Iterable expands beyond email marketing, adds push notifications for iOS and Android

Email marketing provider Iterable has added mobile push notifications for iOS and Android, quickly entering a class of full-featured cross-channel marketing platforms, such as ExactTarget and Responsys.

Iterable previously announced $1.2 million in seed funding earlier this year and is off to a good start. Clients include Eat24 (subsidiary of Yelp), Dot & Bo, and Yerdle. We profiled Iterable, among several dozen other email providers in our recent research report on email marketing, and found them a solid fit for small and medium-sized B2C companies.

The new feature allows clients to target customers with highly personalized messages for both desktop and mobile. In our research report on email marketing, we learned that over half of all enterprise emails are opened on a mobile phone. Designing for and delivering emails to a mobile device remains an industry-wide issue. In fact, Iterable got its start when cofounders Justin Zhu and Andrew Boni saw firsthand the lack of effectiveness of email on mobile devices in driving revenue or user growth at their positions at Twitter and Google.

It’s a common challenge for marketers, especially those lacking major enterprise budgets, to build personalized campaigns and A/B testing without a lot of data wrangling and engineering support. Zhu and Boni launched Iterable in response, as part of SF-based AngelPad program in the Spring of 2013.

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Iterable is now officially multichannel, even competing with mobile marketing automation solutions (MMAs) used to drive growth for mobile apps. Push notifications are the No. 1 use case of MMA providers as told by VB Insight’s massive study, Mobile Marketing Automation: How the most successful apps drive massive engagement & monetization, and can provide as much as a 15 percent lift or more to customer retention, a prized marketing and business metric. Other research from Urban Airship shows daily app usage increasing by up to 540 percent with push notifications.

Here’s how it works: The oldest form of push notifications known to everyone is text messages. Whenever you receive a text message, it has been “pushed” to your phone. In other words, you didn’t have to tell your phone to receive it, it just did it. Iterable’s “trigger campaigns” allow marketers, not developers, to quickly and easily segment customers into different groups and communication workflows based on different input signals. These signals could be user web browser data, shopping cart and purchasing behavior, or other in-app events.

Iterable’s new feature set opens up this capability for marketers at a much more competitive price point than their traditional enterprise counterparts. These in-app alerts are a great way for brands to keep consumers up to speed with updates and features, promotions, or in-location activity.