Our Origin Story, Part 2: How a simple feature became the foundation of Zembula's success

This is the second in a multi-part series highlighting the journey from our first product, Scratch-it, to where we are today with Zembula Dimensions™. 

(Want to know our origin story? Check out Part 1 in our series.)

A little feature we built becomes the core of future success

After this critical meeting, Carl and I realized we’d already built a feature for Scratch-it that controlled what email content was shown based on the open. We had also already created a decision engine that would select the best Scratch-it to show from a content pool.

This feature was built so you could create multiple Scratch-its and set the odds for each version to show up. For example, give 20% chance of receiving one offer, and 40% chance of another offer. 

Why did this Scratch-it “decisioning” feature matter? 

It allowed us to solve our Atlanta customer’s problem (we mention them here in part 1 of this Insights series). We could show an image in an email dynamically, personalize that image, and track who clicked that particular version of the image and where the link went. We could also send via API exactly what personalization the customer saw.

The other part of our learning from this key customer meeting was the opportunity to see how the future of email would be modular and dynamically changed for each user. We had the privilege of learning what it would take for this company of 75+ people to run a modular program today and scale for the future.

We tried to sell this customer on our vision of what we could do for them, but they had invested heavily in their current workflow. We also knew that if we didn’t figure out our approach to real-time email, we would not survive as a company.

Eventually, the customer churned, but we learned so much. We realized our product shortfalls then, but we also saw the future. This customer showed us a fully modular email program and the challenges of delivering it.

The Smart Banner™ and Smart Kicker™ are born

After that fateful customer meeting, Carl and I designed for the future. We would ideate, learn, build, test with customers, and ideate some more. After doing this for a while, we created the first key elements of Dimensions: Smart Banner™ and Smart Kicker™.

Zembula’s Smart Banner lives at the top of every email an enterprise retailer sends. It picks the right use case from a pool of hundreds in the moment of email open, personalizes the content, and outputs the image, which renders for the user in a hundred milliseconds (faster than many content delivery providers). Our Smart Kicker operates the same way, as a banner at the bottom of the email, for full coverage.

Implementing these key elements was just one part of the journey. In the next part of this series, you’ll learn how our testing and iteration process with Dimensions, using the Smart Banner and Smart Kicker, led us to some incredible insights.

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