Emerald plus DESelect
California-based Emerald is an operator of large-scale live and immersive B2B events and trade shows. Founded in 1985, this market-leading brand has connected over 1.9 million customers across 142 events and 16 media properties.
Emerald position themselves as ‘true partners’, combining creativity, innovation, and next-level client service. They serve a vast range of industries including design, equipment, retail, safety & security, and technology.
As one might expect, data and insights are part of the bedrock of Emerald’s proposition.
Drastically reduced SQL pains
After Emerald moved to Salesforce Marketing Cloud from another marketing platform, they discovered that their typical SQL queries were a difficult fit with Query Studio. They found inefficiencies in building out data extensions beforehand, and struggled with the inflexibility of having to define all fields in advance.
Greg Nappi, Director of Audience Database Marketing explains: “It quickly became clear it was an awful lot to expect from us to be able to manage such minutiae within Query Studio.”
Rhonda LeSchack, Database Analyst for the company added: “Sure, we know a little SQL, but we’re not programmers. We were spending way too much time considering how to write code.”
Increased efficiency with DESelect
Before using DESelect, Emerald’s marketers did not have database access, as their central team had built segments previously. Using DESelect Segment really helped Emerald Expositions to enable their central team to create segments themselves, simply and efficiently.
Diving into more detail, Nappi added: “The big win is the picklists. They initially functioned differently from how we intended to use them when we bought DESelect, but their support guys changed it around very quickly. We’re very happy with how our partnership operated!”
Talking about the sheer size and management of their database, LeSchack added: “We have so many brands to support, and so many different values for all these fields, we couldn’t memorize all this information.”
DESelect took care of this. Likewise with creating target data extensions: “Before DESelect, we had to go in, get our data extension all prepped, then run our queries. Which is kind of backward, right?”
DESelect: SFMC segmentation support
In summarizing DESelect’s product and support, Nappi said:
- “It’s a user-friendly tool and saves a lot of time. As in it chops off half the time.
- The support team is excellent, very helpful, and responsible — especially considering the time difference between the States and Belgium.
- You might think that DESelect’s functionality would’ve already been built into Marketing Cloud, but it’s not. It’s a necessity. If you’re buying SFMC, you need to build DESelect into your budget.”
If you’d like to learn how DESelect can help your organization, check out this quick tour, or schedule a demo today.