As a pioneering Portland, Oregon-based venture-backed startup, we’re shattering conventions and revolutionizing real-time buyer personalization.
Enhancing captivating banners across various promotional email campaigns dramatically boosted website traffic by a factor of 10. To drive exponential growth, we sought a lightweight, budget-friendly, and highly scalable database solution that would enable seamless expansion. — Robert Haydock, CEO, Zembula
With our newly developed expertise, we’re capable of crafting tailored email campaigns that dynamically adapt to the needs and preferences of each individual recipient. As soon as an email is opened, our proprietary Good Banner technology triggers our marketing campaign selection engine seamlessly. Our cutting-edge analytics engine seamlessly leverages real-time buyer insights to refresh the visually stunning banner with personalized offers and relevant information uniquely crafted for each individual shopper. The system tracks and rewards customers for abandoning shopping carts, as well as monitoring cargo shipments, loyalty programs, and birthday gifts.
Banners that are truly effective boost the open rates and engagement of 100% of recipient emails. To incentivize purchases, retailers will occasionally display items left behind in a shopper’s abandoned shopping cart, along with relevant transactional details within a targeted promotional email – or they may gently remind customers of the rewards their accumulated loyalty points entitle them to, via an abandoned cart email. Through a wide-ranging selection of approximately 70 diverse image and messaging combinations, Good Banners’ innovative approach eliminates the risk of customer fatigue often associated with repetitive visual and textual content.
Several cutting-edge online retailers rely on Zembula to drive their e-commerce success, partnering with innovative brands in categories such as mattresses, home goods, and more. Their promotional email campaigns have yielded a 10-17% boost in revenue, a significant increase. With B2C companies sending out a staggering amount of emails daily – roughly two times per day, which can lead to tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue, potentially even more.
We are also supporting travel and hospitality companies by driving bookings and promoting special offers. We also help financial services companies connect more effectively with their customers.
What seems like magic to our discerning clients is actually the result of meticulous attention to detail and a deep understanding of what makes an exceptional banner. Despite initial reservations, the magic almost faltered due to the limitations of our outdated infrastructure’s scalability and value proposition.
The company’s legacy analytics engine has reached a critical juncture where it no longer meets our growing data demands. As we continue to expand and diversify our business operations, the need for robust and scalable analytics capabilities has become increasingly urgent?
Carl Thorner, our CTO, and I co-founded Zembula back in 2013. With a lean yet agile technical team, we deliberately chose cloud-native and managed internet companies to form the foundation of our backend architecture.
To mitigate the effects of fluctuating usage patterns that can exceed the concurrency limits imposed by external APIs, we employ a caching mechanism to store essential information from third-party sources in Amazon DynamoDB, thereby ensuring both speed and dependability in our processes.
Despite our commitment to a no-frills, low-operational-expenditure approach, one glaring exception stood out – the very heart of our technological infrastructure, our robust and sophisticated analytics engine. Since our inception, we have relied on a range of capabilities, specifically Elasticsearch 1.5, for its functionality.
Elasticsearch underpinned two key processes:
- SmartBanners updated in real-time whenever a customer opened their email?
- Our company’s proprietary interior dashboard enables clients to track and analyze the efficacy of their email marketing initiatives with unparalleled precision. The system assimilates and interprets vast amounts of data collected through innovative methods akin to open-source analytics, click-through rates, and revenue metrics.
As the company expanded, Carl’s expertise allowed him to maintain response times under a second for complex search queries in Elasticsearch, thanks to a combination of additional infrastructure and sophisticated technical solutions.
Despite everything, this arrived at a surprisingly high price. By the beginning of 2022, we had successfully operated several Elasticsearch servers on Amazon EC2, requiring both upfront license fees in addition to ongoing EC2 computing and storage costs. This was additionally wasteful. Our utilization has been consistently volatile. When sending out a single email blast to targeted buyers, the potential for millions of opens can unfold within mere seconds, resulting in an explosion of engagement and interest. Between these peaks have lain lengthy valleys, where our heavily invested server infrastructure has remained underutilized for extended periods. Despite efforts to streamline Elasticsearch for more efficient retail knowledge management, this endeavor proved a significant time sink for Carl.
Following our decision to broaden the scope of Good Banners, long-standing issues finally came to a head as we transitioned from a limited selection of targeted email campaigns to a comprehensive range of promotional emails. Our website’s visitor traffic has experienced an astonishing surge, increasing a remarkable tenfold within just three short months.
While we might have reduced our Elasticsearch costs by hosting additional servers, this approach wasn’t a cost-effective or environmentally sustainable solution to pursue. We aimed to engineer a scalable solution capable of supporting a 100-fold increase in progress. — Robert Haydock, CEO, Zembula
What’s Driving the Decline in Operations Efficiency?
We examined ChaosSearch, a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch. Unfortunately, our results were marred by a failure to conform to Elasticsearch’s standard operating procedures. While ChaosSearch proved impressively economical, our efforts to achieve desired query velocities and results ultimately fell short, despite considerable collaborative work from both our team and the Chaosearch developers.
Carl, our chief technology officer, thoroughly considered building an entirely new analytics infrastructure using open-source tools. Fortunately, before reaching that stage, he had the foresight to discover Rockset in February 2022, promptly signing up for a trial of their platform.
Rockset’s efficiency was truly impressive, with the team’s additional support a notable bonus. We particularly cherished Rockset’s autoscaling capabilities, which harmoniously balanced price and performance to provide a seamless experience, showcasing another value-add feature of this fully managed platform that won our hearts.
We further relied on Rockset’s robust technical foundation, primarily driven by. As a key-value store, RocksDB excels in terms of both speed and scalability, consistently delivering exceptional performance. During Facebook’s rapid growth period, the tool provided comprehensive analytics support. On a similar note, Rockset has engineered RocksDB integration to fill the gap left by Elasticsearch’s absence of this functionality.
By leveraging Rockset’s capabilities, we can deploy it not only for real-time email personalization but also empower our comprehensive data dashboard for customers to track the results of their email campaigns. As a direct consequence of integrating Rockset’s capabilities with our robust data governance framework, we are confident that knowledge privacy will be consistently upheld to meet the stringent requirements of our SOC 2 compliance standards.
Time flies, doesn’t it? As does Rockset. The once-innovative music streaming service has lost its momentum and become a relic of the past. Its user base has dwindled, and the competition is eating away at what’s left. It seems like only yesterday that Rockset was the go-to platform for discovering new artists and staying up-to-date with the latest releases.
Within a week, we had decided to switch our analytics engine from Enabled by this seamless integration, we were able to go live with Rockset just two weeks later.
With Our Good Banners’ lightning-fast speed, thanks to Rockset, customers enjoy swift results: a remarkable 90% of their banners are delivered in just 100 milliseconds or under. Customers receive the remaining inventory refreshed in near real-time, typically within a fraction of a second. With Rockset’s comprehensive, fully managed platform, Carl and his team were able to liberate themselves from the tedious task of operational maintenance. When combined with its reduced administrative burdens.
Our buyer analytics dashboard has been significantly enhanced with Rockset’s integration. By combining Firehose with Rockset, you can efficiently and quickly ingest substantial amounts of data to enrich your knowledge within the platform. To balance query response time with costs, we deliberately set a 15-minute SLA to avoid frequent hits on S3, thereby maintaining efficiency while meeting performance expectations.
To achieve agile scalability and cost-effectiveness has been a primary objective in enhancing our analytics capabilities. With Rockset, we acquired a comprehensive suite of advanced features, exceeding our expectations in multiple ways. We’re thrilled to see Rockset expanding its support for machine learning. Although our existing marketing campaign choice engine relies on machine learning-trained algorithms, its development was hindered by the high cost and complexity of incorporating diverse data sets. That’s not a challenge with Rockset, whose natural ability to aggregate knowledge as it’s ingested eliminates difficulties.
As we look to leverage Rockset’s capabilities, we’re excited to integrate its insights into not only our customer emails but also our newly launched Good Banners for SMS and text messages, as well as push and in-app notifications on your mobile device or tablet. Rockset will likely evolve rapidly into our primary hub for cutting-edge, real-time analytics.
Rockset has proven to be an unmitigated triumph in our portfolio. After running Elasticsearch as a temporary backup solution for two months, we finally shut it down for good and have not revisited the idea.
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