Maven of the Month: An Interview with Ben Gilbert

Ben Gilbert, Director of Marketing Technology at At Home, has a simple philosophy: say yes first and figure out the how second. As a power user of Movable Ink, he has helped turn At Home's email program into a living, personalized experience that keeps pace with the brand's fast-moving evolution across tens of thousands of products.

In this Q&A, Ben shares how he empowers his campaign team through sharper code and offers advice for marketers looking to dive into data-driven personalization without overthinking it.

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

I always say that Movable Ink brings the *sizzle* to our email marketing program. It takes the fancy bells and whistles that enhance our emails, from sliced images and static tables, and turns them into living, breathing pieces of content tailored to each customer, all with one set of code. It's a key factor in helping us retain our branding elements, introduce varied products from our tens of thousands of SKUs, and retarget folks based on their unique style and favorite categories.

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How has Movable Ink helped you in your career?

Movable Ink gives me the confidence to say "yes" to almost any creative or business challenge brought to me by our channel and design teams. When they have an idea to try something new, I inevitably give them an enthusiastic, "Yes! We can do that with Movable Ink." Plus, my CSM often has strategic thought leadership resources at the ready, which I can share with our folks as a guide on how to do something comparable within our brand guidelines.

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What's your greatest efficiency hack for working smarter not harder?

I love finding ways to combine the power of our ESP's custom coding capabilities with Movable Ink's dynamic fields and web cropping. We can create a powerful, versatile code snippet where just a simple toggle change at the top of the code renders a completely different output below. By passing customer-specific parameters, we tell Movable Ink to do something unique and tailored to that individual. Being able to hand that code over to our campaign managers, who can confidently implement those modules, means we let the technology do the heavy lifting once we feed it a few attributes we know about the customer and their interests.

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Favorite project you’ve worked on recently?

Our business has been going through a brand transformation meant to highlight the value our products bring and the unique elements that make them stand out. This has led to a greater focus on fonts, color styling, and photography that seems to evolve every couple of weeks. By using Movable Ink's web cropping functionality, we built custom modules within our ESP that crop category-level photography directly from our website and pull it into our emails. That photography is already guaranteed to be approved by our brand experts, so we can confidently crop from the site knowing the assets are brand-right, even when those standards are evolving. We have done the same with our product catalog, allowing us to inject popular SKUs into any email just by dropping in a code snippet and pasting in a particular URL from our site to crop from.

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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?

Just go for it. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. We can sometimes fall into the trap of overthinking each of our emails as works of art because of how much effort and passion goes into them, but it's important to keep the customer's perspective: the email in their inbox is just a bite-sized message they're hoping brings them a little bit of joy or information. There's always an opportunity to try something new, iterate on it, learn from your attempts, and keep tweaking. Start small and build on it from there.

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What’s one thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I am obsessed with throwing frisbees in the woods. Those in-the-know call it "disc golf." What started as a curiosity a few years ago has turned into staying up too late watching YouTube videos about frisbee physics and carving out time in my schedule to play tournaments around the Twin Cities. It's been a fun new form of exercise and a great hobby to meet cool, new people.

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Want to hear from more Movable Mavens? Check out the interviews below!