Establishing regional Adobe campaign capability for NOW TV sees an all-time high number of products per customer
NOW TV Ireland was established 4 years ago, but due to its size, had always leveraged the UK’s Adobe Campaign resources. Thanks to recent growth (helped by Game of Thrones success) they decided to establish their own capability and CRM strategy. Merkle implemented Adobe Campaign for NOW TV, maintains the platform and has Campaign builders embedded in the UK team. This made Merkle the natural choice to support Ireland as they established their own capabilities away from the UK.
Challenge
A number of challenges needed to be overcome in order to get Adobe Campaign up and running for NOW TV Ireland. Firstly, the team lacked technical experience – everyone was either a totally new user of Adobe Campaign or had limited experience. Practical experience also needed to be developed, with the creation of processes and ways of working with the new technology. Lastly, we would need to build the team’s confidence – especially as they didn’t want to make mistakes whilst moving away from being supported by the established UK team.
Approach
Taking into account the varying skill levels already present in the team, we delivered both foundational and intermediate Adobe Campaign training to NOW TV. The intermediate training sessions were tailored to the team based on our knowledge of the types of campaigns, the data model and the processes that NOW TV UK has in place (e.g. briefing and QA processes). This ensured consistency between the two markets.
Next we provided follow on support. This support delivered one person for two days per month, scheduled around the release plan to support before campaigns went live. The Merkle consultant primarily helped with quality assurance (QA), ensuring that there were no mistakes before campaigns were pushed live. They were also on hand to answer any technical questions, review workflows, check typologies and generally boost confidence.
Results
We set the following objectives after the training was delivered and all were met or exceeded:
Getting the basics right (rather than looking to create anything too sophisticated in terms of campaigns)
- We completed all BAU campaigns, ensuring that the client could transition smoothly onto their new platform.
Grow the team’s confidence with independent QAing (whilst also working towards an objective of adopting all QAing locally by the end of the quarter)
- The team are now successfully completing the QA process themselves. There have been zero mistakes in 20 campaigns to date.
Create the most relevant filtered data for Ireland, allowing the client to build workflows that start with ROI data only. This mitigates any risk of UK data flowing through.
- We worked to make certain all campaigns are specific to Ireland and the QA process now includes a check for this.
Create a dedicated ROI typology for Ireland emails, to further safeguard against mails going to non-ROI recipients
- Campaign building and QA process ensures that the UK and Ireland-specific typology is sufficient
The success of the initiative is clear: Q3 2020 campaign activity exceeded total 2019 output, and by Q3 end, products per customer finished at an all-time high.
“The team at Merkle were an integral part in supporting the launch of locally run Adobe Campaign activity for us. Through bespoke training days and real-life QA guidance, they were able to help build our new team’s confidence in the relevant tools and processes. This allowed us to unlock CRM activity, previously unutilised, that has already proven very effective in driving our key business metrics.”
Ronan McCarthy
Digital & CRM Controller
8.2%
of total Q3 sales were directly contributed to by the campaigns
Keys to success
- Merkle had extensive experience with the platform and the nuances of the client
- Clear objectives set from the start
- Getting the basics right - we focused on accuracy before we tried adding any complexity
- Ongoing support helped the team grow in confidence, rather than large chunks of cost followed by a cliff edge
