How Ragnarok Deployed a Personalized Loyalty Program for Upside with Census + Iterable

Introduction

Financial platform Upside collaborated with solutions partner Ragnarok to build a personalized loyalty program that improved Click Through Rate by 96%. They first built a strong marketing technology foundation with Census + Iterable + Snowflake, then built and analyzed 80+ message variants to optimize the program.

About Upside

Upside is a technology company 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.

What Upside Achieved:

• More powerful segmentation: 
  • Ability to build custom audiences on top of Snowflake in a self-serve, no-code UI designed for marketing teams
• Improved ROI through contextual targeting and personalization:
  • Easily exclude existing users from ad targeting to improve ROAS
  • Retarget churned users across marketing channels by leveraging first-party data
• More consistent customer experiences with Customer 360 data:
  • Push merchant data to Salesforce so customer-facing teams have necessary context during customer interaction
  • Improve customer support in Zendesk by enriching their instance with historical and real-time first-party data

Upside's Challenges

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.

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.

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.

Interested in deploying first-party data strategies to personalize marketing at scale? Reach out to Ragnarok, or check out Census for Data Activation and Iterable for customer engagement.