Leverage Twilio Engage and Movable Ink to power dynamic, personalized content – and customer loyalty

This recipe walks you through how to leverage Movable Ink within Twilio Segment’s marketing automation platform, Engage. This dynamic duo of Movable Ink and Twilio Segment powers personalized experiences for your customers within the context of their behavior and place in their journey.

Kelly Rogers Made by Kelly Rogers

What do you need?

  • Segment workspace with Engage

  • Sendgrid or Twilio SMS as a Destination

  • Movable Ink

Easily personalize customer experiences with first-party data

With a huge integration catalog and plenty of no-code features, Segment provides easy-to-maintain capability to your teams with minimal engineering effort. Great data doesn't have to be hard work!

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Nearly half of consumers say they’ll become repeat buyers if they have a personalized shopping experience with a brand, yet less than half of companies personalize communications based on real-time customer behavior. Even less do so exclusively leveraging first-party data*. That means missed opportunities – and missed ROI – for brands. 

However, leveraging your first-party data within Twilio Engage alongside Movable Ink’s content personalization capabilities unlocks a realm of possibilities. This is done by easily integrating Segment’s Profile API with Movable Ink to import a customer’s latest profile traits that you can use to render personalized content based on their attributes across channels. What’s more, Movable Ink can also integrate with product catalogs or other customer data via .CSV uploads, webhooks, APIs, and more to bring in even more data to power your content in real-time.

In this recipe, you’ll see how Movable Ink and Twilio Engage work together to do just that by catering content to customers based on their loyalty status and other traits.

NOTE: You’ll need to make sure that you are a Twilio Engage Premiere customer with your identity resolution settings configured in order to leverage this recipe. If you don’t currently have Engage Premiere enabled as a part of your account, reach out to your customer success manager or, click here for more information if you’re a prospective customer. 
*From Segment’s “The State of Personalization 2022”

Step 1: Setup Twilio Engage in Segment (One-Time Setup)

First, you’ll need to sign into your Segment account. Next, navigate to “Engage” on the left-side of your screen and select “Engage Settings” in the drop-down menu. From there, you will be prompted to connect your SendGrid and/or Twilio SMS accounts. Step-by-step instructions for doing so can be found in our helpful documentation here.

 

Twilio Engage

 

Having these accounts connected will enable you to create campaigns directly within the Engage Journeys interface vs. having to navigate to the native platform (the less tabs the better, right?).

Step 2: Add Segment’s Profile API to Movable Ink (One-Time Setup)

Now that you have Engage configured in Segment, it’s time to leverage those rich, 360-degree customer profiles (or what we call “golden profiles”) and their traits within Movable Ink to dynamically populate content. We will do this by adding Segment’s Profile API as a Data Source within your Movable Ink account which will bring in those profile traits.

 

Moveable Ink Demo

 

You’ll need a few pieces of information from your Segment account to set this up and can follow along with our Profile API documentation, too. 

  • Profile API Traits Endpoint: As you’ll see in the screenshot below, you’ll need the Segment Profile API traits endpoint, which is https://profiles.segment.com/v1/spaces/[namespaceID]/collections/users/profiles/user_id:[user_id]/traits?limit=100. Movable Ink has privacy top-of-mind and requires that no PII passes through their platform, so you can set up the endpoint with “?includes=property1” to make sure you’re only calling traits that do not contain that sensitive information.

    • Note that you can sub out “user_id” for another external ID that you have configured within Segment, too.

  • Segment Space ID: This can be found in your “Profile Settings” under the “API Access” tab to paste into the “Test Value for [namespaceID]” field. 

  • Segment API Token: In the API Access tab, you will also generate an API Token which you will copy and paste into the “Username” field within Movable Ink.

     

Configure and preview API response

 

To make sure everything is working properly, you will need to grab an actual user_id from a user profile within Segment to paste into “Test Value for [user_id].” You can do this by navigating to the “Profile Explorer” within Segment and selecting an actual user_id, such as the below. Movable Ink should then give you a successful API response to confirm everything is set up correctly.

 

Identities

 

Once Movable Ink confirms a successful API response, select the step “Add data fields from your API.” Here, you can select the Segment Profile traits that you want to dynamically leverage or populate within Movable Ink and label them as such. This is where you can bring in traits such as loyalty status, loyalty tier, favorite product categories, and more from Segment.

 

Add data fields from an API

 

Once you complete this setup, it is time to go back into Segment and create your loyalty journey in Twilio Engage!

Step 3: Create a Loyalty Journey in Twilio Engage

Go into Twilio Engage and select “Create Journey” to build a loyalty campaign leveraging your rich, first-party data from Segment and the email capabilities of SendGrid (or Twilio if you want to use SMS). 

 

Twilio Engage

 

In your journey, specify your criteria for your loyalty journey within Engage. You can create separate branches for current loyalty members vs. non-members as seen below, or separate it out as it makes most sense for your business.

 

Journey condition

 

Once you’ve specified your criteria and are at the step in your journey where you’re ready to send an email to your customers, select the “Send an Email” option within the journey builder.

 

Create journey

 

You’ll have the option to either import an existing HTML template or use Twilio Engage’s drag-and-drop tool to quickly build an email from scratch.

 

Visual editor experience

 

Step 4: Build Dynamic Content Blocks in Movable Ink

Movable Ink’s Studio provides the ultimate flexibility and customization to create dynamically powered images based upon user behavior and traits that have been sent to Movable Ink via Segment’s Profile API.

For example, the fields outlined in blue will be populated at the time of email open, specific to that user. So this user will see this content appear with their name, their loyalty point total, and their favorite product category – all traits imported from Segment. Additionally, Movable Ink’s integration with your product catalog allows you to dynamically populate an image of a recommended product relating to the favorite product category from Segment, as well as the number of those items in stock.

 

Moveable Ink Demo

 

This level of personalization will let your customers know that you understand them and value them to further drive loyalty with your brand. 

Step 5: Copy & paste your Movable Ink Creative Tags into Engage

Once you’re done and happy with your dynamic creative, copy and paste the email creative tag (or the image URL) into its desired placement within the email in Twilio Engage.

 

Moveable Ink Demo

 

Note that Movable Ink can be used in channels other than email as well, such as push, SMS, in-app messaging, and more, which means you can power these personalized elements across your entire marketing ecosystem. 

Wrapping up

This recipe is just a small example of what Segment and Movable Ink can accomplish together when it comes to omni-channel personalization. We’ve outlined what this recipe achieved below, but if you want to see how you can further tailor a journey like this to your own business needs, reach out to either your Segment customer success team or your Movable Ink client experience team for support.

Recipe Summary

  • Set up your SendGrid and Twilio SMS Accounts within Twilio Engage

  • Connect your 360 degree profiles within Segment to Movable Ink via the Profile API

  • Create an loyalty journey within Twilio Engage

  • Build content blocks within Movable Ink powered by a user’s most recent behavior and trait

  • Export MI creative tags to your email within Twilio Engage

     

Getting started is easy

Start connecting your data with Segment.