What are the components of a Composition Engine?

The daily email marketing problem

Email is the daily heartbeat of your owned customer relationship. When a subscriber opens a message from you, there’s a 95% chance it will be a daily email, not a triggered email, SMS, or any other message you’ve sent.

As marketers add personalization across all their owned channels, it’s critical that daily email be included.

Unfortunately, the daily email is the most challenging place to personalize because of the frequency and limitations of email HTML.

When you personalize email, you are limited by the HTML support of the 140+ email clients where your subscribers open that email. It is impossible to create a perfect branded experience using HTML content alone.

For this reason, almost all major brands now predominantly use images to deliver a branded experience via email, but this limits the personalization capabilities required to live up to current customer expectations.

Image personalization is the answer, but the first generation doesn’t deliver. So what’s next?

The three key problems with existing image personalization solutions

After watching the first generation of image personalization appear on the market in the last decade, Zembula identified three major limiting factors that have prevented broad adoption and caused a lot of churn for image-based personalization solution providers:

1. First-generation image personalization solutions were built to create a single-purpose image, and it took a lot of time and effort to create every piece of content.

This led brands to reuse images, only updating the data within the image if it happened to change. For the daily marketing email, this quickly causes user fatigue, and the personalization is ignored, delivering no lasting value to the subscriber.

As a marketer, you would never send the exact same email content to your subscribers every day for a year. But that’s exactly what daily email personalization has been until now.

2. The first generation of image personalization technology was expensive and didn’t provide a return on investment, and no one ever found the single killer use case for the technology to deliver ROI at scale (no, countdown timers don’t count).

Marketing teams had to put in immense effort to ideate and create a single image. Over the last decade, marketing teams have gotten smaller, so asking to add to workflows to create a single piece of personalized content isn’t feasible anymore.

3. A great daily personalization experience for subscribers requires fidelity, which means many versions and variations of every banner to handle unique scenarios.

You also need many combinations of data to present the most impactful and accurate personalized experience in every email open.

You can’t display the same personalized image indefinitely in a daily email and expect it to perform for very long.

Enter Zembula’s Composition Engine

To overcome these three problems, Zembula has developed the Composition Engine to take image personalization to the next level. 

The composition engine consists of three core elements:

1. Composition: A vector based image personalization editor

The editor lets you quickly design content, combining data-driven elements into a pixel-perfect design that’s on-brand and uses your custom fonts. When the image is displayed to a subscriber in email, it’s personalized with their data in real-time.

Marketers can create more personalized images faster and with less effort, allowing them to create greater variety in their email channel.

2. Engine: Decision engine

Having one piece of personalized content isn’t enough, you need hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of content to provide the variety to handle the long tail of personalization scenarios. Your customer data should be both driving the decision of what to display in any given email open, as well as data being used as content within the image.

All this content needs to be delivered through a single image in your email template to prevent email clipping (every image URL and link is 2kb, and email clipping will happen when your entire email HTML template is over 100kb).

3. Price: Cost efficient (what’s your return on marketing spend?)

Price matters and performance is critical. Historically, the price of image personalization has been at least 10x more than it needs to be for mass retail adoption (maybe if you’re a marketer in finance, price doesn’t matter…but for enterprise retail, it’s critical).

The killer use case for image personalization in the daily retail email is Zembula Dimensions™

We take all your customer data and deliver the most comprehensive personalized experience for the daily email, including hundreds of unique use cases.

The effort required to create this and the ROAS it delivers, makes Dimensions the most efficient next $1 as a retailer you can spend on marketing. Dimensions™ provides a minimum of $11 for every dollar you spend on it.

In the next decade, every enterprise retail marketing team will need a composition engine. McKinsey recently released a personalization report, finding that consumers expect brands to get personalization right.

The best way to get it right is to fully automate it and have enough content variety to always deliver the best personalized experience possible based on the customer data available.

Once you get email right, there are plenty of other channels, like your website and mobile, where you can apply the composition engine. But start by nailing the hardest channel, and you will set yourself up for future success…and budget.

The Composition Engine is the answer to your daily retail email personalization requirement. It won’t change your daily workflow or require your creative team to increase content output to keep up with your business requirements.

It’s time to take the efficient and profitable approach to delivering an exceptional daily customer experience without changing your daily workflow.

Let’s make marketing more manageable and deliver exceptional results for years to come.