Our Origin Story, Part 1: Innovating the future of email marketing with Dimensions™

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

The moment Dimensions™ was born

Zembula’s co-founder and CTO, Carl, and I were traveling to Atlanta from Portland, Oregon, to visit our biggest customer at the time.

Our primary product and source of revenue at the time was Scratch-it. We had just built the first version of our real-time image capabilities, driven by our commitment to improving user engagement and delivering a more interactive customer experience.  

At the time, we felt that if we were going to stay in business, we needed to create a solution that put us in the same sandbox as others in the email space. However, we weren’t satisfied with the approach of screen-shooting a web browser to deliver personalized images in email (as some other market players in our industry continue to do).

We had four core ideas in mind:

There had to be a better way to generate images.

We didn’t think rendering a web browser and taking a screenshot delivered a truly personalized image in email, but at the time, this was how everyone else in our space was doing it.

Data was the future.

Creating widgets that output a personalized image in email wasn’t the right approach either. We needed more: a visual editor like Illustrator or Photoshop built from the ground up. We wanted to create a pure design tool, not something requiring a developer to customize HTML and JavaScript to connect data and visualize it.

Enterprise data was the future of personalization.

Everyone we talked to — both potential and existing customers — had problems with API request limitations. APIs would break, and content would be missing from images.

Carl and I realized we needed data to be easy to connect beyond using APIs or uploading a CSV. We also realized we needed to make it easy for that data to be combined and transformed within Zembula for use in designs.

The critical lesson that changed our future.

Along with using data within creative, we needed that data to decide what to show and to create a single image URL capable of displaying any content in our platform.

Our fateful customer meeting 

We had worked with customers for years delivering our Scratch-it product. But every time they wanted to deploy a Scratch-it, customers had to come up with a creative idea, build it, test it, and then run it in their email program once.

We tried to find strategies leveraging evergreen Scratch-its like birthday discounts, but it was hard to sell that concept to companies at the time. Because creating and deploying a Scratch-it campaign required its own workflow to build, the frequency that our customers used Scratch-it was much lower than we hoped.

Far too often, no matter what we did, a Scratch-it would be built and never actually make it into the final email. We knew this was a bad sign for building a business and was a major lesson on what’s most effective with a customer to ensure retention.

That fateful customer meeting was the opportunity to show them our new real-time image personalization solution. It went well for a while, and then the words we didn’t want to hear:

 “We can already do this real-time image stuff with your competitor.” 

Then came the golden nugget of information.

“Our real problem is we have a modular email program and use Adobe Scene 7 to deliver the right image to the right individual, but we can’t personalize that image block, and we can’t track the links tied to any given image a user sees, so we don’t know what banner someone clicked on.” 

Bingo! That insight changed Zembula’s trajectory. It started a path to massive discovery, leading us to our comprehensive product solution today, Dimensions. See what evolved in the next part of our series.

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