Big thanks to Iterable for putting on a fantastic Activate Summit 2024! We had a blast flying out to San Jose, CA for the in-person event at the beginning of May, and we were further informed and entertained by the subsequent Virtual Summit two weeks later. We heard from a bunch of insightful speakers and got a sneak peek at Iterable’s upcoming product feature releases.

Some of our favorite speeches were from marketers sharing how they helped build their brand toward a national audience, such as Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario, Grammarly CMO Lena Waters, and HipCamp Lifecycle Marketing Manager Julia Allen. Here are a few quotes from them that caught our attention: 

‍

Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario:

"As we thought of other brand names and what [the product] looks like, it started developing into “Oh well, in a plastic water bottle section, if something looks like a beer and says ‘Liquid Death’ on it, I’m betting someone’s picking that up. So many people think this is so edgy, or risky, but I would argue that the biggest risk you can take on a new brand is to blend in, because you will have very limited cash and resources, and there are way more brands that have burnt through all their cash and failed, versus brands who are too edgy and made everyone so scared that they stopped buying their product."

Grammarly CMO Lena Waters: 

"As marketers, we’ve had an extreme digitization of our profession […] and I think we’ve really over-rotated to the bottom half of the customer journey, “My marketing’s not worth something unless the results show up in the dashboard, what does the data say?” I often think about this earlier part of the journey. A lot of kids as students learn about Grammarly early on, and they have a certain emotional appeal and affinity for it, and I think we forget [sometimes] how people feel, what they care about, what they need, how they make decisions, there’s a very human aspect to that which happens earlier in the customer journey, but because it’s considered unknowable, it can get a reputation as something that’s wasted."

Hipcamp Lifecycle Marketing Manager Julia Allen: 

“We learned that users were highly engaged with the pet content within the app, like using the pet-friendly filter to search for campsites. I used this insight to adjust one of our re-engagement campaigns. The historical copy was pretty generic, it said 'Book your next camping trip,' and knowing that the pet content was highly engaged with, I decided to change this to 'Bring your BFF camping 🐶' to send to users who we knew were engaging with pet content, and this one tweak led to an 85% higher click-through rate and a 6x higher booking conversion rate.”

Upcoming Product Features Unveiled

One of the most exciting presentations was from Iterable’s product team, who continue to push the envelope with their lifecycle marketing software innovations. In addition to building a native WhatsApp integration (Winter 2024) to help brands reach a global audience, they have been working on a variety of groundbreaking AI-powered features such as: 

Journey Assist: Coming in Fall 2024, Journey Assist will allow marketers to prompt Iterable to create a customer journey from scratch. This will generate a bespoke customer journey that you can then customize further.

Brand Affinity Reporting: Also coming in Fall 2024, Brand Affinity Reporting will enable businesses to gain deeper insights using the Brand Affinity tool. This feature will offer aggregate data based on user loyalty behaviors, such as consistent click-through and purchase rates.

Smart Segmentation: Coming Winter 2024, Smart Segmentation will make it easier for marketers to leverage customer data in meaningful ways by identifying groups with shared behavioral patterns and interests. In combination with Smart Ingest (available today!), data-driven decisions no longer require a team of analysts. 

‍

Traveling to the Bay Area to meet like-minded marketers was an absolute delight, and we can't wait to play with Iterable's new features and see how we can leverage them to elevate our marketing game. Big thanks to Iterable for an exceptional event, and we hope to see everyone again next year!

Special shout outs to a few amazing humans at Iterable who helped make our trip an unforgettable experience:

- Ally Peatross, Strategic Partnerships Development Manager

- Chris Wheeler, Sr. Manager, Enterprise Customer Success

- Sebastian Cabrera, Senior Account Manager

‍