Maven of the Month: An Interview with Julie Gibson

Julie Gibson, Lead Email Digital Developer at Southwest Airlines, blends technical expertise with a marketer’s instinct for meaningful customer experiences. As an internal Movable Ink subject matter expert, she has helped optimize real-time, data-driven personalization across Southwest’s email program, from dynamic fare updates to highly tailored Year-in-Review campaigns for Rapid Rewards® Members.

In this Q&A, Julie shares how she’s elevated personalization at scale, empowered her team through training and collaboration, and built a program that continues to drive engagement, conversion, and measurable impact.

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Favorite project you’ve worked on recently?

One of my favorite recent projects was refreshing our Year-in-Review email for 2025. It was a great opportunity to apply techniques we learned through the Movable Ink Learning Hub and bring a fresh, more dynamic design to life.

We incorporated several new personalization elements, including dynamic images representing each recipient's top destination, loyalty status indicators, and a shareable social graphic. It made the email more engaging and relevant for our Rapid Rewards® Members, and it was incredibly rewarding to see how our updates elevated the overall experience.

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How do you describe Movable Ink and its value to your business to another marketer?

Movable Ink helps us elevate personalization in our email marketing in a way that’s both scalable and impactful. We use it to power dynamic elements like countdown timers, real‑time fares, personalized destination imagery, and targeted content.

By making each message more relevant to each customer, we’re able to enhance the experience while also improving engagement, conversion, and overall ROI for our email program.

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How would you describe your growth as a marketer over the past few years and what’s your proudest accomplishment thus far?

Over the past few years, I’ve grown significantly as a marketer by deepening my expertise in Movable Ink and stepping into the role of internal subject matter expert at Southwest Airlines. I’ve had the opportunity to partner across our Marketing and Digital organization, consulting on new capability requests, leading module development initiatives, and providing training and support for our broader team of email developers and business owners.

Through this work, I’ve helped increase personalization, maximize our use of the Movable Ink platform, and streamline our email build processes, all while seeing improvements in customer engagement and conversion across our email program. I’m incredibly proud of how far our program has come and the impact we’ve made for the organization.

One of my proudest moments was having the opportunity to speak at Think Summit in 2024. It was a meaningful milestone that reflected both my personal growth and the progress we’ve made as a team.

How do you get the most out of a partnership with a company like Movable Ink?

Building strong relationships, investing in resources, and prioritizing training have been essential to getting the most out of our partnership with Movable Ink.

Over time, we’ve developed a close working relationship with our Movable Ink team, which makes it easy to brainstorm, collaborate, and bring new use cases to life. Internally, dedicating resources to enable new capabilities has helped us move beyond our day‑to‑day promotional calendar and implement new ideas more quickly.

The Learning Hub has also been a valuable tool for upskilling our team. It’s enabled us to build more Movable Ink‑powered content in‑house and focus our service hours on more advanced, complex builds that require deeper expertise.

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What advice would you give to marketers who are looking to utilize real-time, data-driven personalization across their campaigns but are unsure where to start?

‍I always recommend starting with a phased approach. Begin with lower‑lift personalization opportunities that help you quickly prove value.

Start by identifying the data you already have available and choose one or two simple use cases you can execute with it. This could be something like a countdown timer to drive urgency during a sale or creative personalized with first‑party data you've collected.

Once you’ve mastered these foundational elements, you can begin incorporating additional data sources to build more complex, nuanced personalization and targeting. This approach helps teams build confidence while scaling their efforts in a sustainable way over time.

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