Emerald chooses 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. We are absolutely delighted that Emerald has chosen DESelect.
Drastically reducing SQL pains
Emerald recently moved from another marketing platform, to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Once they started using SFMC, 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: “Our SFMC consultant lives in SFMC and Query Studio, so of course he has no problems doing all that. But 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.”
Increasing efficiency with DESelect
Before using DESelect, Emerald’s marketers did not have database access, as their central team had built segments previously. So working with us really helped Emerald Expositions to enable their central team, creating segments themselves, simply and efficiently. Now, they even look into rolling out DESelect to the marketers themselves to completely enable their SFMC users.
Diving into more detail, he 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 them now!”
Talking about the sheer size and management of their database, Rhonda 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 takes care of this. Likewise with creating target data extensions: “If we didn’t have DESelect, we’d have to go in, get our data extension all prepped, then run our queries. Which is kind of backward, right?”
DESelect SFMC segmentation support
As we continue to grow, feedback is everything to us, so we asked Greg and Rhonda about their overall experience with our product and team.
In summarizing DESelect’s product and support, Greg said:
- “We’re really very happy with it and are enjoying the new releases. 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.”
We gladly welcome Emerald and wish them every success on their marketing automation journey.
If you’d like to learn how DESelect can help your organization, check out this quick tour, or schedule a demo today.