We warmly welcome Cambridge University Press (the Press), the oldest university press in existence and one of the largest in the world, amongst our customers. With over 50 offices and approximately 2800 employees worldwide, the Press publishes a wide range of products including professional books, textbooks, reference works, as well as software and electronic publishing.
Combining data sources
The Press began adopting Salesforce Marketing Cloud as of June 2018, but had not been able to fully unleash the power of the platform. As Cherry Otto, Data Marketing Manager at the Press explains: “Our segmentation strategy involves a process of regular uploads from four different systems to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These systems include Salesforce Sales Cloud and a third-party CRM containing school contact data from the UK. However, we would have to manually combine these data sources to arrive at a data set that we could use for campaigns.”
Combining those data sources manually (and uploading them into what is known in Salesforce Marketing Cloud as “data extensions”) was indeed time consuming. For the Press, this usually meant combining lists in Excel and then uploading the files through an FTP server due to their size. Such a process demanded significant quality assurance due to the risk of manual errors. However, there was little alternative since the Press would have been left with incomplete data sets (e.g. missing basic info like “first name”) and as a result would not be able to personalize a campaign.
From SQL to drag-and-drop
It was in this context that the Press came across DESelect, the targeting and segmentation app for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Following a brief discovery phase between the DESelect team and the Press, a pilot was initiated during which DESelect was connected straight to the Press’s Salesforce Marketing Cloud environment. This allowed the Press to test DESelect on actual data, making the pilot highly relevant and re-usable for actual campaigns.
The pilot was highly successful: “It was a dream to use! I put a stopwatch on and it took 4m20s to do a query that normally takes my colleague an hour!” commented Aisling Miller, Senior Digital Marketing Executive at the Press.
Indeed, previously the Press would often have to rely on writing SQL queries to arrive at campaign-ready data sets. Expertise with SQL tends to be rare for marketing teams and so it was for the Press as well, further hindering the segmentation process. Now leveraging DESelect, the Press simply uses a drag-and-drop interface to create targeted lists for outbound campaigns on the fly. Or as Cherry Otto put it: “Having used tools with similar purposes before, DESelect feels familiar for me. But it just works better.”
We are proud to count the Press amongst our customers and wish them success as they continue their marketing automation journey. Thank you for your trust.