To power more effective email marketing campaigns, the company wanted to build an email center of excellence, which would be customer centric, enable centralized email delivery, and deliver dynamic email campaigns. This meant expanding the footprint on Salesforce Marketing Cloud for several lines of business.

Merkle was enlisted to help integrate marketing data and campaigns from the brand’s multiple lines of business (e.g., host, guest) onto the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Merkle also helped the company launch an email center of excellence by building business kits for centralized delivery of email. Major operational hurdles were overcome when building technical kits to launch lines of business on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Launching an interactive host-recognition campaign:

• The company wanted to send recognition to thank its highly rated hosts who meet specific requirements, including volume, reviews, cancellations, customer experience, and other attributes. This highly complex, interactive email campaign needed to be perfectly executed across 32 languages, be built quickly, feature dynamic content, and be tested for quality.
• Merkle set up and launched the entire campaign on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which segmented out the hospitality company’s best customers, pulled and integrated data for personalized email content, and leveraged Merkle’s proprietary methods to speed execution.
• The email campaign enabled hosts to share a personalized GIF across multiple social media platforms with their own hosting statistics. The GIFs were unique to each user, as were other dynamic elements of the email, including the name, the number of countries or cities from which they had hosted guests, the number of 2020 guests they’d hosted, and the year they started hosting. The solution allowed hosts to easily share their personalized GIF to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn directly from the email or by downloading it from a cloud page built on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.