VP of Product Joe Catrambone considers mobile marketing a “gateway” channel to full immersion.
Catrambone and his colleagues at Vibes specialize in using consumer data to activate engaging, personalized mobile experiences for a wide range of global brands. The company’s mobile engagement platform enables businesses to grow, activate and optimize consumer experiences with timely, relevant, high-volume mobile messaging at a global scale.
This process — bridging the gap between brands and consumers — is what drew Catrambone to the organization. Having worked on logistics at Wayfair, he was familiar with handling immense amounts of data that accompany the e-commerce sector.
Yet what Catrambone wasn’t expecting to find at Vibes was data that actually touches people’s lives.
“In some cases, the consumers we’re targeting are us,” he said.
Through close-knit collaboration and robust technology, the teams at Vibes ensure their customers not only reap the benefits of their product but also fully understand how — and when — consumers are engaging with their brand.
Creating Seamless Consumer Experiences
This certainly isn’t a one-team task. Catrambone and his product team work closely with various departments, including the mobile engagement services team.
That’s where Victoria Haas comes in. As senior mobile engagement manager, she serves as a technical support partner for Vibes’ customers.
For Haas, the cohesion between departments contrasts starkly with past professional experiences. Having previously worked for a third-party delivery service provider where departments were siloed, she didn’t have the chance to interact with other teams and gain visibility into the full impact of her work.
Now, Haas gets to watch her team’s work influence and impact other departments while playing a pivotal role in ensuring customers’ needs are addressed.
“This was the first time I had really seen a company take action to deliver the best services, whether it’s from experts in our field or customers giving us feedback,” she said.
To manifest customer success, Haas’ team works in tandem with the customer success department, where Michelle Pierce serves as customer strategy manager.
Pierce’s team conducts bi-annual executive business reviews (or EBRs) with each customer, during which time they’ll review the mobile program’s results and offer strategic, data-driven recommendations to help them optimize their mobile marketing strategies further. With support from the mobile engagement services team, Pierce and her peers offer customers complete visibility into their data and program performance.
Catrambone said that these EBR meetings are far from a one-size-fits-all solution.
“Every single person involved is focused on that specific customer,” he said. “We try to make sure that our customers understand how their individual campaigns are performing, and we want our product to showcase areas where they can improve.”
EQUAL ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE
“I’ve never been at a company that was more transparent and inclusive than Vibes,” Catrambone said. This translates to the way in which employees connect — and collaborate. “Everyone is entitled to whatever information they need, which is why it’s such a great place to work,” Catrambone said.
Pierce added that this flow of knowledge is facilitated by the company’s “open-door” culture. It’s common to find one of the company’s founders on a customer call or answering employees’ questions.
‘Breaking Through the Digital Noise’
With so much support and tailored analysis taking place behind the scenes, the Vibes team is able to “break through the digital noise” — in other words, deliver mobile messages that stand above the rest.
A prime example: sending mobile messages to consumers using their first name.
“It makes them feel like they somehow know you,” Haas said.
Yet the process doesn’t end there. Haas said the company also offers send time optimization, which enables brands to gauge which time of day a consumer is most likely to engage with a message.
According to Catrambone, send time optimization has led to more than a 20% increase in click-through rate, which measures the number of unique clicks on a URL included in the messages.
The company also helps brands gauge how quickly their messages are opened. For Haas, understanding the difference between email and SMS marketing is key to strengthening the message open rate.
“In the past, a lot of customers would replicate what they were sending over email and send it via SMS,” Haas said. “They should be sending different content, and that’s a new idea that our customers are really excited about.”
In Catrambone’s mind, the company’s SMS marketing services are simply one component of a holistic, mobile ecosystem.
“We ‘break through the noise’ in a way that helps our customers seamlessly tie in other channels of value,” he said.
“We ‘break through the noise’ in a way that helps our customers seamlessly tie in other channels of value.”
Doing More With Less
Vibes has spent the past 25 years proving its value to top enterprise brands. Now, the company wants to do even more by reimagining the user experience.
How will leadership accomplish this? By doing more with less — fewer screens, to be precise.
“The client experience should require as few screens as possible,” Catrambone said. “We should be able to automate most of the tasks that marketers see during the day.”
While a solution for this is still in the works, customers can expect to have an experience they won’t find with other martech platforms.
“The goal is to transform the marketer into someone who has a lot of time to engage creatively with their consumer base and doesn’t have to worry about some of the mundane minutiae of day-to-day life,” Catrambone said.
According to Pierce, customers often express their desire to deliver quality consumer experiences at scale. And with increased automation and the proven ability to successfully deliver high volumes of messages within seconds, Vibes’s platform will allow them to do just that.
For Haas, all of this current and future progress ties back to one of Vibes’ core values: a relentless focus on the customer. While the company’s software speaks for itself, it’s the customer-first mindset that lends them a competitive edge.
“At the end of the day, that’s what is going to set us apart,” Haas said.