SAN DIEGO — January 24, 2023 — Cordial, the cross-channel marketing and data management platform for brands to communicate in personal, intelligent ways, announced that it has partnered with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, to list its data offering on Snowflake Marketplace. The new offering will allow joint customers to unify their data and unlock its potential by making it available across their entire business ecosystem.

Modern marketing requires agility, speed, and real-time data. Cordial and Snowflake are working together to give joint customers seamless access to rich customer data, enabling them to analyze engagement trends, monitor consumer behaviors, gauge performance, and unlock new insights about metrics driving their business forward. Additionally, data access can be extended bi-directionally, allowing customers to easily query and leverage data from Snowflake in the Cordial platform for improved message personalization and campaign outcomes. 

“Now more than ever, marketers and technology teams are looking to move faster together. Cordial and Snowflake are removing the barriers for these teams to move fast, trust their data, and iterate quickly in marketing with a customer-led approach,” said Jeremy Swift, CEO and co-founder of Cordial. “This integration makes traditional sharing methods obsolete, eliminating the need to move or copy data, rebuild schemas or manage data pipelines with traditional extract, transfer and load (ETL) solutions, which are costly and labor intensive. This means marketers can spend more time activating their data rather than managing it.”

Cordial’s robust data architecture collects and uses dynamic data sets, including contact attributes, cart items, product catalogs, purchase activity, and digital behaviors. Joint customers can now leverage Snowflake’s data engineering, storage, sharing, and governance, to have unparalleled access and security to this powerful data across their entire team with turn-key setup and maintenance.

“Our partnership with Cordial will enable our joint customers to benefit from real-time, first-party data that has proved invaluable for marketers today,” said Kieran Kennedy, Head of Snowflake Marketplace. “We look forward to seeing this new offering reach more of our customers, helping them to continue maximizing their use of Snowflake’s Data Cloud.”

Additional benefits that differentiate the Cordial and Snowflake integration include:

• Immediate access to rich customer data refreshed multiple times per day.
• Increased flexibility by offering standard or custom secure views of shared data based on specific needs.
• Improved access to retroactive customer data when a secure share is provisioned.

“Cordial’s Snowflake Marketplace offering has given us a more seamless way of accessing and analyzing our data. Sharing data that used to take hours, now only takes a few minutes to complete,” said Hyrum Ward, Manager of Data Engineering at Purple. “All our valuable first-party data from Cordial is now instantly available and queryable alongside our hundreds of other data sources in Snowflake, so we can easily marry up a variety of data points to gain new insights about our business.”

For more information on Cordial’s integration with Snowflake Collaboration Technology, visit www.cordial.com/partners/snowflake/. 

Snowflake Marketplace is powered by Snowflake’s ground-breaking cross-cloud technology, Snowgrid, allowing companies to find, try, and buy the data and applications needed to innovate for their business. Snowflake Marketplace simplifies discovery, access, and the commercialization of data and applications, enabling companies to unlock entirely new revenue streams and extended insights across the Data Cloud. Learn more about Snowflake Marketplace and how to find, try, and buy the data, data services, and applications needed to innovate for your business.

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Our team are experts in customer engagement, and the Phrasee team are experts in AI-generated content to boost customer engagement, which makes for a powerful integration. On top of this, we place kindness, authenticity, respect, and accountability at the heart of everything we do — things that Phrasee is all about too. It’s a perfect match for marketers looking to use data to fuel their customer engagement with personalized, optimized messages.

How Cordial and Phrasee work together

This integration enables marketers to find the marketing messages that resonate best with their audience by experimenting with their messages at scale across email campaigns. This maximizes opens, clicks, and conversions, and in turn drives significant revenue uplift and increased customer engagement and loyalty.

Clients using the integration between Phrasee and Cordial can create email campaigns with on-brand, creative subject lines, ensuring they’re ready for split testing without any manual effort and brainpower usually required.

Clients can then schedule and deploy their experiment in Cordial before uploading the results back into Phrasee for ongoing email optimization, performance tracking, and language insights.

It’s that simple!

A joint e-commerce client of Phrasee and Cordial has experienced an average click rate uplift of 20.5%.

“We’re thrilled to be launching our integration with Phrasee,” said Rachel Bergman, Chief Revenue Officer at Cordial. “It’s an ideal partnership for our mission to help brands send a better message. This integration enables marketers to automate the experimentation process and personalize content for their brand’s unique voice to drive outsized results from their content — it’s a game changer.”

“I’m delighted to be cementing our partnership between Phrasee and Cordial with our new integration,” said Jess Evans, VP of Global Partnerships at Phrasee. “Recently we’ve had the pleasure of working with some of Cordial’s most forward-thinking customers, and it’s clear from working with the Cordial team that we all have the common goal of driving success for our clients. Look out for more functionality around dynamic optimization coming up from this partnership!”

About Phrasee

Phrasee delivers state-of-the-art technology that arms marketers with the right message… for the right person… every time. Its AI-powered SaaS platform generates and optimizes on-brand marketing messages in real-time, to maximize customer engagement and drive incremental revenue.

About Cordial

Cordial is a customer engagement data platform for brands to communicate in personal, intelligent ways. Cordial was founded with the goal of creating better, more human experiences for both marketers and their customers.

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Over the years we have found that the right distributed marketing platform does more than just enable partners and channels. The use cases vary from a hotel chain empowering their various food, beverage, events, and entertainment departments, to an apartment management company empowering their individual apartment managers and residents, to nonprofits enabling local chapters and regions to communicate with their constituents at the local level, and human resources sending internal communications to employees. 

What is the right distributed marketing platform?

The right platform serves two key functions: management and the end-user.

Management needs enough control over brand compliance, scheduling, reporting, and approvals, and they need a thirty thousand foot view of what’s going on locally to remove the bottleneck of the endless requests from their distributed teams. 

End-users want to get their job done in the quickest, easiest way possible, with a very little learning curve. They tend to be non-technical users and are not interested in coding or setup. They need to get on the platform quickly, send their messages, and get on with the rest of their day.

Approved assets need to be front and center to maintain brand compliance and there should be no guesswork on what and when something can be sent. 

The platform needs to be fast and reliable, easy to set up, and cost-effective.

The problem

Many of the available distributed marketing platforms are either too complicated for the end-user, are too expensive to implement, or don’t integrate well with your current marketing stack, making for a sluggish experience that doesn’t leverage your current infrastructure.

Introducing Cordial and SmarterSends 

Cordial is a next-gen cross-channel messaging and data platform that leverages all of your data to create highly personal, intelligent, and relevant marketing messages.

SmarterSends is a distributed marketing platform designed to tightly integrate with Cordial, empowering your distributed marketing teams to create, schedule, and deploy marketing messages using an incredibly simple and intuitive interface.

There are five key factors to know about the combination of these powerful platforms:

1. There is ZERO implementation cost: It takes less than 5 minutes to get SmarterSends set up in your Cordial instance. Simply enter an authorization key into the SmarterSends platform, and you are connected to your Cordial instance.
2. Ease of use was one of the primary design goals: The learning curve for the distributed marketer is negligible. In less than 10 minutes your distributed users can be creating, scheduling, and deploying brand-compliant marketing messages.
3. Management has all the controls they need: Enforce compliance from an integrated approval workflow to locking down message sections.
4. SmarterSends leverages the power of the Cordial system: Take full advantage of Cordial’s advanced functions at the messaging management level.
5. It’s cost-effective: The combination is less than half the per-user cost of other distributed marketing platforms. Along with access to your current per-message cost, SmarterSends is the most cost-effective way to empower your distributed marketing teams.

With teams becoming more and more distributed, implementing a distributed marketing platform is quickly becoming an essential part of the modern company’s tech stack. 

Empowering non-technical users to create, schedule, and deploy marketing messages, while giving management the control they need to ensure compliance across the board is an effective way to drive revenue and growth while removing bottlenecks that can slow down progress and create distractions.

For more information on Cordial and SmarterSends, you can schedule a demo here.

This was a guest post by our friend Evan Lazarus at SmarterSends. 

SmarterSends is designed with both corporate and non-technical users in mind. With no onboarding costs, an extremely easy-to-use interface, and more controls than you could ever want, SmarterSends empowers non-technical distributed marketing teams to create, schedule, and deploy email marketing messages quickly and easily.

The post Distributed marketing and the distributed marketer with SmarterSends appeared first on Cordial.

We’ve put a particular emphasis on our agency and consultant partners because we know how important a service partner network is to digital transformation. In turn, we know a critical piece to agency success in the digital world is maintaining deep expertise in emerging, next-generation technologies that can leverage every interaction in our highly connected world. 

Together, we combine the best in next-generation messaging technology with the brightest minds in the digital and email marketing industry, creating brand campaigns and strategies that engage customers for a lifetime. “As an agency built from email marketing, our passion is that every single message sent is not only meaningful to the audience but drives growth for our clients,” says Morgan Steward, CEO Trendline Interactive. “We’re excited that Cordial’s next-generation technology helps our clients capitalize on the rapid pace of digital change.” 

Enter the Cordial certification program

One of the most exciting ways we’ve gone all-in on partnering with leading agency partners is through the announcement of the Cordial Certification program. 

A Cordial certification is awarded to technical professionals who successfully complete the program, allowing them to demonstrate proficiency and skill with the Cordial platform. Once an individual passes the certification exam, they can use the certification to promote themselves and their agency to the communities, projects, and companies that are important to them. 

We’d like to extend a thank you, and congratulations to the very first agencies and individuals who have successfully completed the Cordial Certification Program. We couldn’t be more excited to promote our leading agency partners and their Cordial subject-matter experts who are proud to be represented as Cordial Certified Professionals. So, who’s certified so far?

Revenue Automation

Reid Morgan, Director, Marketing Automation & Digital Strategy

“The Cordial platform and professional certification course were instrumental in expanding my understanding not only of what is possible with this cutting edge, data-driven platform; but also showed me how I can build extremely robust, targeted personalization into all my communications with smart and efficient workflows. This will let me work better, faster, and more efficiently for my clients and my company.” 

Revenue Automation serves business-to-consumer marketing executives by providing full-service marketing automation strategy, process development, system implementation, and outsourced marketing solutions focused on the acquisition, engagement, and retention of your customer base.

Trendline Interactive

Amy Collins, MBA, VP & Practice Lead, Solution Consulting

“I found the Cordial certification to be very valuable as we continue to serve the needs of our clients. The certification process was detailed and in depth. It ensures that those that become certified are proficient in developing within the tool.”

Rebecca Pascual, Solution Engineer

“I will say it was one of the best exams I have taken for a certification as it truly tests your knowledge and expertise of the platform. The exam was well prepared and very thought-out. It’s easy to memorize and pass an exam, but for this exam, it requires you to demonstrate that you successfully know how to interact within the platform at all levels with the use cases provided. Certifications like this help prove our knowledge and expertise within the platform. I appreciate the opportunity to take this exam.”

Bryan Nord, Solution Engineer

“I found the two part Cordial certification process both challenging and thorough in the knowledge required.  I am truly proud to now be a certified professional for Cordial’s innovative and versatile email platform.”

Rudy Ramirez, Marketing Automation Manager

“As someone who has a role that isn’t super technical at our agency, I focus on implementation and setup of campaigns in platforms, getting emails out the door for clients. So something like using REST APIs to send data to a platform would not be in my wheelhouse. This is something I hadn’t done before in Cordial. The fact that I was able to study the materials and documentation to figure out how to do that I think shows just how useful a certification like this is. It will push people to get a better view and understanding of what Cordial can do – and maybe finally learn something they’ve never done before (like me)!” 

Trendline Interactive is a full-service email marketing agency responsible for some of the largest and most successful email programs in the world. Combining great strategy, an extensive understanding of ESP technology, sophisticated email solutions, flawless execution, and in-depth analytics services, Trendline creates tailored programs that produce bottom line results.

MicroChannel

Frankie Aston, Senior Marketing Automation Consultant

Josh O’dea, Marketing Automation Consultant – Technical Associate

MicroChannel is an award-winning business technology solutions provider trusted by over 1400 customers across Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and South East Asia. Partnerships with world-leading technology companies such to deliver end-to-end solutions including ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, BI, eCommerce, WMS, POS, Expense & AP Automation, Hosting and Managed IT Services.

Become a Cordial Certified Professional

Why get certified? Certifications give you a professional edge by providing industry endorsed evidence of skills mastery, demonstrating your abilities and willingness to embrace new technologies. Certify with Cordial and unlock new opportunities! Your investment in obtaining Cordial certification can bring you many benefits including:

• Demonstrate your proven expertise
• Achieve industry recognition
• Highlight skills companies and customers seek
• Differentiate yourself in the marketplace
• Increase your earnings potential

To learn more about our certification program or get started with your certification, please contact us at partners@cordial.com.

The post Say hello to the first Cordial Certified Professionals appeared first on Cordial.

Cordial is built on a flexible architecture, which allows you to easily add data to the platform using the method that’s easiest for you: REST API, JavaScript SDK, Amazon S3 Bucket, SFTP, or Kinesis stream. Because of this, our ability to integrate with the best eCommerce, loyalty, and CDPs is expansive and always has the client in mind. 

We’re very excited to announce our strong ecosystem of best-in-class technologies that are leading the way in helping marketers and technologists be more personal and relevant in how they engage with their customers.

Cordial was founded to build a flexible, scalable, and transformative platform for technology integrations. By architecting our data platform first, and building channels on top of these data capabilities, we enable marketers and technologists to leverage all of their data to personalize messaging with the same level of 1:1 precision in every single channel. Because Cordial was built data-first, there’s no limit to what marketers can personalize, and likewise, there is no limit to our ability to integrate with other technologies and platforms.

“Working with the Cordial partner integration team has been a pleasure. They took the time to not only develop and vet the integration but to understand our platform and work together to develop a communication strategy and handoff for clients.”

Nathan Stanton, Head of Product, Poplar

We partner with best-in-class technology providers to enrich data both in and out of Cordial. Flip a switch and stream data into the Cordial Data Platform with our pre-built technology integrations, or use our flexible architecture to send your data to other technology platforms. 

Our REST API makes it easy to integrate with your existing technology stack. Use webhooks to trigger direct mail, update user profile information in a CMS, or send user information to a call center…the sky’s the limit.

“Simplicity and flexibility are essential to deal with the complexities of true retention marketing today… Cordial has built their product to be simple, flexible, and robust enough to scale according to client needs. They have what we look for in a partner technically, AND the partner team is great to work with.”

Chris Jacobs, Director of Partnerships & Alliances, Annex Cloud

Our team is always working on making new technical integrations to better serve our mutual clients. If you’re interested in integrating with Cordial, reach out to partners@cordial.com and we’ll share our Integration Process Guide to jumpstart an integration and kick off a partnership together.

The post The Cordial ecosystem of technology integrations appeared first on Cordial.

With limited in-store traffic this year, Cyber Week 2020 was—you guessed it—unprecedented. Not unlike years prior, any delays in performance can dissuade customers in an instant, resulting in major revenue loss. But, the Cordial team and technology were born for these stakes! We anticipate, prepare for, and manage massive traffic and sending volume because we know how impactful this week is for each and every one of our clients.

In fact, one Cordial client had migrated from a legacy provider where they experienced a catastrophic business impact due to delays in their API service last Cyber Week. Order confirmation emails did not deploy, which understandably caused panic among their buyers. Those buyers spun up support emails and picked up the phone, swamping customer service. The loss in revenue, excess returns and cancellations, and overtime for customer service workers turned what should have been the most profitable time into a costly season.

When Cordial switched to Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing, we saw our API server latency “drop from an average response time of 650ms before Argo to 403ms the day after [we] enabled it — an improvement of over 35% on day one.” Since 2018, we’ve extended the use of Argo Smart Routing to every consumer interaction. At any time of year, retailers are acutely aware of how load times affect conversion rates, which translate to cart size and overall revenue. For example, research from Kissmetrics suggests that a one-second page delay could cost $2.5 million in lost annual sales (based on an ecommerce site making $100,000 per day). 

Here’s how it works, in words I can (sort of) understand:

In the run-up to Black Friday, Cordial built what Platform Architect Daniel Smith dubs a “stable of Workers”: dozens of mini-apps that the company is ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. Each Worker is suited for a specific job, like shedding traffic that is likely junk, or routing certain kinds of requests to a particular server to reduce load during critical moments. The team also drafted a corresponding ‘game day’ document outlining which contingencies should invoke each Worker. Read the full case study on Cloudflare.com

This year, we saw an 82% increase in traffic on Black Friday over last year, and the Cordial Data Platform was hard at work processing nearly 60 million data automations per day over the weekend. Data automations allow you to sanitize, normalize, transform, and programmatically enrich any type of customer and business data. These powerful utilities are a foundational aspect of highly personalized messages.

By using real-time data across all of their messaging channels, our clients saw amazing results this season. Buyers, when purchasing from a Cordial-delivered email, SMS, or mobile push message, spent an average of $46 more per order—a 76% increase over non-Cordial attributed spend.

If you’d like to increase your average order value by 76% (or more!) by Cyber Week 2021, get in touch with us today. We would love to show you how Cordial clients are seeing increases in revenue and customer engagement within their first few days of sending.

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When you’re ready to take charge of your email deliverability, being mindful of spam traps is one of the most important steps you can take. If you don’t, your spam trap hits could grow and grow until you find yourself blacklisted and completely unable to reach your customers or prospects. How do you monitor spam trap hits? Glad you asked. 

Cordial partners with email deliverability monitoring platforms like Validity that have functionality built in to help you monitor your reputation and remediate issues when they come up.  

With access to a breakdown of your spam trap hits by type, you’ll discover where exactly you are struggling. Noticing a lot of typo traps? You might benefit from running your list through a verification service to catch those traps and remove them before you send, rather than after (decreasing the negative impact on your sender reputation). Hitting way too many recycled traps? You likely need to spend time looking through your engagement metrics to identify and sunset addresses who aren’t engaging with your mail. 

That’s where analytics comes in: By understanding who actually wants your mail and who doesn’t, you can remove the addresses you shouldn’t be sending to in the first place, reducing your chances of hitting traps or racking up spam complaints. This is where it’s clear spam traps can help you, too. By understanding your trap data, you can make proactive changes to your lists based on engagement and become a better sender. 

Let’s say you’re seeing a lot of recycled traps, meaning you are emailing addresses that have been inactive for quite some time. This is a good reason to put some sunsetting guidelines in place: Any email address with no engagement with your emails for six months should immediately be culled from your lists. If you’re worried about pulling the trigger so fast, you can take this as another opportunity to re-engage the customer. Send them an email asking them to adjust their preferences or click a button to re-confirm their interest in your newsletter before you pull them from the send. 

It’s important to note, too, 250ok uses a proprietary sensor network (another term for spam trap network). The data you’re seeing is only from the addresses we operate, so if you hit a trap in the Gmail network, it won’t be reported in your dashboard (but it will count against you and could lead to a blacklisting). Keep in mind, those other trap hits negatively impact your reputation, so you want to make sure you’re addressing the root causes of spam trap hits: poor sending practices based on quantity rather than quality. 

If you’re not monitoring spam trap hits in some capacity or another, you’re missing out on a really actionable slice of the data pie. If you only think about trap hits when you see the impact on your reputation, or find yourself needing to be delisted from a blacklist because your complaint rate and trap hits were so high, you’re making life harder on yourself. And really, today, you don’t need to make life any more complicated. 

If you still have questions about spam traps or need any help regarding them, Cordial can partner with you. We understand that even legitimate senders can become the victims of spam traps, and we have the expertise to guide you to greater success. To learn more about what we can do for you, get in touch with us today.

This was a guest post by our friends at Validity. 

Validity is a highly trusted name in customer data quality. Tens of thousands of organizations rely on Validity solutions to improve customer engagement and manage their customer data. With Validity, organizations make better decisions that drive more leads, close more deals, and confidently plan for continued growth.

The post Making spam traps work for you, not against you appeared first on Cordial.

So, let’s say that you want to run a personalized email marketing campaign. You know the importance of setting up an experiment, establishing a control group, and continuing with the holdout until the results have been validated.

But hold on a moment. How do you take that crucial first step towards actually running a personalized email marketing experiment?

Many brands are becoming ‘customer-obsessed’ in order to drive growth and hit revenue targets. Marketers are now measuring the success of their campaigns using customer-centric metrics, such as improving customer lifetime value, or increasing repeat purchase rate, rather than measuring opens and click-through-rates.

Every decision — from product planning to email campaigns — should be informed by a deep understanding of customer interests. So, how do you figure out which customers to email, when to email them, and what message you want to reach them with?

For example, imagine that you believe you can stimulate additional repeat purchases by offering customers a 20% discount. One way to do it would be just to send an email to your entire customer base (minus the control, of course) with the offer, and see whether it results in a lift in repeat purchases.

We often hear this referred to as “batch and blast,” or, more recently, “spray and pray.”

How an un-targeted promotion can be potentially risky:

1. It’s costly.

It’s true that a 20% promotion might help you reconnect with customers who have faded away over time — and stimulate some purchases that they might never otherwise have made. The problem is that plenty of the customers receiving this promotion would have made purchases anyway, with or without the discount. Giving them 20% off is just eating into your margins. What you would really like is a sharper way of targeting those customers who are fading away or at-risk — customers for whom any additional purchases will be incremental to what you have gotten without the promotion.

2. It leaves money on the table.

The flip side to sending a discount to a shopper who would have made a purchase anyway is missing the chance to send the most relevant promotion to a given customer. Your job is to connect with your customers with the right message at the right moment. It’s possible that all of your customers might be interested in a 20% discount regardless of their relationship history, purchase patterns, and current behavior. Possible…but unlikely. Ideally, you would want to figure out a way to email different customer segments with a message that is crafted to appeal specifically to them.

How to move towards a smarter approach to email marketing

1. Tie email triggers to the customer lifecycle using behavioral targeting and 1:1 personalization.

Consider three customers: Jessica, who has bought jewelry from your website every month for the past five years; Vesper, who used to buy new shoes every half a year or so, but hasn’t made a purchase in nine months; and Leanne, a new customer who made her first purchase of jeans last week. These customers don’t look too different at first glance. All three are female and have made purchases in the past year. But each is likely to be most responsive to a different kind of campaign.

For Leanne, a follow-up email at the 30-day mark — possibly with a discount — can help your brand remain top-of-mind and trigger a repeat purchase. Jessica, on the other hand, is an active customer who is “hot” and needs little additional prodding to buy; an email with a sneak peek at the new earring collection might be more meaningful (and cost-effective) for her. And Vesper is a customer who is steering of her normal purchase course — “cooling,” so to speak — and might need additional incentives to reconnect with your brand. A welcome-back message and special deal on shoes could help remind her why she loves you before she becomes truly “cold” (inactive and likely gone for good).

There are many benefits from using customer segmentation in marketing. Tying email triggers to specific points in the customer lifecycle and aligning your email marketing efforts with your customers’ “temperatures” can help you serve up more relevant messages and offers.

2. Sharpen your messaging and offers with a refined customer segmentation strategy.

One of the foundations of advanced customer analytics is the premise that your customers are all different — so they shouldn’t be treated the same. If you know that customers who reach your site through the Google adword “carburetor” are fundamentally different than those who reach you through adword “muffler” (different repeat purchase likelihood, different profit per order, and ultimately different customer lifetime value) consider running separate email campaigns with different messages and offers for each segment. It will help tie your marketing efforts to the real drivers of your company’s performance.

3. Keep on refining.

Email marketing is not “one-and-done.” It’s an ongoing and iterative process; today’s exciting new idea is tomorrow’s status quo. A/B testing — the idea of holding a bake-off between two or more competing ideas to see which produces the best results — is sometimes called the “champion-challenger” model when a new idea is being evaluated against an existing favorite. So make sure that you have a robust pipeline of challengers ready to go up against the current champion for supremacy. Observing that a 15% discount leads to revenue lift over an email with no promotional offer? Why not try a dollar-denominated discount instead or a buy one, get one promotion? Why not experiment with a new subject line or new creative? Effective email marketing is about continuous, incremental improvement rather than putting the “right” option on auto-pilot.

Ultimately, the promise of email marketing lies in its ability to enable a more personalized, individual relationship with the customer. Acknowledging that customers are all different — and linking marketing efforts to the stage of their relationship with your brand — can help ensure that you deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time.

This is a guest post from our friends at Amperity.

The post How to improve your email campaigns using a customer-centric marketing approach appeared first on Cordial.