Agency Neticon Builds on SendGrid to Offer Email Personalization Solution to Clients

Challenge

Email is an essential awareness and conversion tool for commerce companies. However, its effectiveness depends on whether or not the recipient finds relevance in the message.

In 2013, Neticon decided to rethink email for their clients. Instead of sending one email to a list of customers, they planned to send personalized messages to each customer, leveraging data collected in Neticon’s commerce platform.

Diana and her team needed to:

• Replace list-based targeting with user profile-based targeting, pulling data from several systems including their client’s CRM and user journey data.
• Seamlessly break down a single campaign into personalized campaigns while maintaining globally segmented reporting and scheduling.
• Capture the email feedback loop and build processes to collect profile information and targeting criteria for email campaigns.

Along with these requirements, Neticon needed to find an email partner with the API technology which could support these 1:1 conversations at scale.

Solution

After testing several email providers, Diana and her team built an internal custom campaign management tool, called Mailicon, integrated with SendGrid’s APIs.

Mailicon’s personalization capabilities, which are made possible with SendGrid’s Event Webhook API and highly scalable infrastructure, include:

• Real-time profile enrichment enabling data points – such as in-store or online activity or email engagement – to contribute to a user’s profile.
• Satellite templating equipping clients with template-building tools with content modules that dynamically adapt to user profile data.
• Feedback processing with automatic suppressions allowing clients to keep campaigns focused on active users and maintain sender reputation.

“Using SendGrid’s infrastructure, APIs, and testing tools let us focus on building better personalization experience, context conversation, and data point integration,” says Diana. “Scaling our solution 100 million emails per year was a smooth, easy process.”

Result

With SendGrid, Neticon has transformed its clients’ email programs. “Instead of sending tens of manually segmented campaigns each week, we’re sending fewer targeted campaigns, reducing our client’s operational costs,” says Diana. “Since we’re delivering more relevant emails, we’ve also improved conversion metrics.”

One of Neticon’s clients is reporting the following results with Mailicon:

• Higher quantity and quality of conversions, with significant increases in click through rates and open rates increasing from below ecommerce market averages to above average.
• A reduced churn rate, demonstrating that their customers are more engaged.
• The ability to experiment with and innovate email templates and content.

Bottom Line

SendGrid is the perfect email partner for Neticon’s Mailicon tool because of its:

• Flexible, well-documented, and straightforward APIs which enabled Neticon’s team to integrate quickly, decoupling email infrastructure from its core business.
• Real-time analytics which are essential to Neticon’s targeting, subscriber management, and profile enrichment automation.
• Reliability and scalability allowing Neticon to grow with the confidence that SendGrid will continue to deliver its clients campaigns.