• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, September 11, 2017

Movable Ink, a software company founded in 2010 by Vivek Sharma and Michael Nutt, is dedicated to joining content and context in email. But many firms are still not using data to drive dynamic, personalized content. That topic — and others — will be covered on Tuesday at the company’s Think Summit in New York City. For a pre-conference update, Email Insider spoke with Movable Ink CEO Vivek Sharma. 

What’s your goal at Movable Ink? 

When Michael and I started, we felt like there was a lot more in email than was being done. We observed that the ESPs were doing a good job on the nuts and bolts: getting email out the door, list management, segmentation — all that stuff. But the content strategy was not always mapping to that. What we felt was conspicuously absent was a contextual approach, putting content or the experience first. What it is they are going to respond or not respond to? 

How do you define content? 

Content is the message — and how you present it to someone. You have to think: What is your creative strategy? And how this is representative of the offer? Is it appropriate to the person?

How do you achieve that?

The twist is being to trace contextual signals at the moment of open, and generate content on the fly — real-time, and web-dynamic 

What does that entail?

You don’t want to have a  static piece of creative in email — you might as well be shoving flyers in people’s mailboxes. With Travelocity, the inventory is fast-moving — a flight is not available, maybe they’re even cross-selling a car rental after you land — they’re able to inform strategies like this. We can do real-time pricing in email, which was never possible before.

What else is working?

We’re finding that people tend to respond to imagery — pure text-only messages are not as effective. But it depends on the context. Does an experience shot work effectively? Maybe the person is not as deep in the funnel — maybe they’re in the discovery mode, and need to see a wider selection of types of products. There’s a lot of components, and content also has to adapt for different formats — for tablets, desktops, on the go. How do you adapt to the moment the individual consumer is in, and do it at scale?

What could companies be doing better?

A big discovery in the last 18 months is that many brands have lots of data. They’re building a 360-degree view of the customer, pulling CRM or web interaction data. And all of that data is used for segmentation and targeting for the most part. Analysts are thinking about the perfect audience, and who is likely to churn, but there’s not a content strategy moving alongside this. What if that same data could be activated into content — to create beautiful creative tailored to the consumer?

Who kinds of clients do you serve?

We’re working with many B2C marketers — retailers like Macy’s, financial service companies, travel marketers like Travelocity, Hilton, Leading Hotels of the world. We also have entertainment and publishing clients — the New York Times, and the Jets and 49ers. It runs the gamut. 

And you have a new product coming out?

It’s our Intelligent Content Platform. Intelligent content is personalized content generated in real-time from any content, data, and business logic. We actually released it, and performed a full migration over the last three or for months. We’re introducing it at the conference. We want to democratize the ability to do advanced things with creative—to charge the offer, the font type. It makes it simple to take a Photoshop and have an email template ready to go. It’s coupled with data sources, any API you have, and make it simple to see which fields are important to you. The goal is to help marketers scale their personalization efforts.