Dell Technologies, Inc. has been undergoing a multi-year transformation to optimize and influence its customer experience through customer journey management. Merkle has been involved since the beginning as an advisor and transformation strategy team. One of the major findings from the project identified digital data as a key component of customer journey management.

The challenges of this campaign were:

• Transitioning from a traditional broad-reach and targeted marketing approach to a customer journey management approach
• Addressing multiple countries in Europe in a systematic and compliant way

To transition to customer journey management, digital data needed to be integrated into Dell Technologies, Inc.'s marketing database. Merkle proposed its digital data integration (DDI) approach in conjunction with existing customer data integration (CDI) to stage, match, and integrate data from the company’s weblog feed. In the initial pilot, several use cases for targeting, insights, and measurement were identified to test and measure results.

The initial build lasted two months. This process included tuning the DDI engine and an assessment against the different use cases, followed by six months of using the defined customer journeys to segment accounts and contacts for different business units.

We tested the solution with a Future-Ready Enterprise campaign that utilized digital data to drive results and identified tuning needed for the DDI engine to ensure correct page tagging.

Based on its pilot, the digital data integration (DDI) engine has been deployed to 21 European countries and is fully embedded in Dell Technologies, Inc.'s marketing programs including email, targeted display, lead scoring, outbound telemarketing, sales intelligence, and sales account plays. It is the combination of first-party data with online data that enables powerful segmentation for the business’ customer journeys and campaign personalization, which continues to improve with new sources as they are added. Digital data integration has become one of the underpinning pillars of Dell Technologies, Inc.'s marketing transformation by improving sales and marketing performance overall.