Agency Neticon offers email personalization to clients with Twilio SendGrid

Neticon is an agency based in Milan, Italy, that helps brands compete in an ever-changing digital world with product customization, digital marketing, multi-channel commerce solutions, and more. Founded in 2003, Neticon’s high-profile clients include brands like Ray-Ban, Versace, Roberto Cavalli, and Sunglass Hut.

Diana Avelar, Head of Digital Marketing at Neticon, leads the team that manages email campaigns for several clients and delivers 100 million messages annually.

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, which meant pulling data from several systems, including clients’ CRMs and user journey data
• Break down a single campaign into personalized campaigns while maintaining globally segmented reporting and scheduling
• Capture the email feedback loop
• 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, that integrated with Twilio SendGrid APIs.

Mailicon’s personalization capabilities, which are made possible with the 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 Twilio 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 Twilio 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,
• Significant increases in click through rates and open rates (increasing from below ecommerce market averages to above average)
• Reduced churn rate to demonstrate that their customers are more engaged
• Ease in experimenting with email templates and content

Bottom line

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

• Flexible, well-documented, and straightforward APIs: Neticon’s team can integrate quickly and decouple email infrastructure from its core business.
• Real-time analytics: The company can easily target, manage subscribers, and use profile enrichment automation
• Reliability and scalability: Neticon can grow with the confidence knowing that SendGrid will consistently deliver  clients’ campaigns