all day long in that case, you know, 

Spencer

There’s something to that actually. Yeah, yeah. Unsubscribe if it does not spark joy. 

And then, you know, actually Steven, I feel like this would be better, more eloquent or not, I don’t know if you’re eloquent, but better said by you, you know, so I’ll let you ask this, this next question here about that. 

Steven

Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and Len, make sure you keep that piece in there that Spencer said, I’m more eloquent, I just wanna make sure that 

Spencer

Yeah, let’s, let’s not, that’s not, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. 

Steven

Yeah. So, you know, Heather, you, we’ve, we talked a lot about different channels and you know, everything kind of comes back to, especially when we talk about digital marketing, everything really comes back to email at the end of the day, right? 

Like, email is the workhorse. It’s, it’s, it’s been the staple of digital channel communications for several years now. And yet, like direct mail, it is a pretty old system, right? Like, it, it’s all the attempts to evolve over the last 10 years or decade or so I that I’ve seen like things like AMP for Gmail that basically never took off. You then have like really great, I would say paid email tools like superhuman, but they’re kind of outta reach of your journal consumer. You know, there’s not really like a great emails just kind of meh at the end of the day in terms of like the, the, the, the opportunity you have to do interesting things with it, right? 

You have to really stretch your creative limits. And there’s, you know, plenty of marketers out there have demonstrated that we have brands like Really good Emails out there, which, you know, you guys have a lot of content in there that they’re like, people are doing some really fantastic things, but man, are you like racking your brain to like, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re working in like a and working in a box and trying to like, make a really interesting experience as opposed to having a whole house to work with, you know? So, so we talked about multi-channel, it sounds great, but you know, if I’m in a legacy platform and I’m making all my money off of email anyway, you know, like why would I modernize, right? 

Like, like what could, what, what, what would the expectations be around like doing multichannel? Is it really gonna make me net more money or is it just like, eh, I’ll get like a 5% or 2% here. It’s not really gonna make as big of a difference. Email’s still gonna be by, you know, source of revenue. 

Heather

Yeah. I mean, I think it is funny, Steven, ’cause I feel like, you know, e email has been projected to die every year for like the last 15 years, right? Like every, everybody comes out and, but you look at, you know, the analyst community as an example with like Forrester and whatnot and, you know, they’re still doing email waves alongside the multi-channel waves. So you’re right, email is, is the workhorse. I think a hundred percent of our customers send more than one channel. And about 60% of our customers, that combination, which is the most popular combination is email plus SMS. 

And, and then the second most popular is email plus in-app or push. Like, we kind of couple those together. But I think the benefit that we see is, and why add other channels is there are often two, two reasons that we have customers doing this largely is one, I don’t know, I have two teenagers at home and they don’t use email at all, right? And so if your demographic is younger or you’re looking to activate and establish a brand relationship with that younger demographic as they’re coming into being the core buying segment, you know, in our, in, in our economy, you need to start engaging them in other ways, right? 

And so that is one big way that we see and a reason why we see customers adding different channels. And then the other is, you know, there are certain conversations that people want more real time or more efficiently, right? They don’t want, and SMS is good for that, right? Like consumers and just think about your own personal customer experience, right? Like sometimes if you are showing signs of being in market and ready to buy something, an SMS you know, that directly delivers that joyful moment of personalization or of a promotion code or of a confirmation of your order or your flight or whatever it is. 

There are reasons why people, you know, want to have that second touch point in a more real time or easily viewable channel. And so that’s where we see a lot of, like all of our customers, a hundred percent of our customers send email on our platform. But the addition of that other channel does oftentimes amplify the results. We have a, we have a large fitness apparel customer that we work with and they recently shared a lot, a great case study with us, with our internal teams on adding SMS. They tested it during their last Valentine’s promotion and they added SMS plus email and that that two channel combo drove a two over a two x increase in lifetime value for customers that got the double combo versus customers that just got a single combo. 

And so, and I would imagine a lot, lot of your listeners and your marketers out there see that too. That’s not unusual across all of our customers for sure. So I think, you know, just, and then playing into the preference part and being able to optimize for different types of messages and different preferences, a different channel plus email just always exponentially drives ROI. 

Spencer

And we’ve actually had clients like newer like clients that are startups where they don’t know exactly how their audience is going to best engage with them yet. And so it’s one cool thing that you can do in interval is actually to, to test out like it’s the same content but one’s SMS and one’s, you know, rich push versus an in-app message versus an email. 

And what we usually find is like if it’s, if it’s a product that expands generations, you’ll see those generational differences. And then other times it’s just the nature of the product might be more that people are reacting more in the app Yep. Than they would in emails. I think for me that’s like one, that’s one one really big thing for like a newer brand or if they’re just trying out new channels and then they don’t wanna go all in yet. They can actually use the same content and test it side by side.

Heather

It’s such a great point. And that’s why, you know, we say we’re AI powered customer engagement platform, despite the mouthful that takes to describe ourselves is because also Spencer, you bring up a really good point in that you have to test it, but it’s also, like I said earlier, it’s not always the same for every individual, right? And so oftentimes the performance of the campaign in aggregate is better because you have different channels in there because like I said earlier, like I might prefer one channel versus you prefer a different one. And so being able to leverage the AI to make that decisioning at the u at the user level versus like the marketer having to just figure that out and what channels they assign different ca campaigns to, that’s, that drives a huge increase of ROI for our customers on the optimization front. 

Steven

Yeah, and actually I was, it was funny when we were just talking about like the SMS channel, ’cause again, like you think about a channel that, I mean we’re, we’re talking real old, you know, like we’ve got 160 characters, you know, it’s not like from a marketing platform we can send this as an iMessage. You know, we can’t necessarily tap into some of the things that Apple has or Google has in terms of their like messaging capabilities. We’re like a, you know, an Apple talking to a Google or Google talking to an Apple phone, you know, where everything’s still sent as a basic SMS yet I think, you know, in some of our joint customers and especially, and some of the, the joint customers that I use personally, you know, we, they, they’re sending experiences right now where, you know, you might get an appointment reminder, you know, your annual appointment reminder through an SMS for example, right? 

Which to me is the best thing ever. ’cause like right, I’m gonna, I’m definitely gonna gloss over that email if I get it. But in the SMS they do things like, you know, click here to book or text us back your preferred times and we’ll find something available for you. Which is like, yes. Because if you like do that in an email and you write back an email, then you’re in like writing an email back and forth, right? Which is like a completely different mentality. There’s a built in expected delay to it, but the SMS, there’s a little bit more instant gratification to it, but there’s also the, like, it’s, it’s easier to just like say yes, I don’t have to like type it, you know, I can like do it for my phone. 

I don’t, I’m not clicking through like an unread email, like it just pops up in the notification. I like tap and hold the thing, I write my reply, it’s done. Right. It’s like, it’s just so much simpler. And I think like that’s where, you know, if you’re sort of in a legacy platform and you’re like, that sounds like a really cool use case, how can I do that? And you can’t, you know, like you just, there literally is no way you’re gonna get the SMS response in your customer service platform and get that routed back to the same short code that you sent that marketing message from fast enough. It’s gonna have a built in at minimum two hour delay, right? 

There’s just no way you’re gonna be able to do that. And I think it’s like, stuff like that is definitely the future, even if we’re sort of using, you know, quote unquote older platforms to achieve it. But I mean, just imagine that, you know, maybe one day we’ll all switch over to WhatsApp like the rest of the world has, and we’ll have, we’ll be able to get really, really cool experiences. But you know, I say that, you know, North America specifically is not, you know, we’re stuck, we’re stuck in our legacy technology here. 

Heather

I mean I I agree. Like what’s, I was just gonna say, and I’m glad you brought it up, like the, the experience that you just described, it’s very big with our non-US based customers, right? And so I definitely think WhatsApp has been widely adopted for users outside of, of the US as like that channel in which they love getting service related emails and confirm, confirm or I’m sorry, messages and confirmations. And what’s great about WhatsApp and I agree with you, like I wish the US user would get more on that bandwagon because there’s so much more flexibility in that channel, right? 

Like you can do quick replies with that channel. You can do just a lot more on creating that joyful experience that you just described, Steven. Like it’s even easier to do, you know, when you’re orchestrating those messages in the WhatsApp channel than SMS. So a hundred percent agree. Like adding what, and, and this is why having it all centralized on one platform is radically important because if you’re a global brand, you wanna have all of these channels as options for communication, right? And so our brands, you know, we could, you know, you figure out is WhatsApp deliver to somebody who is a non-US user? 

And then SMS goes to us and then, you know, email goes to people that have higher per behavioral footprint and email. Like whatever you optimize as you need to when you centralize on a single platform 

Spencer

In Iterable old office, I don’t know which number offices was, but it was back in like 2018, all the, all the conference rooms were named after different like communication channels. 

Steven

Oh yeah. The one on Stevenson Street or whatever it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the, okay. 

Spencer

And the one that that stood out to me was, I think it was called something like Carrier Pigeon. Yep. Yep. And so I always like to ask you guys like, when is the carrier pigeon integration? 

Is that, you know, is that in the roadmap? 

Heather

Don’t write it off. Don’t write it off. Yeah. I mean it might just be robots now. So I mean that’s not far off, right? I just, I just have been touring college campuses and like the big thing now is robots delivering food. Like these little guys just run all over the campus. So yeah, why not, why not deliver one of your communications through, you know, a robot on campus that might get more attention from the college students than an email these days, right? 

Spencer

Maybe we can automate glitter bombs. 

Heather

There you go. 

Steven

Actually Spencer, remember back when we were living in New York, there was this thing where, I remember there, I can’t remember when it was, but when we were doing a lot more on the, on the video production side of our business kind of early on, we would have to get like, like, like bike messengers basically. Remember there was like, I think it was like Uber or something. There was an app before that where like all of a sudden like messenger service became like accessible whereas before you, it was like calling a limousine company. You know, like you just didn’t do it. Yeah. 

Spencer

I forget what it’s called, but it was like a courier. Yeah, it was like a bike courier who would go from one end of Manhattan to the other with something to get for you and Yeah. You would pay for that. 

Steven

Yeah, we would have to do that to like deliver tapes back and forth. And when we’re doing like the 48 hour film contest or whatever, we have to get stuff in the hands, like all kinds of like use cases. But it reminds me of like, you know, we jokingly say carrier pigeons, but yet like bicycle messengers came back, you know, so like, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re, I mean there’s a lot of pigeons in New York, you know. So 

Spencer

Also I, I wanted to address the fact that my dog is here. There’s like flood warning here and there’s thunder and lightning and he gets so scared by thunder. 

Heather

Aw. 

Steven

Oh. 

Spencer

And so for like the first 10 minutes.

Heather

He’s a cute one 

Spencer 

His name’s Arthur. For the first like 10 minutes I kept hearing the scratching noise and I thought it was like Steven’s daughter in the background or something and I was, and I heard it and he just ran in and jumped up here. So I had to, I’m consoling him while we’re, while we’re chatting. 

’cause otherwise he would just keep scratching in the background. 

Heather

You’re like the emotional support person for him. I like 

Spencer

It. I’m the emotional support person. Yeah, 

Steven

He’s, so you get, you get to go, you get to fly free on his ticket then, huh? 

Spencer

Yeah. I have to go under the seat though. Yeah. 

Or I might be too big. They might have to stick me in the cargo. 

I think one thing that we wanted to talk about is like, is is audience building, Steven, that was actually the question that I was referring to, but, and you, you jumped ahead, but it was actually relevant and, and well said 

Steven

See eloquent. That’s me. 

Spencer

I, again, I think it was well put, not eloquent, but we’ll, we’ll bake to defer there. So basically, yeah, it’s about audience development and why do it in a customer engagement platform versus a CDP. 

Heather

Yeah, I mean I think you have to do audience decisioning in, in a couple of places, right? And so I think it’s about where is the use case appropriate? And so I think about customers who do audience decisioning in CDPs and that is largely for like, you know, I think of a CDP as like laying down train tracks, right? And so if you’re decisioning on is this audience, and this is how a lot of our customers, I was just at a customer this week and they were saying, listen, we’re working to decide like is this a first party owned channel activation or is this a third party paid media, you know, activation. 

Okay. And so that, that like upstream decisioning of audiences is very, is done very easily and, and, and well in the CDPs, okay? And so that, that sort of stuff is happening or maybe it’s like, hey, this is like an offline audience that is not orchestrated with digital, but instead just like gets our catalog as an example. All that decisioning and activation happens at the upstream from Iterable platform. But once you make the decision that these users are users to activate in the owned channels, because that is the cheaper channel, right? And so that doesn’t mean they’re all customers. That means that you have a way of communicating with them in a first party environment, which is good. 

Like that’s a way to extend the ROI on your paid media. Capture it. We have lots of customers, you know, converting from high investment in acquisition and instead reinvesting on the paid media side. So get the email address, get the opt-in of SMS, get something to like extend how you can communicate with them to pay off your media investment. So activate onto the, onto your customer engagement platform and then the decisioning from there. Really customers do use our platform at that point because one, it’s faster because to send data back and forth to like trigger things and all that, you lose all that real time eligibility. 

Two is, there is a large set of data that I always explained is like the exhaust of our platform that isn’t anywhere else in the stack. Who opened an email, who clicked on an email, who responded, what channel is their preference? All the things, right? So there’s a lot of other data that just lives natively in our platform that then customers use to make further audience decisioning and triggering detail details there also, you know, oftentimes when you’re composing an email, you’re creating, you guys do this all day long, you help customers do this, you need to do decisioning and segmentation for personalization purposes, right? 

And so doing that all in our platform at the point of the message delivering versus it’s just cumbersome. Like you, like, okay, you know, the old school way is customers are creating static segments in their CDP for who gets an email about shoes versus who gets an email about, you know, purses or accessories and then, you know, trying to do all that and then send us those separate lists like that’s clunky, not real time and hard to manage and report on and adjust based off of the customer preferences and behavioral data. So activate on our platform, send that audience over, and then use the decisioning for personalization triggering journeys and just overall, like, I just think it’s become more efficient to do it a little bit lower stream in our platform. 

Spencer

So it it sounds like where you would, you, where you’re drawing the line is it’s the central point for all, all the own channels, 

Heather

Correct? That’s a, are Things that, are There other is an eloquent way of saying that Spencer? So yes. 

Steven

Wow. 

Ah, Look at this eloquent guy over here. 

Spencer

Buttering me up over here. 

So something that we run into a lot is like, when is a brand or a potential customer of ours ready to take the next step to a modern engagement platform? Now obviously from a a monetary standpoint, they’re probably always ready for it, but there are some ducks that they must put into a row before they’re, they’re truly ready to, to get the full utilization out of it. So, you know, either one of you, what, what, when do you, when do you feel that a company is ready to, to take the next step? Yeah, 

Heather

I don’t know. Steven, you wanna take it? 

Steven

Yeah, I think to start off with, I, you know, and, and and a lot of what we see in, in, you know, companies undergoing digital transformation is they’re typically starting with their data infrastructure. 

And usually the impetus for that is, and we work with many customers who literally still have a server in a closet somewhere, you know, on their on site. And you know, I think, you know, COVID of course sort of accelerated, you know, are we gonna keep this lease or not? And then well we have to keep it ’cause we literally have a server in the closet here and it’s gonna take a lot of money and effort to move this thing. But also just the accessibility of that data and the, the reliability of it and all kinds of other things, it started to really prompt many companies to say, well, okay, well I wanna get this all in the cloud. 

I actually think it’s gonna be cheaper in the cloud than it is to literally have the server, you know, in in, in my, in my office. I mean there’s some limited use cases where, you know, for security concerns or things like that where you’re probably never gonna get away from that. But the vast majority of cus of, of, of companies out there don’t have to think about that. 

And so part of these exercises we see is, you know, maybe in the last, you know, five or 10 years they’ve been building an, an infrastructure, a data infrastructure in, you know, Amazon off of AWS and and and S3 and, and Redshift or they’re on the Google set using BigQuery. 

And now, and some of them even more recently are using tools like Databricks and Snowflake and they have this sort of modern data set that they’re working with, but they need actually all the legacy data that has maybe some core transaction information is on there that’s not available in their, in their cloud data set. And so there’s been sort of this larger kind of consolidation exercise, but as they’ve gone through that, they, they’re starting to, to realize, okay, well I also have some other kind of crusty pieces of my, you know, application that I’m holding up that’s using this, you know, literally data sitting in the closet. 

And so this is kind of bringing it to the forefront of, this sounds like a great exercise, you’re gonna make no money off of it. You’re, the only thing that you gain out of it is, is stability and business continuity, right? Which, you know, are important things, don’t get me wrong. But when you think about I am gonna deploy a percentage of my workforce, it’s gonna generate literally no revenue off of this operation, how can I actually take advantage of that and generate revenue off the back of it? And I think that’s where you come to this point where you are very much ready for a customer, like a modern customer engagement platform. 

Now maybe you’re not replacing your entire, you know, email infrastructure or as we’ve worked many times before, your homegrown custom built e email infrastructure and we won’t, won’t give any names, but we won’t name any names of multiple, multiple clients who have made this decision at some point in the past. But I I when you, when you kind of come to this point and you’re like, okay, well rip and replace that also looks like it’s gonna be a long period of time, but man, I’m leaving a lot of money on the table. What we’ve actually seen a lot of people do is to sort of shift their mindset to say, I’m gonna move my marketing engagement program, I’m gonna start there as a part of my digital transformation and I might as well go to a platform that’s gonna support this new data infrastructure that I have. 

It’s going to integrate with Snowflake or Databricks or BigQuery or Redshift or Azure, you know, which by the way, big highlight, right? Smart and jest with the Iterable and High-touch partnership is like the perfect gateway for that and has so much versatility in how you can leverage that data, which I think is well and ahead of where some of the other modern players are in the system where maybe they’ve kind of built some of this or they’ve built kind of custom integrations with some of these partners but haven’t quite taken the route that you guys have with working directly with a vendor and a partner and having that integration natively done and having that much more versatility in the types of data sources you can take, which I think is extremely powerful the way that you guys are doing it and being able to kind of tap into that without necessarily setting up a complex, you know, event or other type of architecture. 

You know, you’re, you’re moving from people who are, you know, Heather as we mentioned, writing, you know, writing, getting data updates at 1:00 AM that they’re then gonna send emails at 10:00 AM or 11:00 AM or SMS you know, literally hours later. And so the staleness of the data is very apparent. And so being able to kind of deprecate that piece of the, of the marketing and use a modern engagement platform that’s like the perfect, in my opinion, like starting point, right? Because you’re, you’re working with the clean data as the, as the the, the data migration project continues, you get access to more and more data and then you get to the point, you know, where you have this sort of marketing vision of what you wanna do and you’re graduating into that over time your team’s catching up from a capability standpoint, you’re, you’re kind of able to accelerate and use some of the AI features within the platform that you don’t have anywhere else in your tool. 

And again, just like you mentioned where you can and then exhaust that information back into the, the data warehouse and then have other places be able to activate that. Again, CDP being a main consumer of that type of data. But still, I think that’s like, to me that’s the kind of ideal starting point and especially if you’re on like a legacy provider and you’re again stuck there because of your, you know, wonky data infrastructure. 

Heather

Yeah, I mean a hundred percent agree. That is definitely like brands that are moving towards a data transformation in modernization, which are largely moving towards the data warehouses and whatnot that you described. Like that’s definitely a sign. So if you, all your listeners out there, you, your organization is talking about that like yes, you are definitely ready for a more modern customer engagement platform. Also, I would say listen, if you are as a listener and somebody that’s a, I assume you’re all listening ’cause you’re marketers out there, if you were your team are struggling with like, you know, taking forever to run queries, long production timelines, can’t activate data that you want to ’cause you can’t get your engineering resources, wanna integrate AI more. 

Like I haven’t even talked about, you know, our new journey assist program or product that you basically, it’s a natural language prompt for building journeys, right? So everybody out there is tired of like dragging tiles into a canvas and setting all that up, well now you can just tap that into natural language prompt on interval and it generates it all for you. So time-saving all, that is your sign that you’re ready to migrate to a more modern platform. And I wanna be clear like we’re not just for those like enterprise legacy replacements, the other note-like sort of thing that you should be thinking about. 

And the other reason people come to Iterable is they’ve matured out of their existing system. So we have a lot of customers that start on, you know, more of the product-led offerings, put their credit card in and have started and, and working through that. But those programs have been successful for them, their businesses have grown and they’re looking for something with more scale, more functionality, being able to, you know, bring more AI into it, more enterprise-ready. That is another big sign of modernization for an engagement platform as well is like you’re sort of maturing out of your existing solution and it’s time to sort of talk to something, to a product, to a team that has a product that’s a little bit more sophisticated and can support more sophisticated use cases across multiple channels. 

Spencer

You know, off of that there are also going to be companies that, brands that come to you that are not at the ideal state. 

You know, you and Steven just laid out what would be great to have to be a, you know, the ideal customer, but you know, when the, the situation is really messy, the data’s messy, you know, but you still want to help this brand. 

Heather

Yeah, I mean we’re, and we do this with, with you guys a lot too on our, you know, our co-implemented partners. But, and, and you all know this as well, is like, there are plenty actually I would probably guess a majority, I don’t know the exact number, but a majority of our customers actually use us for their CRM system. Like we are their central place of where they store their data. So I think it’s important to call out, like we are talking about sort of the modernization in context of people who are on legacy systems, but a large percentage of our customers, even our enterprise level customers store their data in our platform and that is where their data lives and stores and that is their first party data. 

So Spencer, to your question, like I think that’s the starting point, right? And like we do this a lot with customers is we to help them scope out what their data strategies are be we help them source out and we lay out a particular, we do like a, a blueprint, a tech blueprint workshop here at Iterable and we’re like, okay, what’s your stack look like? How does this work? You know, and for many that don’t have an investment or aren’t ready to go to a data warehouse or a large CDP, we are their central place of storing the data. And that works just fine. Just fine. 

Spencer

There’s something we did early on that I wanna revisit early on in the podcast, which is I like to just come up with a random prompt in chat GPT and, and show the results here. It’s has nothing to do with anything. It’s just fun. So we can end Not the dolly though, are we’re doing Dolly. We’re gonna do well they’re all, they’re all in one now. ’cause we have the, we ded to pay for the paid version, so, oh, right on Heather, if you wanna do the honors, give me, give me a prompt and let, let’s challenge it. Let’s really S=see what to came up with. 

Heather

Okay, well here is how I, I’m such a nerd on AI that this is how I like to spend my time and I’ll give you, I haven’t done one in a while, so I’ll give you a prompt for Zoom backgrounds. I like to have chat GPT create zoom backgrounds for me. So give it a prompt and let’s say we’re in summer, so let’s give it a prompt that create a zoom background in a modern beach house with and i, I like a mid-century modern aesthetic with natural color and minimal furniture. 

Steven

Can I, can I add one piece to this? Yeah. 

Heather

Oh, please do Puppies?

Spencer

There is a, a prominent piece of artwork featuring the Iterable logo. 

Heather

Perfect. And a puppy. 

Steven

Heather

Yes. 

Because everyone loves puppies. 

Spencer

This is where it’s gonna start to go awry actually. Yeah, I I love it. 

Heather

While you’re typing, I will share that. I, I I’m a big pickleball player and we have regular pickle, we have quarterly pickleball tournaments where we create swag for our teams and I use chat GPT often for my t-shirts and, and swag. Oh, look at that. Wow. That’s pretty good. Wow. 

Spencer

That’s actually Pretty good. 

Heather

That puppy is cute and matches the decor no less. So that is amazing. 

Steven

Wow. And that arable logo is not your logo, but it looks cool. No, but 

Heather

I can, I Can Photoshop our real logo on there, so that’s all good. 

Spencer

Look at those hand drawn lines. 

Spencer

Yeah, I mean, I I’m gonna download this. This is, this 

Heather

Is, They spelled it correctly, so that’s good. That’s a plus. Yeah, 

Steven

I gotta say from TPT doesn’t always get the letters right on words. I found. 

Steven

That’s true. This doesn’t feel like minimal furniture though. I mean, it feels minimalist, but it doesn’t feel like minimal. I mean, you got that chair over the gap there, you know, 

Steven

Or the chair on lefthand side 

Heather

There. I agree. 

Steven

Had a dinosaur brand paging in the background. That’ll really get ’em. 

Spencer

Alright, I promise this is, oh wait, 

Steven

Oh it just, The couch looks so strange though. And then it also added more 

Heather

Furniture. It’s always missing legs. Yeah, it’s always missing legs. You know, the, the, for some reason the AI cannot get the legs and the, on the couches right at all. 

Spencer

Yeah. It’s starting to turn into like one of those like Escher paintings where like the stairs go up and they’re, but they’re actually going down at the same time. 

Heather

Oh Yeah, you’re right, you’re right. Yeah. 

Steven

Spencer did not understand your prompt there unfortunately. 

Spencer

No. It Was like, oh, it’s all good. 

Nah, but it was pretty actually overall the, the initial prompt was, was pretty good. 

The power of ai 

Heather

Ding, I mean power of ai. You can build zoom backgrounds and then, you know, also build, build your journeys an interval with natural language prompts. It’s all open and real these days. So 

Spencer

I, I love how you brought my randomness back in. It’s just, it’s great top-notch. But yeah. Thank you. So we’re out of time for today, but Heather, thank you so much. I mean, we learned a lot about why should you modernize to a, you know, a current best-in-breed customer engagement platform, why you should consolidate all your channels into one of those, and when a brand is ready to, to make the move. And if they’re not, they can make the move anyway. There’s still, there’s still a a, a really strong case to be made to do it anyway. 

Heather

Yep. Well thank you both. It’s always a pleasure to chat with you both and the dog. So thank you. 

Steven

And don’t forget to subscribe to the Ragnarok and share it with your friends and family and also follow Iterable as well on or, or log into or go to iterable.com. I-T-E-R-A-B-L E.com. 

Spencer

Follow them on their website. 

Heather

You, you have the voice, Steven. Like that’s impressive right there. That’s good. 

Steven

That’s my band-up voice. For, for, for, for podcasting. 

Spencer

We, early in the early days, Steven, Steven and I would do this joke where I was, Steven would do his like his, I’m on a call voice and I, I, which, you know, sounded markedly different ’cause it was when working remotely was like sort of starting to become a thing and we were roommates back in the day and I was like, wow, he sounds really different. And so when he came outta the room I was like, hi, my name’s Steven Aldrich, you might know me from this call. 

Steven

It’s so true. My wife even does the same thing now where she, she’s like, she’s like, am I talking to, am I talking to my husband or am I talking to business? Steven, you know, 

Heather

I oftentimes get accused of don’t use your work voice with me. Yes. Yeah. In our, in my house. Yes, sure. 

Steven

It’s you when you, when you throw too many, like circle the wagons and types of, you know, sayings in your, in your, in your sentence structure, you know, there Yeah. You’re you’re getting into work voice mode. Absolutely. It’s, I wanna level set on that and then we’ll circle back and double click on it. 

Steven

Who are you? I asked you to, I asked you to get me a sparkling water out of the fridge. What are you doing? 

Heather

Well thanks guys, this was really fun. I totally appreciate it. So always fun. 

Steven

Yeah, it was great to have you on.