Increasing email CTR by double digits

Dribbleup produces smart sports equipment and fitness gear, primarily known for their smart soccer balls, basketballs, and medicine balls. These products are designed to connect with the Dribbleup app, which provides interactive training sessions, performance tracking, and virtual coaching. The app offers a variety of training programs and real-time feedback to help users improve their skills and fitness levels. Dribbleup products are popular among athletes, coaches, and fitness enthusiasts looking for a more engaging and technologically integrated way to train.

To leverage hundreds of thousands of rows of session data per day, engineers at Dribbleup needed a way to create automated email marketing campaigns that were personalized at a user level, with no marketing team.

The team faced multiple challenges:

Data integration and management - Handling and integrating data from multiple sources into a cohesive system

Segmentation and personalisation - Creating relevant and personalized content for different user segments requires sophisticated models to analyze user behavior and preferences

Scalability - Managing and processing large volumes of data and sending personalized emails to millions of users requires robust infrastructure and efficient processing capabilities.

Compliance and Privacy - Ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations (like GDPR) and maintaining user trust.

Dribbleup faced the challenge of making smart recommendations that utilized millions of interaction events they currently tracked. Although they have relatively few products for sale the data engineering involved in making sense of what users should get recommended proved to be a complex challenge.

When searching for a solution that could solve this Dribbleup considered several vendors. Ultimately they chose Shaped due to the ease of integration with Redshift and the configurability afforded via Shaped’s API.

Shaped provided a comprehensive solution by integrating advanced recommendation systems. The process involved:

Data Integration and Analysis - Shaped seamlessly integrated data from multiple sources, including user behavior, viewing patterns, and content preferences. This provided a unified view of each user, enabling accurate and personalized email recommendations.

Bespoke Ranking Models - Using this integrated data, Shaped created bespoke ranking models tailored to each user's interests. These models analyzed session data and dynamically adapted to users' intent, ensuring that the email offerings were always relevant and personalized.

Real-Time Adaptation - Shaped's real-time processing capabilities allowed the experience to dynamically adapt to changing user behaviors and preferences during each session. This ensured that users were surfaced product offerings that were specific to their current interests and needs.

Using Shaped, Dribbleup has sent over 40M personalized emails, with requests continuously totalling more than 1000rps. Without a marketing team, engineers at Dribbleup have successfully built an automated email marketing engine, utilizing millions of sessions to increase email CTR by double digits.