As the industry-leading mobile app for used car sales, Autolist is an all-star at leveraging data to provide customers the exact vehicles they’re looking for.
With so much information available to today’s consumers, from make and model all the way down to the VIN, it was only natural that the Autolist marketing team wanted to bring that same level of customizability to their email program.
Using Iterable’s unmatched data flexibility, Autolist has optimized their marketing campaigns using real-time customer data and propelled their business on the road to success.
Sue Cho, Director of Email Marketing at Autolist, spoke at our Activate conference to explain how the company drives behavior-based personalization at massive scale by leveraging Iterable’s APIs and workflows.
Read on to learn the four critical steps that Autolist took to automate 50,000 dynamic, personalized emails every day—without anyone having to push the send button.
1. Identify How to Help Your Users
Autolist’s priorities were focused on creating a productive, educational, and enjoyable user experience.
When analyzing their email program, the marketing team identified three key components of this user-centric strategy:
- New listings that match the user’s particular search filters
- Price drops on vehicles that a user has saved or that match those filters
- Transactional messages that confirm user actions and provide next steps
We all know that personalization goes beyond, “Hi [First Name],” and once Autolist determined the right information that mattered most to their audience, they became better equipped to take their campaigns to the next level.
2. Create a Wish List of Data Points
After you’ve designed a user-centric marketing strategy, then the next step is to dream big—really big. When you’ve invested in the right growth marketing technology, there are no limits to the data you can leverage.
The marketers at Autolist needed their growing amount of user information to be easily accessible for their email campaigns, including last search date, last email open date, listing location, price range, image URLs and a multitude of additional data points.
Many platforms aren’t conducive to real-time personalization, but Iterable’s modern architecture built with Elasticsearch technology enables Autolist to dynamically personalize each message for millions of users.
3. Harness the Power of APIs
Every email marketer can become an email engineer by using APIs to trigger messages. APIs enable real-time personalization without requiring database duplication or slow data transfers.
Autolist recognized three major benefits of Iterable’s API capabilities:
- Speed to transfer large amounts of data quickly
- Scalability to add more data without increasing the load
- Simplicity to minimize engineering time and resources
Legacy marketing clouds can’t keep up with real-time user updates, but Iterable’s APIs allow Autolist to trigger transactional confirmations and activate automated workflows that are optimized for maximum user engagement.
4. Orchestrate With Workflows
Once Autolist set up their APIs, then they were able to use Iterable’s Workflow Studio to trigger campaign based on custom events, such as a price drop or new vehicle listing.
This highly visual, drag-and-drop workflow builder makes it simple to filter users and send messages based on previous engagement or other criteria.
Autolist’s price drop search campaign, as seen in Iterable Workflow Studio.
In the workflow above, Autolist can notify users of price drops on specific vehicles that users have searched. This way the marketing team ensures that their messages are highly relevant to each individual subscriber.
Autolist Looks Ahead to a Bright Future
Since partnering with Iterable, Autolist has achieved a 30% lift in click-to-open rate, and the marketing team is excited for the road ahead.
Never one to stop iterating, the company plans to consistently improve their marketing, starting with what’s top of mind:
- Developing geo-targeted push notifications when a user is nearby a dealer with a matching vehicle
- Creating dynamic content based on properties of listings
- Optimizing their process to create more sophisticated segments
With real-time data at their fingertips, leading brands like Autolist can create highly personalized campaigns across all marketing channels and master customer engagement.
View the video testimonial above to learn more about how Iterable is making an impact at Autolist.
“With Iterable, I think the marketers have finally got it. We finally have a tool that developers love, that marketing can actually use.” ~ Sue Cho, Director of Email Marketing at Autolist
If you’re looking to automate your marketing campaigns so you never have to press the send button again, then reach out for a customized demo of the Iterable Growth Marketing Platform.
