Scaling Personalization for Retail Success

Challenge

When our client, a leading national grocery retailer, approached MERGE, they had valuable insights from their customer purchasing data about what messages to communicate.

However, they needed assistance in scaling their creative and email/push production processes to meet customer demands—ensuring the right message was delivered at the right time through the appropriate channel. Additionally, they sought a solution to efficiently repurpose content, as 30% of the time, the same content was reused across different emails.

They set out to develop an automated process for including personalized offers within their promotional email communication program. Given the scale, with multiple email campaigns sent weekly and individual emails reaching over 20 million recipients, this required a new multi-team process and leveraging the Adobe technology stack to automate across necessary platforms.

The goal was to scale personalization across multiple promotional email campaigns. To achieve this, the client turned to the experts at MERGE to automate and scale their new email process, which would consist of:

Automating and transforming the client's approach to launching campaigns by sending email modules into Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) from Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets (while ensuring seamless project management and content approvals through Workfront).

Leveraging Workfront Fusion to connect Workfront and AEM assets to send approved creative and create reusable content modules and then deploy directly through Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).

Outcome

MERGE architected a solution in Workfront to capture campaign intake, creative, and copy for personalized versions of “content modules.” MERGE also leveraged collaboration tools in Workfront to facilitate the approval of creative assets. 

The next step was to leverage automation to pull assets from AEM (where they are stored and repurposed) and send them to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, where they are compiled into completed emails and finally sent to the end customer.  

Here’s a closer look at what the process looks like:

#1 — Campaign Request Submission: The end user submits a request for an email campaign in Workfront. The creative team then accepts the work and provides direction for the personalized content "modules" using a custom form.

#2 — Automation Trigger: Once the creative team accepts the campaign, an automation is triggered. This creates a folder in Workfront that connects to a corresponding folder in AEM.

#3 — Creative Asset Development: The content modules, consisting of images and copy, are designed and routed through Workfront Proof. This process allows for collaboration, feedback, and approvals.

#4 — Final Approval and Storage: After approval, the email specialist adds the final creative assets to the Workfront folder. These assets are then automatically sent, tagged, and stored in AEM.

#5 — Template Integration: Templates built in Salesforce Marketing Cloud are linked to AEM, allowing them to identify and use specific modules.

By optimizing the content supply chain from planning and creation to activation, MERGE accelerated time-to-market using Adobe’s products: Workfront, Workfront Fusion, and AEM assets. This streamlined the email process for efficient content utilization, enabling the reuse and automatic pulling of content areas.

Results

The solution has unlocked a new level of efficiency and integration for our client, making all active modules readily accessible in AEM for seamless integration with other systems. This pilot implementation has transformed the entire workflow, leading to significant improvements in production, development, and deployment.

By repurposing 30% of content modules across multiple email builds, the team achieved 30% time savings. Standardizing and reusing content modules within AEM reduced the time required to develop multi-subject emails by 20%.

Our client is also on track to achieve a 40% reduction in the processing time for multi-subject email deployments. This optimization enhances the association of personalized content with the email audience, significantly easing the load on existing systems.

Ultimately, our client is now empowered to execute 20 million weekly email sends. Each email is tailored to reflect the shopper’s unique shopping habits, ensuring a highly personalized and engaging user experience.