Your email creation process could use a makeover: Streamline, personalize, & optimize with Sculpt

We’re sick of the status quo. And we’re obsessed with helping marketers create extraordinary personalized experiences for their customers.

So for the past 11 months, we’ve been hard at work building a new way to personalize emails from the ground up. Instead of integrating a third party email editor into our platform, we decided to take on the task of building one ourselves so it would be 100% compatible with all the powerful personalization features you can take advantage of with Cordial.

Before we dive in, let’s take a minute to talk about personalization. Integrating personalization at scale across your email program is no easy task. To truly personalize at scale requires a massive amount of customer data and the infrastructure to process and act on that data in real-time.

As we discuss in our post about the difference between segmentation vs personalization, marketers have traditionally used a segmentation model to “personalize” emails by manually modifying multiple versions of the same email and then sending out each of those versions to a different customer segment.

Here’s an example of the typical campaign creation workflow:

• Marketer identifies four customer segments and sends to IT to pull a customer list
• Marketer asks content team to write copy for the four different segments
• Marketer asks designer to create four different static emails, one for each segment.
• Marketer reviews the design and makes edits.
• Developer builds out four different emails
• Marketer makes a small change in the copy
• Developer goes back and changes copy on all four emails
• QA and testing
• A/B test setup
• A/B test goes out to 20% of list
• 80% of messages go to the winner

Using this process it can take weeks to bring a campaign to market. It’s slow, inefficient, and heavily encumbered with tedious tasks and changes. I’m sure you’ve thought at least once, “There’s got to be a better way…”

There is.

Let the makeover begin

Sculpt puts the power back in the hands of the marketer, removing the logistical burdens and barriers that have held organizations back in the past.

Using blocks of code that personalize content based on real-time customer data, Sculpt enables marketers to:

• Cut campaign creation time from days to minutes
• Create one template for multiple customer segments
• Integrate advanced personalization far beyond {{first_name}}
• Build messages without relying on development or design support
• Optimize messages in real-time using machine learning

Instead of marketers working with designers and developers to create each and every email, the development team can build the required content blocks and save them so they can be reused over and over. Once the templates and blocks are built, the designers’ and developers’ job is now done. This frees up time and energy to focus on other tasks instead of constantly being pulled away for yet another campaign.

Marketers can then use the custom-built branded templates and blocks to build dynamic messages with drag and drop efficiency. Using Cordial Experiments, marketers can also test multiple variations of the message in real-time, removing the need for manual A/B testing.

An example of the new workflow using Sculpt:

• Marketer creates an audience segment within the Cordial platform using real-time data from their stack.
• Marketer builds a message using Sculpt’s drag and drop block system. Because the blocks have already been QA’ed there’s minimal testing needed and your per-campaign QA is streamlined!
• Blocks pull in dynamic content and populate messages based on real-time customer data.
• A unique email is sent to each customer
• Email variations are tested using machine-learning and the winning email variation is identified.

What this means going forward

Without having to worry about creating multiple email variations for multiple segments, marketers can create a single email for multiple segments that personalize using customer data.

Without having to rely on designers and developers to create emails, marketers can unleash creativity and spend more time on the things that matter.

Without having to set up complex A/B tests or manually optimizing emails, marketers can let the machines do the work and take the credit for moving the needle forward.

The Sculpt editor frees up valuable time for marketers to focus on what actually matters: unleashing creativity to write better copy, integrate more advanced personalization, and launch new revenue-generating campaigns. Our mission is to empower marketers to be the geniuses that they are, and we believe Sculpt is another step towards achieving that mission.