Beyond the Book: How Scribd, Inc. Writes a New Chapter in Engagement with Smart Ingest

Scribd, Inc. is a premier digital content company that has evolved its offerings into a distinct portfolio of digital platforms. Its services provide users access to a vast collection of content, now distributed across specialized apps: Everand, which hosts the subscription library of over one million professionally published titles (audiobooks, eBooks); Scribd, which maintains its original function as a user-powered document-sharing platform; and Slideshare, a repository for professional presentations. With its core reading product, Everand, and its social reading platform, Fable, the company competes directly with industry giants like Audible (in the subscription audiobook space) and Goodreads (in the book-tracking and social community space). 

Leading Scribd, Inc.’s strategic collaboration with Iterable is Aroash Solomon, Senior Director of Growth, along with key team members, including Alyssa Van Arsdale, who spearheads lifecycle and product marketing strategy across all four brands. Their mission is to harness the power of technology to strengthen brand connections, streamline initiatives, and drive growth across Scribd Inc.’s robust portfolio.

Scribd, Inc. previously contended with a complicated and time-consuming data pipeline that slowed its ability to adapt to emerging data needs. Introducing Iterable’s Smart Ingest, co-developed with Hightouch, fundamentally changed this dynamic, making data processes more agile.

“Before Iterable’s Smart Ingest, adding a new data field required several weeks of engineering work, along with up to a month for scoping out new data requests. Now, with Smart Ingest, we can implement new data efficiently from Databricks (our data warehouse), saving significant time and resources,” explained Aroash, Senior Director of Growth at Scribd, Inc.

Crucially, this shift to Smart Ingest delivered a significant, quantifiable ROI: Scribd, Inc. saved $91,250 a year ($250 a day) with this efficiency shift.

Smart Ingest makes your customer data instantly marketing-ready. Instead of waiting on engineers or wrestling with complex APIs, marketers can pull fresh data directly from their warehouse into Iterable in minutes. The result? A seamless, real-time flow of insights you can use right away for precise segmentation and personalized campaigns so every message reaches the right person, at the right moment.

This streamlined process empowers Scribd, Inc. to address pressing data priorities without being held back by engineering delays. With faster access to critical information unlocked by Smart Ingest, they’ve improved their campaign segmentation capabilities, allowing for more precise audience targeting and personalization. This strategic advantage has made their marketing efforts both more effective and efficient. Scribd, Inc.’s collaboration between data, analytics, and marketing has highlighted the meaningful operational improvements enabled by Iterable technology.

For Everand, a brand launched in 2023 to expand Scribd, Inc.’s suite of offerings, Iterable’s Smart Ingest became the key to unlocking a more effective push notification strategy. As part of this effort, Everand designed and launched a new onboarding activation campaign that leveraged the enriched data flow to help new users quickly experience value and build reading habits.

The campaign included a sequence of five emails and one push notification, triggered by specific user actions during the first seven days of the trial period.

The results validated the data-driven approach: within the first two quarters of the launch, engagement increased with no rise in cancellations or unsubscribes. Users exposed to these activation emails and push notifications demonstrated stronger reading habits and higher conversion rates:

• Reading Time Increased: Users read +0.35 minutes more per session.
• Reading Habits Built: Users were 1% more likely to start reading overall.
• Conversion Improved: Push notification open-to-read conversion was 89%. 
• Upsell Success: Adoption of the premium Plus plan rose by 1.4% compared to the holdout group.

This activation series demonstrated that timely, value-driven messaging can increase engagement and conversion, helping users discover value faster and stay subscribed longer—a critical part of Everand’s growth initiatives.

Scribd, Inc. is preparing to implement Iterable’s Embedded Messaging capabilities to further boost user engagement across all of its brands. Presently, even straightforward updates, such as implementing educational banners on their website and mobile app, demand significant engineering resources and can take up to a week per platform to execute.

“Embedded Messaging will remove operational friction and give us the flexibility to adapt education in real-time,” shared Aroash.

The team is excited to use Embedded Messaging to enhance product education and drive key outcomes such as user acquisition and activation. By guiding users from web sign-ups to the Scribd app’s more feature-rich mobile experience, the company hopes to nurture stronger reading habits and open new engagement possibilities, including mobile push notifications. With plans to integrate embedded messaging for both web and app platforms, Scribd, Inc. aims to create a seamless user journey that aligns with its overarching goals of bolstering user loyalty and driving lifecycle growth across its full portfolio of brands.

Through innovations like Smart Ingest, AI, and Embedded Messaging, Scribd, Inc. continues to demonstrate its commitment to delivering dynamic, personalized experiences for readers. These collaborative efforts with Iterable underscore Scribd Inc.’s dedication to efficiency, user engagement, and forward-thinking solutions. As the digital reading landscape evolves, Scribd, Inc. is well-positioned to lead the way, building stronger connections with users while maintaining its innovative edge.