Zembula and Rockset Power Real-Time Marketing Email Personalization
Customer Company Size
Startup
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Smart Banners™
- Rockset
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon Kinesis Firehose
- RocksDB
Tech Stack
- Cloud-native services
- Real-time analytics
- SQL queries
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Revenue Growth
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Retail
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Zembula is a venture-backed startup based in Portland, Oregon, specializing in real-time customer personalization technology. Founded in 2013 by CTO Carl Thorner and his team, Zembula has developed innovative solutions that enable companies to deliver dynamic and hyper-relevant emails to their customers. Their flagship product, Smart Banners™, allows businesses to personalize email content in real-time, using up-to-the-moment customer data to tailor offers and information to individual recipients. This technology has been adopted by some of the most innovative and fast-growing online retailers, including Purple, Thrive Causemetics, and Manscaped, as well as travel and hospitality companies like Vail Resorts and financial service companies. Zembula's solutions have led to significant revenue increases for their clients, with promotional emails seeing a 10-17 percent boost in revenue. Despite their success, Zembula faced challenges with their legacy infrastructure, prompting them to seek a more scalable and cost-effective solution.
The Challenge
Zembula faced significant challenges with their legacy analytics engine, which was based on Elasticsearch. As their business grew, the demand for real-time email personalization increased, leading to scalability and cost issues. The existing infrastructure was unable to handle the spiky nature of their email campaigns, resulting in underutilized resources during low-traffic periods and overwhelmed systems during high-traffic periods. The cost of maintaining numerous Elasticsearch servers on Amazon EC2 was high, and the engineering effort required to optimize Elasticsearch for efficient data storage was a significant drain on resources. The situation worsened when Zembula expanded their Smart Banners™ to all promotional emails, causing a 10x increase in traffic within three months. They needed a more scalable, cost-effective, and low-ops solution to support their growing business needs.
The Solution
To address the challenges with their legacy analytics engine, Zembula explored alternatives to Elasticsearch. Initially, they considered ChaosSearch as a drop-in replacement, but it did not meet their performance requirements. Fortunately, they discovered Rockset, a real-time analytics platform, in February 2022. Rockset offered the scalability, cost-effectiveness, and low-ops features that Zembula needed. With Rockset's autoscaling capabilities and support for complex SQL queries, Zembula was able to deploy it for both instant email personalization and powering their big data dashboard for customer campaign tracking. Rockset's technical foundation, based on the RocksDB database, provided the speed and scalability required to handle Zembula's spiky email traffic. Within a week, Zembula decided to switch from Elasticsearch to Rockset, and they went live with the new analytics engine just two weeks later. The transition to Rockset resulted in faster Smart Banners™ delivery, with 90 percent of them being delivered in 100 milliseconds or less. The fully managed platform also reduced the operational burden on Zembula's technical team, making Rockset 3x more cost-effective than Elasticsearch.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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