UPSIDE X CENSUS

How Upside boosted email CTR by 96% with a personalized loyalty program

Upside, a retail cash back platform, built a strong marketing technology foundation with Census + Iterable + Snowflake, then collaborated with solutions partner Ragnarok to design a personalized loyalty program that improved Click Through Rate by 96%. They leveraged their customer data to create and test 80+ message variants to optimize the program.

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Industry: Consumer Apps, Ecommerce, Fintech, Payments

Headquarters: Washington, DC

Company type: B2C, FinTech

Team: Growth, Marketing

Use cases: Dynamic audiences, Email personalization, Granular Segmentation, Marketing personalization

Featured integrations: Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Iterable, Salesforce, Snowflake, Zendesk

Upside is a retail cash back platform that increases the financial power of people and businesses in the real world. Since 2016, they’ve helped millions of people get more purchasing power on the things they need, and tens of thousands of brick-and-mortar businesses earn measurable profit.

Results

Hyper-personalized loyalty program: Using Census, Upside's team now has access to all their Customer 360 data in Snowflake, and they can quickly and easily sync data to Iterable to power all their personalized emails and messaging experiments.
More powerful audience segmentation: The marketing team can now build audiences on top of Snowflake using Census Audience Hub, enabling them to target new user segments with a self-serve, no-code UI designed for marketing teams.
Improved advertising ROI: Upside can easily use first-party data to exclude existing users from ad targeting to improve ROAS, and retarget churned users across marketing channels.
More consistent customer experiences: Upside unified their picture of the customer across internal tools to help provide seamless brand experiences. Specifically, they synced merchant data to Salesforce so customer-facing teams have complete context during customer interactions, and enriched Zendesk with historical and real-time first-party data to improve support.

The Challenge

Unifying customer data was one of Upside’s biggest challenges. Without a connection between their customer communication platform, Iterable, and their customer data stored in Snowflake, Upside was unable to use Iterable's powerful segmentation tool to its full potential. This made advanced marketing initiatives—like loyalty programs—hard to execute.

In parallel, the lack of customer 360° context in other platforms such as Facebook, Google Ads, Salesforce, and Zendesk was hindering their ability to optimize ad spend and customer service workflows.

The Solution

Unified, simplified audience building with Census

After implementing Census, Upside was able to supercharge their Iterable account with access to all their 360° customer data in Snowflake. Now, marketers only needed to build audiences in one place upstream from their business tools, while Census automatically updated audience membership with its real-time syncing capabilities. Rather than manually uploading audience data into tools such as Zendesk or Facebook, Upside could rely on Census’s automation and streamline operations.

Upside automated audience targeting with Census, so their customers would always receive the right message at the right time

Deploying a Loyalty Program with Ragnarok

With the technical infrastructure in place to build and activate more granular audiences, Upside leaned on Ragnarok’s CRM services to strategically improve their personalization efforts. Thanks to Ragnarok’s expertise in handlebar logic, Upside deployed through Snowflake + Census + Iterable a comprehensive lifecycle campaign centered around purchase behavior.

The one month sequence triggered 27 possible messages (across email, in-app, and push) depending on how the user progressed through the program. With a goal of making a certain number of purchases, the user would get updates throughout the month to track their progress and encourage completion. Should the user hit the desired purchase threshold, Upside would give loyalty rewards to be used the following month.

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Upside's app now serves personalized loyalty offers based on past behavior

Experimenting with Iterable Journeys

Thanks to Iterable’s marketing automation capabilities, testing different variants and sequences of the loyalty program was effortless. Ragnarok was able to lean on Census to sync the necessary behavioral data into Iterable, and orchestrate the complex messaging sequences in Iterable. With three separate variants of the program being tested, Ragnarok was able to efficiently build and analyze 80+ message variants to optimize the program. Utilizing Iterable’s testing suite, Ragnarok was able to improve the Click Through Rate of email campaigns by 96% month-over-month.

From your data warehouse to all your apps, customers, and agents.

Without code or CSVs.

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