Announcing Cross-BU Saturation Control in DESelect Engage

Teresa: Campaign lead times can be a real pain point as well, particularly when you’ve got multiple BUs in an organization or multiple campaign teams that are trying to run different campaigns at the same time. You know, we’ve heard from customers that they often have to spend hours in a meeting each week, just collaborating and coordinating what campaigns are going to go out and when, and this is very time intensive and takes up a lot of money with all the people at the table trying to figure this out. And it takes time away from actually building the campaigns and driving that revenue. So campaign lead times and the coordination that has to happen is really difficult.

Teresa: Customer-facing wise, we don’t want to cause marketing fatigue. We don’t want to encourage unsubscribes or opt outs, and so figuring out what that ideal frequency needs to be depending on subscriber behavior is also a big challenge. How do we figure that out and then overall, especially from a leadership standpoint, whether you’re a high level VP or CMO or you report into one, they want to know how campaigns are working.

Teresa: They want to know: How are we continually improving those campaigns? What are we learning, and how are we going to improve those? And so your metrics tend to be under a lot of pressure to show that you’re learning and that you’re continually improving. And so it’s hard to do that when you don’t really know what’s happening, especially across an organization that’s communicating with the same contacts.

Teresa: And then we’ve got the legal and compliance issues, which impose quite a bit of rules on messaging and really just ensuring that we’re not violating any of the rules or laws that are in place.

Teresa: So let me launch a poll, and find out from each of you which of these is your top pain point. If you had to pick one that really keeps you up at night, and that you struggle with, we’d love to hear that.

Teresa: I’ll give you just a minute to answer that. It’s a pretty long poll. Lots of reading to do there. But lack of visibility, leaving money on the table, time, intensive campaign planning, marketing fatigue, overall campaign strategy, or legal and compliance issues?

Teresa: I’ll give you guys just a minute to answer, and this will help us also, as we talk through some of the stuff today, it’ll help us hit on those key ones that you mention.

JvD: Teresa, while people are voting, what do you think is going to be voted this on the most.

Teresa: Oh, gosh! I think you know for me at a high level, I think it’s leaving money on the table. Are we under engaging? I think that one might be tied with maybe marketing fatigue. This is the opposite problem, right? Are we under-engaging or over-saturating our prospects and customers. It’s the big question.

Teresa: But as a marketer the last thing we want to do is leave money on the table. 

Teresa: Okay, I’m going to launch the results. Let’s see what everybody said.  Okay, can you guys see the results? Can you see them? Jonathan?

JvD: Yes.

Teresa: Okay? So 18% said lack of visibility. 18% said leaving money on the table, marketing fatigue at 36%. And then not knowing what’s working to be able to improve overall campaign strategy.

Teresa: So marketing fatigue, campaign strategy improvements due to not knowing what’s working, followed by leaving money on the table and lack of visibility. So this is great. Thank you, guys for answering the poll. That gives us a good sense for where your pain lies.

The Consequences of Mismanaged Communications

So based on what you guys have said. You’re probably feeling the consequences of some of this right? And the pain is real and the consequences are real. So if you are sending an inappropriate messaging frequency, or you’re over saturating customers and prospects, there’s a chance that you’re seeing higher unsubscribe rates. Market data suggests you’ll see maybe a 10% increase in unsubscribe rates.

Teresa: The other problem is wasted resources. As a marketer, you know, we really don’t want to waste our marketing budgets. We’re all resource strapped right now. And so when you’ve got these mismanaged communications, you’re likely not just leaving money on the table from the lack of sales or revenue that you’re helping sales bring in, but also the the money that you may be wasting on on the marketing side. You expend the effort and the time and the resources to get these campaigns out, and they don’t have the results that you’re seeking. We’ve seen from Deloitte that up to 23% of marketing budgets are wasted annually. That is a big number and we’re all trying to avoid that. A lot of us are rated on that in our annual performance reviews, and we definitely don’t want to see that. 

Teresa: And then the compliance risk not only in terms of fines that could potentially damage your organization, but also in terms of reputation, the cost of earning a bad reputation if you are over-saturating your customers. So these are the consequences that we tend to  think about as we struggle with these customer engagement challenges.

Teresa: So you’re not alone. At DESelect, we spend a lot of time thinking about this, and we are really focused on helping you prioritize customer engagement effectively. To ensure that you are engaging just the right amount at just the right time. And that’s what Engage is all about.

Send Frequency Optimization vs Saturation Control

Teresa: There are 2 terms that we use a lot, send frequency optimization and saturation control. And, as I said at the beginning, while they are related, they’re not synonymous. And so, Jonathan, could you describe to our guests what the difference is, and why, at DESelect we aim to solve for both of these?

JvD: It comes down to understanding the subscriber’s individual preferences and behavior. So, this is where you’re going to be looking at. Okay, if I’m sending, for example, 3 emails per week to a contact, are they engaging with all of them? Or not at all? And you know my interest. My affiliation with the company may be bigger or different than yours. So maybe your ideal number of communications to receive from a brand is 5, and  maybe mine is 3. So it’s really different per contact.

JvD: And you want as much as possible to look at the engagement that the contact is showing to find that ideal number of communications per contact.

JvD: Now, that is different from saturation control which is really trying to prevent overwhelming one contact. What you want to avoid is that one contact receives 5 emails a day from your company.

JvD: And this is where the challenges that we saw before, like having visibility are important. And these days, especially in larger organizations, you have multiple marketers working on different products, different agendas, different campaigns that I want to send out.

JvD: It’s unclear to what extent there’s an overlap between the audiences, the segments that are receiving these different campaigns. And then there’s also the automated sending that’s happening with your marketing automation system. So having a system in place where you can define rules like, okay, I want to make sure that we’re never sending more than one or maybe 2 emails in a day, or we’re never sending more than one to each user per week.

That’s where you kind of have a system that can that can take care of this. We sometimes compare Engage to a mission control center, like airports where they want to make sure that multiple airplanes don’t leave at the same time and you have to get a final go before you can take off. That’s how we think about this.

Teresa: Wonderful thanks, Jonathan.

Build Engagement, Not Fatigue

Teresa: So DESelect Engage does both, and I know we probably have all heard the fairy tale. Goldilocks and the 3 Bears. Oversaturated or We want to hit that just right sentiment, communicating with people at the right moment at the right time with the right message. So the goal is to build engagement and not create marketing fatigue. And these are the two levers that we pull to ensure that we can do that. Another key benefit of Engage is that we can optimize the campaigns across the teams and so getting that visibility into what other teams are doing and ensuring that we can improve campaigns over time, that we have all the information to improve the campaigns, and that we’re prioritizing appropriately. Send frequency optimization and saturation control eliminate collisions and help us get that just right engagement.

Teresa: And then, ensuring compliance and safeguarding the reputation of the organization, reducing those risks due to any excessive or unwanted communications.

Teresa: We’re going to get into the demo in just a minute. But one of the things I wanted Jonathan to talk a little bit about is our integration with Salesforce. And why. This is such a great solution when you’re working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Can you talk a little bit about that, Jonathan, about our integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

JvD: Yeah, for sure. So we are. a Salesforce partner and on  the AppXchange. And what this allows us to do is have Engage right in your Salesforce Marketing Cloud, just like Email Studio or Journey Builder, just available on their menu there on the AppXchange. And that also allows us to intervene in Journey Builder. So right before a send would go out, we can actually stop it from going out or delay the execution of it.

JvD: So we are right there where the marketing automation with actual sending happens. And also it allows us to easily read into the activities. So we can read the data views which allows us to understand which sends happen also outside of Journey Builder, which engagement is happening so that we can optimize the number of messages that we’re sending to contacts and prioritize the relevant campaigns.

Teresa: Fantastic. Thanks. Jonathan.

Teresa: Okay, so Jonathan’s going to do a demo that shows how to apply the saturation control rules across multiple BUs so that you can have that enterprise-wide control over audience saturation levels. He’s going to show you how to set up a parent BU, perform calculations, use the calendar and a few other things. So I’m going to stop sharing so that Jonathan can walk you guys through the demo.

Teresa: Okay, Jonathan, take it away.

Cross-BU Saturation Control Demo

JvD: Thanks, Teresa, alright. So as I just mentioned, DESelect Engage is available on the AppXchange menu. I’m showing you guys today from a staging environment.  So first, I want to show you guys the admin panel. So this is where you can configure how everything works. And especially over here.

JvD: You can see my screen now, right? Because I just got a message here. Alright. So I’m currently in the Admin panel in Engage and the first thing that’s new here is this new screen here that shows business units. So this is where we’re going to group multiple business units together. We’re gonna have a concept of a parent BU, and it shall be so. It’s a bit different from Marketing Cloud, where you can also have like a hierarchy of business units. And in this case, we’re going to have a parent where you’re gonna be able to set up rules that are going to apply to all the different business units that are grouped together, so to both the parent itself and the other children, the other BUs that are part of the business unit group.

JvD: So what’s really changing with this functionality that’s releasing, is until now, Engage worked business unit by business unit, meaning if a contact existed in two business units and both business units were only looking at the sends happening within that business unit. What we’re allowing now is to look at the sends happening in the different business units so that if a contact exists in multiple business units, we can really get a full picture of all the communications that somebody is getting. And so to make that possible, we wanna group some business units together.

And then we also want to create the rules that we need to enforce across the grouping across the different business units. So first thing I just showed you, that’s the business units. And the next thing is the rules. So under rules, this is where you define what limitations we need to enforce when we allow messages to go out. So some examples that we have here is we will only allow one newsletter for seven days, and we will always only allow one promo email to be sent per day.

And, as you can see, we now have the definition here of scope. So a rule can apply either to the entire organization, so meaning those different business units that we group together. Or they can apply just to the current business unit. So in this case here, I do have a rule for one SMS per day. It only applies to this business yet, because maybe other business units do want to have different rules around how many SMS they allow per day? Or maybe they don’t use SMS. Okay, so here, in the rules, we are going to define what rules need to be enforced. So the system knows, how do I need to prioritize? And which messages do we want to allow or not allowed to be sent?

JvD: Okay. Now, the next thing. So once we have set up the rules. The system can actually take those rules into account when doing calculations. So in essence to the calendar view. Where you can see I have here some campaigns on my calendar as you can. And then red means even more people, more than 50 are being excluded.

So what I want to show you today is an example where in this current business units, I have a rule that says one email to be sent per day. So if we look at the sends that are happening today, I have one that’s in the green and one that’s in the red. So the one in the green. Here we can see that everybody’s receiving 100% of the target people. However, the one in the Reds. We can see that 58% of the people are not receiving this email because we only allow one email per day to be sent.

And so what’s happening here is there is some overlap between the two, the two sends, and therefore the campaign with the lower priority, which is the one in the red. There we’re going to exclude some people. So this is now within my current position. So this was already working like this, right? But now you’d be surprised to see that tomorrow we have a campaign that’s in yellow. At the same time, there’s only one send that I can see on the calendar here.

Now, what’s happening here is if we allow the other business units to show up here. So on the calendar view, I can show the sends that are happening in other business units as well. So when I apply this, I can see sends from another business unit. So there’s another send from another business unit happening at the same day. And this send does have a higher priority. So again, we can see there is some overlap between two campaigns, but we only allow one send to go out per day. And hence some people are being excluded from the end of July promo.

So again, we can see here. 27% of the people are excluded because we only allow one email to be sent per day on all business units. So before, this would not have been the case. But now, because we do look at the sends happening across the different business units, we do know this other send happening. And so for the contacts that are targeted on both campaigns, we can now exclude them from the lower priority campaign and enforce the rule of only sending out one email per day.

JvD: Alright. The last thing that I want to show you is our dashboard capability. Which is where you’re going to have full visibility on all the sending that’s happening. And all the decisions that the system is making. So we did do a send today to get your classes on. We can see here that we target just under 100,000 people. And 42% of those people were included. So how many people were being excluded. So if you want to see the details of this, we just click here. And then we can see the overview here of the percentage of people being included or excluded. And we can even look into the details of all of those people. And we can see if somebody was excluded for a sent, the reason for these exclusion laws. So again, there, the contacts that are being excluded is because they’re hitting this rule of only one email to be sent per day.

[recording cut off for a couple of minutes]

JvD: It will show me all the all the sends that are happening for a specific contact.

So as you can see here, so send. It already happened is a campaign that we just mentioned. But here I can also see all other sends that are planned for contacts. So I get a full picture of which campaigns somebody is being targeted for.

And this now also includes the sends happening on those other business units. So while before I couldn’t see this, I now have a full visibility on which sends, also another business unit that somebody is being targeted for, and that can also make me–help me understand why? The sort? Why the system is excluding people from certain sense.

Alright, I think with that I did show everything that. I wanted to show. Wanna see, Teresa, did any questions come in on this on this demo.

Teresa: No questions yet. So everybody. If you have any questions at all, or would like to see any aspect of that demo again, go ahead and chat us, and we can. We can walk through anything again, or answer any questions you might have about that.

Teresa: Okay, we do have a question coming in from Chris. Jonathan, Chris is asking, how does the system handle contacts receiving emails and journeys?

JvD: Receiving emails and  journeys. So do you mean emails that you’re sending to a journey builder? So the way it works is, if you do a send through journey builder, then within journey builder, we do have a component that connects to our system. And then we can make a decision. This basically decision splits where we can put people on the include or exclude path. So that’s how we say, okay, if you’re included, then you should receive the email. If you’re excluded, then we’re not sending you the email today, and then it’s up to you how you want to deal with it. Maybe you want to do a retry and consider like you. Wait one day, and then tomorrow you make a new evaluation. We do have customers that successfully use it to increase engagement, so it ends up sending more or less the same number of emails, but they better spread them out over time.

And and that’s way, there’s definitely no loss in revenue. There’s like an increase of revenue because you’re sending the emails because you’re better spreading them out. You do typically get better open rates and engagements, and so on.

JvD: So Chris feel free to to let me know in the chat if I answered your question.

Teresa: Thanks. Jonathan.

Teresa: Okay, any other questions?

Teresa: Okay. Chris says, yes. Thank you. Awesome. Chris. Let us know if you guys have any other questions.

When to Apply Cross-BU Saturation Control

Teresa: Jonathan, so tell us a little bit about how our guests would apply cross-BU saturation control in real life.

JvD: So if you set up business units in Marketing Cloud, you can do that in different ways. Right? Typically like 2 big use cases are one. Each business unit is a brand or each business unit is a country.

Now, cross-BU saturation control is relevant when one contact can exist in multiple business units.

JvD: And typically, that is 1, 1 business unit equals one brand.

JvD: So as a consumer, I can be a fan, a customer of multiple brands, of course. So in that case I could exist in multiple business units.

And then you want to know, what are the sends. What are the sends that we are sending to that same customer? Within the different brands. And then, if you want to optimize your sending with saturation control. Then it does make sense that you do look at all the sends happening from the different brands.

Now in the other situation where one business unit is one country, typically somebody just has one address. They live in one country, so they only exist in one business unit. So there is actually no need to apply saturation control across different business units, because contacts will only exist in one BU anyway. So there would be no sending happening in other business units.

Teresa: Fantastic. Pretty simple, right? So we’ve got another poll for you. And we’d love to understand which of these statements is true today: I know which contacts are saturated right now. I know which contacts are under engaged right now. I know whether Mary Smith (pick your name) will be under or over saturated a month from now. I know if another BU adds a campaign, it will create saturation. I can automatically exclude saturated contacts from all sends. I can see which contacts are receiving what communications. So I’m going to launch the poll and see how big a pain point these are. Which of these statements is true today?

Teresa: And of course, we have none of the above as a as a response too.

Teresa: Results are coming in.

Teresa: Okay, so this is interesting. Let me share the results.

Teresa: Okay, so only 9% know who’s under engaged. Nobody knows who’s saturated.

Teresa: 18% can automatically exclude saturated contacts from all sends. 36% can see which contacts are receiving what communications.

Teresa: But 36% can’t say any of the statements are true. Jonathan, it looks like we’ve got a group that really could understand the value of what we bring to the table here. Thank you, guys so much for answering the poll. It’s very helpful for us.

Teresa: I think you guys are are feeling some of the pain of under engagement and and over saturation. So thank you for answering that.

DESelect Design Tenets

Teresa: We’re  nearing the end of the webinar here, but I want Jonathan to tell you a little bit about how he approaches the design of our products and the things that he takes into account as he’s building a solution for you. So, Jonathan, if you want to talk to us about your design tenets and how you ensure that everything works seamlessly in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so that we can provide an optimal experience to our customers. I’d love for you to to walk the guests through that.

JvD: Yeah, sure. So there’s basically 3 principles here that we take into account to try to provide the optimal user experience. So we want applications to be intuitive. We want them to be turnkey, and we want them to be fully integrated. So when it comes to intuitive, I’ve shown you. The UI of apps like engage, the back end of this, is really complex.

JvD: And there’s a lot that goes into making all these calculations. And it’s a very advanced algorithm. But we do want to make this application look easy. And so our challenge is really, how do we make something complex, easy to use? So yeah, we we just want customers to be able to see the application and get going immediately.

JvD: When it comes to cross-BU saturation control specifically, how do we easily also create the visibility into the campaigns that are going on? When it comes to being turnkey, we pride ourselves on providing applications that can be installed in like under 15 minutes and it can immediately be used without going through a long implementation process. So also here, when it comes to cross-BU saturation control, it’s going to be easy to set up these rules, and the parent BU, and it’s going to immediately be applied in the other business units.

JvD: There’s really just a few minutes of work, and you’re ready to go and apply cross-BU saturation control.

JvD: And then the last thing is we want to build applications that are integrated. So as you’ve seen, it integrates right into Sales Marketing Cloud, it’s available just as any other studio and also in Journey Builder. It’s really easily integrated with a custom component as you can just drag and drop into your journey.

JvD: So yeah, those are really things that we aim for and that make those applications easy to use and quick to get going without an expensive implementation process or an extensive training.

JvD: I do wanna say, though, we do also provide services if  you want to avoid unnecessarily technical points. Because, as I mentioned, that’s it’s easy to set up.

JvD: But we do see that it’s not always easy for customers to understand what rules should we set up, or how do we make decisions internally on which campaigns get a higher priority than others. Or how many sends should we allow per week or per month? And that’s where we can provide some support as well.

Teresa: Definitely, and our customer success team will always be there. Working with the clients side by side to ensure that the implementation goes well.

Teresa: One question that we get a lot Jonathan, is around the scalability of Engage. How would you characterize its ability to scale?

JvD: Yes, yeah, we do get this question a lot. And we do have customers that are using this application obviously for millions of contacts that they send to, or tens of millions even and of course, with high volumes of sends happening every day. That’s why we built this application from the ground up. Off the marketing cloud platform, so it does run on technologies like surplus functions and special databases that are built for scale and speed, so that we can provide those daily calculations in the fast manner so that we can connect with Journey Builder in a way where we give responses to the journey builder and under one second

JvD: You’re not gonna see any delays. And we can support customers that, as I said, have tens of millions or hundreds of millions, even of contacts and and send volume cause of course, it’s really important. We do need to be able to look at all of your contacts and look at all of the sends, all of the recent sends that happened in the last couple of weeks. Also all of the campaigns that you’re planning to do in the next couple of weeks. To be able to make decisions.

Teresa: Awesome. Thank you. Are there any questions for Jonathan or myself? Feel free to put them in the Q and A. Or in the chat and if not, we really want to thank you for your time. I know how busy you guys are and the pressure that you’re under these days. And so we really thank you for being here. We’re going to make the webinar available on demand. You’ll get an email with that link and a link to the slides as well, and so feel free to share it with your colleagues or your bosses.

Teresa: And if you would like to have a more in depth conversation with us, we would love to do that. So if you would like for us to reach out to you with a call back, just type Yes in the chat, and we will reach out to you for one on one. In the meantime, we’re always here for you. Come to our website, check out all of our resources around Engage and marketing fatigue. We’ve got quite a few things there, and we’ll follow up with you on email as well, with a few links to some content that may help you on this journey to figure out how you’re going to overcome those big challenges that we talked about in the beginning. Thank you, Jonathan, for your time and for the great demo. Good luck out there, and hitting your revenue targets and really connecting authentically with customers through your communications. And we’re here to help anytime you need us.

Teresa: So thank you for joining.

JvD: Take care. Have a great day.