Challenge

One of the biggest overarching problems the James Hardie team faced was ongoing issues with their Marketo instance, specifically with Salesforce sync errors. They were spending more time fixing things in Marketo than progressing, which is oftentimes a tell-tale sign that it’s time for an audit.

James Hardie was looking for assistance in the following areas:

Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection

 

There were several action items to prepare for the launch of the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection:

 

Deploy announcement email: Promote the launch of the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection to the database.

 

Redesign/update the existing Sample Request drip program in Marketo: Add the new siding options offered with the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection.

 

Build brochure download program: Embed a Marketo form on the Magnolia Home | James Hardie web page to offer a new brochure depicting the collection.

 

Marketo Audit

 

The James Hardie team partnered with MERGE to ensure their instance was as optimized as possible before the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection. Not to mention, this would also lay a stable groundwork for the future and ensure scalability.

Outcome

We called in the support of seven team members: one project manager, one client director/solution architect, one senior technical consultant, two senior consultants, and two consultants. Our team developed solutions for the following areas of work:

Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection

 

The MERGE team executed the announcement email that was sent to 60,000+ homeowners.

Brochure download program

 

Our team partnered with MERGE’s EEP (Experience, Engineering, and Platforms) Development team who owns all of James Hardie’s website development work to create the brochure download page and embed a Marketo form. From here, we built an ongoing program in Marketo to capture form fills and send emails with the brochure asset.

Redesign/update the existing Sample Request drip program in Marketo

When a user filled out the Sample Request form, they had the option to choose from a wide range of siding samples. Upon launch, MERGE’s EEP Development team added the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection to the sample request form.

Our team set up velocity scripting in Marketo to ensure their email included details on which Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection samples they ordered. We also included the new emails (which our team hardcoded) into the existing sample request program in Marketo. From here, we created a new drip specific to the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection sample selections.

Marketo Audit

 

MERGE also executed a Marketo audit to ensure there was structure to their instance. These were the four goals of the Marketo audit:

Marketo governance and organization: Implement governance policies to monitor users, permissions, security risks, and general instance enhancements, as well as implement a standardized folder structure, naming convention, and archive strategy.

 

Improve data management and integrity: Establish best practice guidelines around data management and governance as well as diagnose and implement a solution for Salesforce sync errors.

 

Increase efficiency and scalability: Create program and email templates in Marketo to streamline builds and scale, in addition to enhancing program design for nurture and drip campaigns.

 

Improve data enrichment and reporting insights: Implement lifecycle and lead scoring strategy, as well as increase data reliability to enhance segmentation and reporting.

 

MERGE also provided documentation so that in the event something broke, it doesn’t take as long to fix. The post-audit worksheet also serves as a roadmap to gain alignment and work toward the four goals outlined as our primary objectives over the next 12 months.

“We were the most impressed with the dedication to documentation – MERGE provided a high level of detail in the technical design document.”

Results

The James Hardie team now has increased confidence in their Marketo instance. Now, their instance is set up according to best practices and there’s an enforced structure. They are no longer running into issues around things breaking in Marketo, which has already saved their team plenty of time.

“MERGE has influenced our thinking – now, we do things the right way the first time around.”

 

The launch of the Magnolia Home | James Hardie collection was also successful – through our work in deploying the announcement emails, redesigning and updating the sample request drip program in Marketo, and developing the brochure download form, the James Hardie team saw some noteworthy metrics:

The Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection landing page is the fourth most visited page on the James Hardie website, with 300,000+ views.

 

Several thousand sample requests for the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection.

 

The most influential impact that MERGE had on James Hardie was documentation. Providing more standardization and discipline in their Marketo instance was crucial in driving efficiency, and they no longer had to spend time fixing problems with their instance.

“It’s been valuable that MERGE has such deep relationships with Adobe and Marketo, that if we need to pull in those partners and make sure that we’re connecting the dots, they can really help us do that.”