MarTech and customer engagement
A plain-English tour of the marketing-technology stack: how customer data is collected and unified, the plumbing that moves it, and how cross-channel messages get personalized and sent. The field notes behind the customer-engagement work on this site.
Live demos
See the concepts in action
Workers AI · live
Personalization engine
Pick a customer and fire an event. A model on the edge writes the personalized email, SMS, and push, live.
Try it →Interactive
Journey visualizer
Watch a customer travel an automated journey, then flip a branch and watch them reroute live.
Open it →Solution design
Solution design teardown
A full worked Iterable rollout for a fictional prospect: architecture, journeys, KPIs, and a phased plan.
Read it →MarTech Foundations
The map of the marketing-technology stack: what a CDP is, how it differs from a warehouse and a sending platform, and the plumbing that moves customer data between them.
What is MarTech? A map of the customer-engagement stack
Marketing technology is just the set of software a company uses to find, understand, and talk to its customers. The jargon hides a simple shape: collect data, unify it, decide what to say, and deliver it. This is the map.
Read → 7 min readWhat is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
A CDP is the tool that turns a pile of scattered customer data into one trustworthy profile per person, and makes that profile available to every other tool. Here is what that means and where the line sits.
Read → 6 min readCDP vs data warehouse vs ESP: who does what
Three tools get confused constantly because they all "hold customer data." The difference is what each is for: storing everything, unifying the customer, or sending the message.
Read → 6 min readETL, reverse ETL, and iPaaS: the plumbing
Data is useless where it cannot be reached. These four acronyms are the pipes that move customer data to where the work happens. Direction is the whole story.
Read →Channels, Journeys & Personalization
How messages actually reach people: the channels and what makes email deliver, why mobile needs an SDK, and how journeys and AI personalize at scale.
Channels and deliverability: getting the message there
A channel is the medium a message travels on. Platforms differ less on the list of channels and more on getting one of them, email, to actually land in the inbox. Both halves matter.
Read → 5 min readMobile SDKs and push: why an app needs one
You cannot send a push notification straight to a phone. Only Apple and Google can do that. A mobile SDK is the piece that connects your app, and the person using it, to the platform that wants to reach them.
Read → 7 min readCustomer journeys and orchestration
A campaign is one message. A journey is the automated, multi-step path a customer travels, with waiting, branching, and sends along the way. This is the orchestration layer where a marketer actually works.
Read → 7 min readCross-channel personalization at scale (and where AI fits)
Personalization at scale means tailoring content, timing, and channel for each person automatically, without hand-writing a million messages. It runs on two different engines: templating and AI. Keeping them straight is the whole skill.
Read →New to this? Start with What is MarTech? for the map, then What is a CDP?