Customer Success Story: Cambridge University Press

Eliminated quality assurance concerns caused by manual Excel and FTP processes need to be implemented.
No need to rely on writing SQL queries to create a campaign-ready data set
Unlocked significant time savings for segmentation in SFMC
% time saved on data management
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Flow used on DESelect website pages
no SQL dependence of Marketing
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Flow used on DESelect website pages
SEO Winners
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Flow used on DESelect website pages
Experience
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“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!”. Aisling Miller Senior Digital Marketing Executive Cambridge University Press
“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!”
5/5

Aisling Miller

“Having been able to count Cambridge University Press as one of our first customers was a massive token of trust to us. But most of all it was great to see how happy they were with our solution.”

Anthony Lamot

Anthony spent 7 years in CRM and Marketing Automation, leading projects for national and international organizations. It’s during these that he recognized the need and potential for DESelect. In his last advisory role, Anthony was the Lead Marketing Automation at Toyota Motor Europe, where he helped roll out SFMC to 30 markets in less than a year. Earlier he also founded a mentoring program for startups and a booking site for sailing trips. Anthony holds a MsC Work Psychology (magna cum laude).

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.

"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!"
“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!”. Aisling Miller Senior Digital Marketing Executive Cambridge University Press
Aisling Miller
Senior Digital Marketing Executive, Cambridge University Press

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.

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