Movable Ink Gets Insights 50% Faster Using Amazon Athena

• Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

• Sales & Marketing

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
• Data Science Services

Movable Ink’s Intelligent Content Platform supports real-time personalization of email campaigns using up-to-date information from websites, social-media platforms, and APIs, as well as contextual data about device type, weather, recent user activity, and more. Additionally, it enables customers to analyze data about their users to make better marketing decisions. This process incorporates large and unpredictable amounts of data from a wide variety of sources, making the scale, elasticity, and connected nature of cloud services a logical fit. To meet these challenges, Movable Ink migrated its entire production environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2015, taking advantage of multiple regions and availability zones to provide redundancy, resilience, and scalability. In addition to the data and content used in personalized email messages, Movable Ink captures data on user behavior after users receive those messages, such as whether they opened the email, what items they clicked on, and what they browsed and purchased on websites as a result.

Movable Ink is a company that provides real-time personalization of marketing emails based on a wide range of user, device, and contextual data, driving higher response rates and better customer experiences. The company uses the Amazon Athena serverless query service to analyze data stored in Amazon S3, gaining insights to improve results for customers’ marketing campaigns. Movable Ink’s Intelligent Content Platform helps email marketers create unique content for customers using any content, data, or business logic to improve campaign performance and deliver innovative customer experiences.

Movable Ink uses Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) clusters to capture data about user actions and push it to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Movable Ink has been collecting data on user actions since 2011, and this database grows by up to 100 GB per day. To reduce time to insight, optimize costs, and increase flexibility for its analytics, the company recently adopted the serverless Amazon Athena query service. Amazon Athena enables interactive querying of large-scale data sets in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It eliminates the need for complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs to prepare data for analysis, and delivers most results within seconds. Since the company began using Amazon Athena, it has realized both cost savings and improved performance for analytics related to user actions.

• Improved performance by 50% compared to persistent cluster solution
• Provided analysts with the flexibility to adapt queries on the fly for richer insights
• Adopted pay-as-you-go querying to optimize costs

• Reduced costs by $15,000 per month