- 3% lift to revenue per customer
- Daily segmentation of 5M+ records
- Easily able to identify highly engaged customers for cross-sell opportunities
THE CHALLENGE
Dependence on singular IT employee
Home Chef, a meal kit and food delivery service that delivers over three million meals monthly to its subscribers, needed to pull proper audiences together in Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Engagement). Because of a reliance on a single team member that was versed in SQL, the company faced challenges in managing and effectively targeting its vast, diverse customer base. When that team member left the company, the marketing automation team was forced to face this dependency, as well as their lack of familiarity with their data model. Home Chef’s marketing department then sought a solution that could enable them to create personalized marketing campaigns and provide deeper insights into customer behavior on their own terms.
Today with DESelect, Home Chef has several members of the marketing team that feel confident understanding customer data and putting together the best campaign audiences–in less time than ever.
Goals
- Eliminate bottleneck with IT for creating customer segments
- Have a better understanding of data relationships
- Efficiently cross sell and upsell existing customers
Results: Independence gained through simple data visualization
- Achieved more sophisticated segmentation to identify niche customers
- Able to identify when useful data is missing thanks to deeper understanding
- Empowered non-technical users to feel confident approaching segmentation in SFMC
With DESelect, our marketing team is able to unify multiple data sources, identify high-value customer segments, deliver curated experiences to those audiences, and produce measurable results. Best of all, they're doing so independently -- without reliance on IT or SQL -- and in less time. We’re improving order rates, generating more revenue, and DESelect allows us to do that.
Michelle FrandsenSenior Manager, Lifecycle Automation
USAGE
How Home Chef uses DESelect
- Rebuilt a weekly reactivation audience through Waterfall Segmentation
- Saves significant time building audiences by using Filters plus leveraging Picklists
- Able to ideate better on campaigns after using Preview to identify customer behavior and to know if something is off before running the entire selection
- Faster ramp time for entry-level marketers who don’t know SQL
- Leveraged their DESelect CSM to take apart a legacy SQL query and recreate the segment in DESelect
Highlights
Why Home Chef Chose DESelect
- A visual layer to raw numbers“[Before DESelect] there was one person, so there was definitely a bottleneck with that role in terms of how much the team needed and their ability to fulfill all the requests. Skill sets were also limited so we kept our strategy easy, simple. With DESelect, it adds a visual layer to our data, which makes it so much more approachable for someone that doesn't have a database background–which is all of us on the team."
- Stronger, sophisticated segments“Past orders, taste preferences, dietary preferences–these were all attributes about our customers we weren’t using much prior to DESelect. Now that we know what tables and values to look for, it's pushed us to get more sophisticated with our programs versus when we just didn't have the ability.”
- Streamlined data management"It just simplifies things. And it's relieving a bottleneck in terms of making sure that not one area of the team is responsible for [segmentation.]”
Q&A with Lifecycle Marketing Team from Home Chef
-
What was audience creation like at Home Chef before DESelect?
Prior to DESelect, any sort of new audience that we had to pull, it was always a process. We're in Salesforce and some data is on one table, other attributes are on a different table. We were using a lot of data relationships but then hitting roadblocks with those because of their limitations. It was also just really time-consuming to know where all of the different fields were across all of our data extensions. Now with DESelect it's much easier to see all of our data represented, join and filter across multiple data extensions, and run quick counts to check our audience sizes.
-
When did you realize you needed a segmentation solution?
Most of the team didn’t know SQL. They almost always had to go through one person who did, but even then some queries were more advanced, even for them.
We would get a lot of errors. And the team is asking themselves, ‘why did I get this error?’ We ended up kind of taking shortcuts. It was a handicap for us.
With our existing SQL queries, we could not edit or narrow it ourselves in any way. When our only SQL resource left the company, it became really apparent that we needed a better solution.
-
What first attracted you to our products and why did you ultimately choose DESelect?
It was really the ease of it, that was the big factor. We were used to a drag and drop style using data relationships and filters, so this is somewhat similar. To be honest, I don't even think we looked at other competitors, I think we just went straight to DESelect.
And then Deedee, of course.
-
What value does DESelect bring to your organization?
There's so much that happens across the customer lifecycle, so with better targeting, which DESelect allows us to do, it improves all of our results. We wouldn't be able to get as niche without the help of DESelect. For a recent customer experiment, with the help of DESelect to refine and automate our audience segmentation, we saw a 3% lift to revenue per customer. Before DESelect, this number was likely 0% because we weren't digging into the data in this way.
Now that we know what tables to look for and what values to look for, it's like we've been able to ideate a little bit more, even when we're not using it. We can also quickly see what audience sizes are out there. For example, let’s find out ‘How many people are vegetarian?’ and activate an experience to customers who might be interested in our meatless options.
-
What major accomplishment has your team had with DESelect you wouldn’t have had otherwise?
The team is much more confident when working with customer data in DESelect versus SQL. They can work independently to figure out and know what they're looking for, and doing that all in less time than before. Now we're identifying more data feeds to complete our view of the customer, help us pull more selections, automate new processes, whatever it is that we need to tell our story.
Also, there are members of our team that maybe would never get exposure to data analysis and querying database tables. But they are now through this solution.
-
What type of customer would you recommend DESelect to?
Other marketers like us who are not database professionals but understand how unlocking your customer data can lead to effective audience segmentation, personalized customer experiences, and better results for the business.
Honestly, anyone using Marketing Cloud!