Campaign Operations Archives

Unlocking seamless navigation with Braze’s central search function

Posted on: 20 February 2024

Braze’s recent navigation feature is a game-changer, offering users an enhanced and intuitive experience throughout the platform. In this article, I delve into the upgraded interface and focus on the central search function, a powerful tool designed to streamline user access and efficiency. So, how does it work, and what difference will it make for managing your campaigns and content?

What is Braze’s central search function feature and how does it work

At the core of Braze’s latest update lies the central search function, revolutionising how users interact with the platform. This dynamic tool allows users to find and access specific campaigns, canvases, email templates, segments and pages effortlessly by using keywords. Accessible via the top-of-the-dashboard search bar or keyboard shortcuts (⌘ + K for Mac, Ctrl + K for Windows), users can initiate a search with results instantly displaying below. The search results display both recent and archived content, minimising clicks and ensuring a seamless user experience.

The results you can see – explained

When you search using keywords, you will find the following results:

Campaign names: Find any campaign names that are active, stopped, drafted or archived.
Canvas names: Find any Canvas names that are active, stopped, drafted or archived.
Email template names: Locate templates in your template gallery.
Pages: Navigate to any page within Braze– whether it’s “Canvas”, “Data Exports” or “Webhook Templates”, you can land right on it.
Segment names: Find any segments that are currently active or have been archived.

Why is this feature so important?

The central search function is a gamechanger because it enables you to:

Rapidly locate and access active, stopped, draft, or archived campaigns and canvases
Effortlessly find email templates in your template gallery
Navigate directly to specific pages within Braze, such as “Canvas”, “Data Exports” or “Webhook Templates”
Locate both current and archived segments with ease.

Not only does this streamline navigation and accessibility across the platform by allowing users to quickly find and access what they need, its intuitive design, coupled with the ability to seamlessly access recently viewed content, transforms the user experience, catering to both new and experienced Braze users.

Keyboard shortcuts to keep in mind

Below are some of the easy keyboard shortcuts that you can use to navigate through the central search window:

Key takeaways

Efficient navigation overhaul: Braze’s latest update introduces a streamlined navigation interface, enhancing user accessibility and efficiency across the platform. The seamless design ensures users can effortlessly find and access key features, marking a significant improvement in the overall user experience.
Central search function as a power tool: The central search function emerges as a pivotal feature, allowing users to quickly locate campaigns, canvases, email templates, segments and pages with ease, along with being able to see their status categorised as active, stopped or archived.
Empowering marketing teams with precision: The central search function addresses common challenges faced by marketing teams by providing quick access to essential elements. This feature empowers marketers to navigate Braze effortlessly, fostering productivity and efficiency in campaign management and content creation.

If you’re interested in learning more about Braze or you’re a Braze user looking to maximise value, be sure to get in touch with us to speak to one of our experts.

Want to learn how to elevate your brand using Braze’s generative AI? Click here to read more.

How Braze’s Canvas components personalise marketing journeys

Posted on: 27 September 2023

In the last part of our ongoing blog series exploring the Braze platform, we shared our key takeaways from this year’s Braze City x City London event. Today, I’ll dive into Braze’s various Canvas components and how you can leverage them to personalise your marketing journey.

What are Braze’s Canvas components?

By using a Canvas in Braze, you can unlock new user journeys that will improve processes and increase the effectiveness of reaching your audience. Here I break down a few of the Canvas components that enable a truly personalised marketing journey.

Action path

An Action path in a Canvas helps you to sort users based on their actions. By using an Action path, you can customise user paths based on custom events and engagement events and hold users for a given duration to prioritise their next path based on their actions during the evaluation window.

Within the Action setting module, you can choose how long you want to keep users in the Action step by choosing the evaluation window. This is set to one day by default, but can be customised to seconds, minutes, hours, days and even weeks.

Audience path

Audience paths help narrow down and target users by sending users down different paths based on specific criteria such as age groups, country and even user preferences. An Audience path allows you to intuitively filter and segment users with a strategic priority-based user-grouping.

Imagine a sorting funnel with ranking criteria: users are evaluated for each criterion in a priority order and sent down the path of the highest-ranking criteria they qualify for. An Audience path allows for up to eight audience groups, and for each group, you can assign specific filters or segments. The true power of an Audience path comes from its ability to assign priority, enabling you to target users that fall into specific filters and segments while still targeting users that might not fit those specific criteria all in one single Canvas component.

Decision Split

A Decision Split is a ‘yes or no’ feature that creates two mutually exclusive paths for users based on either an action or a user’s attributes, enabling a personalised, real-time experience for users. Within a Decision Split, you must use a segment or filter to create a ‘yes or no’ query to evaluate users.

An example of a Decision Split could be whether a customer is push enabled – ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In the case of a yes, the user would go down the push message path, and in the case of a no, users would go down an email path.

Delay components

Delay components help achieve the desired delay in communications, ensuring the user receives a message at a specific time and date (e.g. three-day delay) or holds users for a designated time. When using a delay step, it’s important to consider that the delay step’s limit is 30 days, and that a delay component can only be connected to one next step.

Experiment paths

Experiment paths allow you to test multiple Canvas paths against each other and a control group at any step level. It enables the random assigning of users down different paths, ensuring you can test which path is most effective.

As an example, if you want to test results between different time delays before a message after a user completes an action, you can do so while also setting a condition that after a specific experiment evaluation window, the winning path will be used, and the other paths ignored.

Our partnership with Braze

As a trusted Braze partner, our multidisciplined team can help you get the most out of Braze and customise your marketing journey to resonate with your customers. If you’re looking to adopt Braze or are already a Braze user, contact us to find out how you can start enhancing your marketing journey by harnessing Braze’s Canvas components.

Continue reading:

Blog 1 – Exploring Braze: optimising your CRM by leveraging key features

Blog 2 – How to elevate your brand through the power of Braze’s Sage AI suite

Blog 3 – Leveraging Braze’s Winning Paths to augment Canvas performance

Blog 4 – CACI’s Braze City x City 2023 takeaways

CACI’s Braze City x City 2023 takeaways

Posted on: 20 September 2023

WOW! What an amazing event Braze City X City was!

This year’s London event gathered numerous companies who are avid Braze users to share their future strategies, gauge customer engagement trends and learn how to harness the power of AI.

The morning was dedicated to thought leadership and was an amazing opportunity to chat with likeminded members of the CRM community, as well as hear from Braze’s CEO Bill Magnusson. We spent the afternoon hearing from some inspirational speakers who shared their experiences with areas like Sage AI and networking with friends and colleagues in the industry.

Key highlights of Braze City x City 2023

As Platinum sponsors, we were delighted to spend the day having brilliant conversations with multiple brands about their MarTech stack and digital maturity and run them through our Braze maturity assessment (which was a big hit!). Some of our personal highlights were seeing our colleagues Sam Obafemi, Account Director and Elena Hughes, Managing Consultant, sharing their amazing work helping MAC Cosmetics to create cut-through on Black Friday and achieve new customer experience highs, as well as hearing from Amy Clark, Head of CRM at ASOS, on the impact that this platform has had on their brand – an implementation we are proud to have supported the ASOS team with.

Challenges & themes addressed at Braze City x City 2023

While companies consistently expressed their positive sentiments about the platform, a prominent theme of the day was around the challenges in harnessing customer data. Specifically, determining how to ensure data is integrated to Braze in an optimal way to deliver campaigns and automated use cases while maintaining efficient data point consumption. This is a fundamentally critical point, as the true potential of the Braze platform can only be unlocked when your data is configured correctly.

Braze themselves have recognised this and have developed a number of features to help brands tap into their existing data, including:

Cloud Data Ingestion: This feature enables Braze to read data directly from Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift.
SQL Segment Extensions: Brands can create more advanced/complex segments through a new SQL Editor interface.
Data Transformations: Braze enables direct integration with other platforms that can call webhooks through building the necessary data transformations logic directly in Braze. This ensures that incoming webhook data can be directly mapped into the required data structures within Braze.
Catalogs Enhancements: With enhancements such as Shopify integration and plans for future integration with Cloud Data Ingestion, enabling brands to automatically keep data in sync with their data warehouse. [Jon Hyman, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer of Braze, hinted at additional announcements around Catalogs features to be announced at Braze’s upcoming Forge event. We expect this will prove a significant step forward in helping clients integrate more complex data sources]

Our partnership with Braze

We’ve supported many brands on their journey with Braze, with a particular focus on ensuring optimised data integration and setup. Along with our experience in implementing the aforementioned Braze features, we’ve designed and built bespoke solutions to support clients needing additional tooling to aggregate, clean and transform data for integration with Braze.

To find out how CACI can help you get the most out of the Braze platform or understand the changes and enhancements you can make to your existing data infrastructure to ensure its seamless integration with Braze, please reach out to us.

Continue reading:

Blog 1 – Exploring Braze: optimising your CRM by leveraging key features

Blog 2 – How to elevate your brand through the power of Braze’s Sage AI suite

Blog 3 – Leveraging Braze’s Winning Paths to augment Canvas performance

Blog 5 – How Braze’s Canvas components personalise marketing journeys

Leveraging Braze’s Winning Paths to augment Canvas performance

Posted on: 15 September 2023

In our last article, we explored how brands can utilise Braze’s Sage AI suite to enhance their audience engagement. Now, we’ll be diving into one of Braze’s newest Experiment Path features, Winning Paths, to find out how it can help nurture audiences and enable marketers to make impactful decisions at any point along the multi-touch journey.

How does Braze’s Experiment Path work?

In the ever-evolving world of digital optimisation, the ability to leverage data-driven insights is a deal-breaker. Braze’s Experiment Path node enables testing delivery time, messaging cadence, channel combinations and much more against earlier defined conversion events by randomly assigning users to different paths (or an optional control group).

This functionality was designed to streamline testing efforts and automatically send the most engaged users through subsequent steps. While it’s especially beneficial when setting up recurring or triggered canvases, it can also be used when setting up a single-entry flow.

If the initial test results are not statistically significant and the Winning Path wasn’t determined, Braze will direct users towards the best-performing path to ensure the most relevant experience. Alternatively, marketers can choose to distribute volume and allow customers to continue further down by following percentage splits specified at the beginning of the experiment.

For single-entry canvases, Braze will automatically apply a Delay Group that will separate randomly assigned users, while the rest will follow down the experiment paths. When the test is complete, the Delay Group will be connected to the Winning Path and continue through the canvas.

How is Winning Paths implemented?

To implement Winning Paths, follow the steps below:

Add in the Experiment Path to your flow by using the drag and drop canvas builder. By default, there are two paths with 50% of eligible audiences split between each path.
Next, simply tailor distribution for up to four variants and activate Winning Path in Settings by toggling on the feature.
Lastly, define the conversion event that will determine the results and set the timeframe to define how long the experiment will run before the top performing flow is selected.

The experiment window begins when the first user enters the step, and the start can be triggered earlier than expected by users in early time zones if they’re using local time delivery. When setting up the experiment, considering time differences is imperative, as is considering the impact of setting shorter timeframes. If local delivery time is enabled, we recommend setting an experiment window of at least 24-48 hours to give all customers an equal opportunity to interact and eventually convert.

Why Winning Paths will make a difference for your brand

Winning Paths is a fantastic way to enrich your brand’s testing strategy, connect with your customers and help you better understand microtrends among audiences flowing through lifecycle or BAU journeys. This functionality will ultimately allow marketers to run multiple tests in parallel and define successful ways to build meaningful connections.

Our partnership with Braze

As a trusted Braze partner, our multidisciplined team can help you maximise your Braze experience value and help you connect with your customers like never before. If you’re looking to adopt Braze or are already a Braze user, get in touch with us to find out how you can implement Winning Paths to bolster your testing and customer engagement strategies.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Braze or if you’re a Braze user looking to maximise value, please reach out to us.

Continue reading:

Blog 1 – Exploring Braze: optimising your CRM by leveraging key features

Blog 2 – How to elevate your brand through the power of Braze’s Sage AI suite

Blog 4 – CACI’s Braze City x City 2023 takeaways

Blog 5 – How Braze’s Canvas components personalise marketing journeys

How to elevate your brand through the power of Braze’s Sage AI suite

Posted on: 6 September 2023

We’re excited to kick off this blog series by delving into the remarkable Sage AI suite within Braze, a game-changing toolkit that has transformed how brands engage with their audience.

One aspect that consistently captures attention and sparks curiosity is the components that make up the Sage AI suite. The potential of generative AI, the insights available through the Predictive suite and the brilliance of the Intelligent suite have already sparked incredible innovation within the realm of Braze. Personally, I find immense joy in highlighting these remarkable features, which truly stand out in their capabilities. So, what comprises the many layers of Sage AI and how does each component work?

In this blog, we’ll explore the intricacies that each Sage AI component has to offer as we journey through its captivating landscape and find out how Generative AI, the Predictive suite and the Intelligent suite are reshaping brand strategies to create new avenues for engagement.

Intelligent Suite

Within the realm of Braze’s cutting-edge capabilities, the Intelligent Suite takes centre stage. Comprised of three pivotal components that redefine how marketers connect with their audience, it encompasses:

Intelligent Selection:

As the epitome of efficiency and optimisation, this game-changing feature empowers marketers to conduct multivariate tests seamlessly. Picture this: the highest-performing variant automatically receives the remaining audience, streamlining the process and safeguarding customers from unproductive experiences.

Intelligent Timing:

In the world of marketing, timing is everything. Imagine the impact that delivering your message at the exact moment when your audience is most receptive would have on outcomes. With Intelligent Timing, Braze marketers can reach customers precisely when engagement potential is at its peak.

Intelligent Channel:

Crafting personalised interactions is an art, and the Intelligent Channel component adds a stroke of genius to it. By analysing customer behaviour and preferences, Braze enables marketers to select the best channel for communication, maximising open rates and engagement.

Predictive Suite

In the ever-evolving world of marketing, predictive analytics take centre stage through the dynamic Prediction Suite. This suite helps Braze users predict customer behaviour and optimise strategies for impactful engagement. Let’s dive into two of its remarkable facets:

Predictive Churn:

Empowering brands with proactive insights, Predictive Churn enables Braze users to customise filters that detect potential churn. By training algorithms to assign churn likelihood scores to individual customers, brands can craft tailored communications aimed at mitigating churn risk. This personalised approach transforms challenges into opportunities for customer retention.

Predictive Events:

Unlocking users’ future behaviours is a holy grail for business growth. Enter Predictive Events, a remarkable machine learning model that unveils the likelihood of user actions, particularly purchases. As marketing teams decipher forthcoming behaviours, they can shape campaigns, vouchers and incentives for maximum ROI. This predictive prowess transforms marketing strategies from generic campaigns to customer-centric interactions, ensuring journeys resonate profoundly.

Generative AI

In the realm of innovative marketing, AI emerges as a dynamic partner, enhancing creativity and efficiency. Let’s explore three ground breaking AI-driven tools that are reshaping how brands can create, communicate and engage with users:

AI Copywriting Assistant:

A transformative approach to crafting compelling messages, the AI copywriting assistant seamlessly integrates with OpenAI’s GPT-powered copy generation tool. By simply inputting a brief product name or description, this AI marvel generates human-like marketing copy that resonates. This feature comes ready-to-use in most message composers within the Braze dashboard, revolutionising your messaging strategy.

AI Image Generator:

An OpenAI system that produces stunning images and artwork based on natural language descriptions on demand, DALL·E 2 unleashes visual creativity through AI magic Four unique variations of prompts are generated with each input request, enabling brands to generate images up to ten times daily and foster a new level of visual storytelling.

AI Content QA:

Content QA with AI, driven by ChatGPT and OpenAI, acts as a vigilant editor that ensures your messages meet impeccable standards and that your content’s quality reaches its highest potential through AI intelligence. Content QA meticulously identifies and flags elements such as spelling errors, grammar glitches, inappropriate tone and offensive language. Accessible from the Test tab during message composition, this tool reshapes content perfection within campaigns and Canvases.

Why your brand needs Sage AI

The Sage AI Suite within Braze unveils a realm of innovation that redefines brand engagement. Generative AI transforms messaging with human-like precision through the AI Copywriting Assistant and Image Generator. Meanwhile, the Prediction Suite empowers brands to anticipate customer behaviour, from averting churn with Predictive Churn to enhancing campaigns through Predictive Events. The Intelligent Suite elevates engagement by optimising selection, timing and channel choice.

This suite isn’t just technology; it’s a bridge to profound connections, resonant storytelling and empowered strategies that will shape the future of engagement. By embracing the transformative potential of Sage AI, your brand can confidently step into a new era of brand-customer relationships.

Our partnership with Braze

As a trusted Braze partner, our multidisciplined team can help you maximise your Braze experience value and help you customer engagement outcomes reach new heights. If you’re looking to adopt Braze or are already a Braze user, get in touch with us to find out how you can harness Sage AI’s new components to bolster your engagement strategy.

If you’re interested in learning more about Braze or you’re a Braze user looking to maximise value, be sure to get in touch with us to speak to one of our team.

Continue reading:

Blog 1 – Exploring Braze: optimising your CRM by leveraging key features

Blog 3 – Leveraging Braze’s Winning Paths to augment Canvas performance

Blog 4 – CACI’s Braze City x City 2023 takeaways

Blog 5 – How Braze’s Canvas components personalise marketing journeys

Exploring Braze: optimising your CRM by leveraging key features

Posted on: 1 September 2023

Braze is one of the fastest growing CRM tools on the market. It enables brands to be truly app-first and deliver enhanced and personalised real-time customer experiences without complex and bulky ETL or batch processes which often involve painful and delayed overnight data loads.

Leveraging effective marketing technology is now critical for a business’ long-term success. It allows businesses to stay ahead of the competition by understanding and adapting to everchanging consumer behaviours and tailoring experiences that best reflect their needs.

Braze is a leading platform in the CRM space, having recently been scored as ‘leader’ within The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs in Q1 of 2023. Its innovative approach to connecting with customers has been a gamechanger. With a particular focus on digital messaging, it has established itself as an accessible, customisable and specialised tool on a global scale.

In this blog series, my multidisciplined team will lift the lid on Braze and uncover the key features we see within the platform that are certain to deliver growth and take your use of Braze to new heights.

Our partnership with Braze

As a trusted Braze partner, we help brands get the most from the platform by supporting in all areas, from platform integration and audit to campaign management and optimisation. Our Campaign Operations team is well versed in the platform, with each member who interacts with Braze being certified in the platform. We invest in our partnership with Braze by further upskilling our team to a high standard, with multiple team members holding more than three different certifications ranging from the marketer exam to the digital strategist, enabling us to support brands in getting the most out of this amazing platform.

Our experiences and certifications have enabled our development of a set of Braze Accelerators specifically designed for CRM teams striving to achieve better results in a shorter timeframe. They have also contributed to our team being awarded Agency Partner of the Year in 2022 for our work with Domino’s in assessing their campaigns, enhancing their understanding of their customers’ behaviours and identifying personalisation opportunities that bolstered their testing capabilities and paved the way for more effective outcomes.

If you’re interested in learning more about Braze, and how CACI can help you in driving the most value from your Braze investment, be sure to get in touch with us.

Continue reading:

Blog 2 – How to elevate your brand through the power of Braze’s Sage AI suite

Blog 3 – Leveraging Braze’s Winning Paths to augment Canvas performance

Blog 4 – CACI’s Braze City x City 2023 takeaways

Blog 5 – How Braze’s Canvas components personalise marketing journeys

Braze’s Global Customer Engagement report will have brands rethinking customer experience

Posted on: 10 March 2023

In today’s competitive market, understanding how best to engage with your customers and reacting to their behaviours is critical to success.

Following the launch of Braze’s third instalment of the Global Customer Engagement report, I explored the three key customer engagement trends within the report. I also considered how brands impacted by these trends should respond to these familiar challenges.

CACI is an award-winning partner of Braze. We know consumers better than anyone else. Our breadth of demographic data combined with our expertise in marketing and data technology and campaign delivery makes us a key partner for brands looking to deliver innovative customer journeys.

Trend 1: Retention-focused strategies

The first trend identified in the report is how brands are increasingly focused on retention to combat the unsustainably high acquisition costs. The report highlights that brands increased their marketing budget on retention from 33% in 2020 to 45% in 2022. This enables marketers to invest in their customers and design solutions to keep them coming back to their brand.

The challenge is that a sub-optimal strategy can end up costing you time and money. A strong retention strategy delivering value to your customers is worth its weight in gold, as not only are acquisition costs high, retaining customers today is becoming increasingly harder with the breadth of touchpoints available for your competitors to interact with existing customers.

Identifying and combatting these behaviours while understanding how to add value throughout the customer lifecycle is vital. While Braze has a variety of channels and techniques that enable you to deliver your retention campaigns, the hard work happens outside of the platform.

To help brands develop the right strategy to maximise value, CACI’s CRM Strategy team are first focused on getting to the heart of what makes or breaks customers’ interest in your brand. We use our breadth of skills across customer data and campaign delivery to help develop and deliver award-winning retention strategies across a variety of sectors. We recognise that every strategy is different depending on your organisation’s needs, goals and customer behaviours. That is why we take the time to innately understand and ensure each strategy is bespoke to cover each of these areas.

Trend 2: Data management

The 2023 report highlighted two main data management challenges that we also see when working with brands:

Brands have too much data

The days of batch imports and overnight data loads for campaigning are slipping away, and real-time data is becoming increasingly prevalent. With more real-time touchpoints comes more data needing to be categorised, organised, refined and adapted.

This is where having a strong alignment between your tech stack components becomes crucial. The ability to process this data at speed and understand the quality of the data– not the quantity of the data– is paramount.

However, not all brands have an aligned tech stack suited to this influx of data. CACI’s Marketing Technology Solutions team help brands see the wood from the trees regarding their overall data architecture by delivering gap analyses that find and prioritise the gaps to plug.

We’ve recently completed an extensive Braze and architecture audit for a global retail brand which assessed four key areas: Architecture, Usage, Process and Data. The results of this have helped fuel this brand’s understanding of their existing data structure, what gaps are present and then supply a roadmap of priority actions across the next 6 months. This work will enhance the customer experience and deepen customer understanding.

There is a capability gap

The report is correct when it says: “Data management doesn’t end with technology—teams need to be set up to effectively use data.” Skills within CRM are ever-growing, and with more emphasis on data, there are desires to analyse this data immediately and understand how your brand can leverage this within the customer strategy.

Our Campaign Operations team enable and elevate brands daily to unlock key features of Braze such as Conversion Events and Funnel Reports to inform campaign performance. Beyond Braze, utilising the power of Currents has helped brands understand macro and micro campaign performances, resulting in changes to customer strategies and optimised test and learn processes.

Our team of Certified Braze Consultants are a blend of operationally and data-focused power users who bridge capability gaps by working with you to unlock the untapped potential of Braze. Additionally, the team supports our Data Scientists to identify micro customer behaviours that affect campaign performance.

Trend 3: Siloed teams

Like the capability gap, siloed teams can be incredibly detrimental and limiting to a brand’s CRM programme. According to the report, 16% to 28% of marketers in small to large scale companies reported that customer engagement was owned by either marketing in collaboration with other teams, or by cross-functional digital teams. Collaboration between Data, Tech and CRM has become increasingly vital to build out relevant testing strategies and evolve customer experiences.

The report explained that this is not just a regional or even an EMEA issue, but a global one. At CACI, we have the knowledge and tools to drive and manage successful transitions in a company to help increase adoption and enablement of new business processes and technology solutions. Our Operational Change consultants will work with a cross-functional team of experts in-house to create end-to-end solutions to real-life business problems.

How CACI can help

The Braze report provides an excellent overview of the challenges we are all facing in creating and executing effective customer engagement initiatives through the trends of retention-focused strategies, data management and siloed teams.

CACI can supply end-to-end support along the customer engagement journey and help turn observations into strategic and tactical solutions through our powerful combination of data and technology, ensuring customers remain at the heart of any engagement strategies.

To learn more about how CACI can support your business’ customer engagement strategies and initiatives, get in touch with our team of experts today.

Campaign Operations

5 practical tips to get the best value from your campaign migration project

Posted on: 13 May 2021

Minimise risks and maximise ROI with our best practice round-up

Campaign delivery is critical to your organisation’s competitiveness and growth. In challenging and volatile market conditions, being able to monitor and adapt campaigns in real time to meet changing customer wants and needs is a core skill for successful marketing.

It’s no surprise that many businesses are looking to invest in improved campaign management platforms. Technology has evolved rapidly in the past few years: exploiting new and sophisticated multi-channel, high volume solutions for customer retention, development and acquisition is a priority for marketing and customer experience leaders.

Choosing a campaigning platform with the features and headroom your organisation needs is just the start. The ROI and competitive advantage you stand to gain will only be as good as the migration process.

Many organisations find campaign migration more challenging than they expect. Our expert team has five top tips to help you avoid common pitfalls and tackle your platform migration project with the same rigour as your platform selection business case:

Include the migration project in your business case to ensure that you can afford to deploy effectively and rapidly. A great campaign platform can make all the difference to customer experience, engagement and ultimately the sales bottom line. It’s a big investment and you’ll have looked carefully to find the best fit for your needs and to calculate ROI. But migrating to a new platform is not just as simple as turning off campaigns in one platform and turning them on in the new one.
You’ll need strong methodology and project management to define the order of campaigns that need to be migrated and prioritise those that are business critical before moving on to the others. You’re dealing with high volumes of campaigns and data, and you need to build in IP warming and parallel running of old and new platforms during this phase. Planning ahead is crucial.
Review existing campaigns being sent out and evaluate whether they could be improved and optimised. It clearly makes sense to do this as part of the migration, rather than doing a direct lift and shift. Many organisations struggle to do it in practice because of resource constraints. Your team needs to maintain business as usual during the migration. If you can access additional resources or third-party support, your team can provide focused input to campaign improvement work through workshops, while the migration project team manages and delivers the actions.
Training is key to ensure a smooth transition and quick adoption of a new platform. Your team may need to adopt new processes and learn new skills. It’s important that they are confident using all the features and capabilities of the new solution if you’re to achieve maximum impact and hit your ROI goals. Build user confidence and avoid stress by providing formal training and making responsive, expert support available to answer questions and resolve issues once the platform is live.
Access specialist and dedicated resource to make it happen as quickly as possible and without interruption. In most organisations, everyone’s working to capacity, so finding extra time and resource to manage a major migration project is difficult. It’s not realistic to expect your team to handle it on top of business as usual. Exploit the experience of platform migration specialists: their proven methodology and expertise is worth paying for to avoid the risk of delays or campaign interruptions undermining the value and impact of your campaign platform investment.

If you’d like to keep your campaigns flowing and hit the ground running with your new campaign platform, get your free copy of The CACI three-step guide to successful campaign migration. In it, our specialist Campaign Operations team shares insights from our proven process, to help you plan an effective transition.

With long experience supporting leading organisations through efficient and low-risk campaign migration projects, we can shoulder the burden of planning and managing an optimised transition to your new platform, to achieve rapid value from your investment. Talk to us if you’d like to find out how we can help.

How to build a business case for Adobe Campaign

Posted on: 19 November 2018

There’s good reason for Adobe Campaign being recognised as the leading multi-channel campaign management tool by analysts. It’s packed with powerful features that enable marketers to orchestrate communications and experiences across multiple channels.

Given the power of the tool when compared to other products in the market, Adobe Campaign may appear aspirational. In reality, (and having done a number of business cases for investment in Adobe Campaign) the case can be easily made. Even when moving from a low-end email service provider.

Costs to consider when building your business case:

Licence cost of Adobe Campaign
Implementation cost to configure your instance of Adobe Campaign
Campaign migration costs for transitioning existing campaigns to Adobe Campaign (note, this may be a good chance to improve your campaigning rather than doing a “lift-and-shift”)
Training of your team
Ongoing user support for technical and campaign users of Adobe Campaign
Outsourcing of the Adobe Campaign function which is an increasingly popular option allowing you the best in market tool along with an expert team of users
Costs for integration with further channels (SMS, Push, WhatsApp, Programmatic Display)

What’s crucial is to calculate both the CapEx and OpEx costs to get you running with Adobe Campaign. Pulling together this list can be daunting, however, CACI and Adobe can help you build a full plan with costings.

What return can I expect from Adobe Campaign?

Now comes the other side of the equation. What return do you expect to achieve from moving to Adobe Campaign? This return may be an operational cost saving by moving suppliers or, the opportunity to improve marketing performance.

Operational cost savings can come from combining existing tools into one multi-functional tool. Multiple tools that are commonly combined include ESP, SMS, campaign selection tool, customer database, and mobile app messaging. Not only is there a potential cost benefit of doing this, there is also the added power and simplicity of managing everything through Adobe Campaign. Our client, The O2 invested in Adobe Campaign and Email Studio, and have reported a reduction in campaign production timelines by 80%. Watch the customer success story.

Personally, the more exciting element of investing in Adobe Campaign is the opportunity to produce more engaging, more coordinated, cross-channel direct marketing – to actually deploy customer journeys with personalised marketing messages. Journeys that drive a significant and measurable financial return to your business.

When calculating your opportunity to improve marketing performance consider:

What would an improved response rate to marketing communications mean?
How would reduced churn or unsubscribe rates influence CLTV?
If customers are more engaged with my brand, what difference would this make?
What would the financial benefit be of reactivating lapsed customers?
Through personalised comms, what improvement could we see to offer conversion?
By improving campaign selections how much could we improve cross-sell purchases?

The perfect business case for Adobe Campaign would be composed of both an efficiency factor and an improvement in marketing response. Especially given that improved efficiency should enable the team to launch more campaigns, do more testing, and give more time to consider strategy. Combining both areas together should give you the case to invest in market leading technology that will really take your marketing efforts forward.

If you’d like help compiling your business case for Adobe Campaign, get in touch.