Case Study: Camping World

Retail / Consumer Goods

Camping World Success Story

Streamlining Campaign Velocity To Save Weeks At A Time

THE CHALLENGE

Too much data and not enough resources

Established in 1966, Camping World has grown to become the nation’s top selling RV and camping equipment retailer, achieving over $6 billion in revenue in 2023 alone. As a publicly-traded company that has been in business for almost 60 years, they have a long history of customer data at their disposal. They also have a complex business with many business lines, including CW Auctions and Good Sam. Camping World’s core goal has always been to make RVing fun and easy–and they believe the way in which they communicate with customers should reflect that. At the end of the day, they want to make sure they are communicating with their customers with products and services that are relative to their unique needs.

Although the desired outcome was clear, Camping World’s challenge lay in the technical processes. The heap of available customer data couldn’t be leveraged by marketers with limited technical resources to carry out time-consuming segmentation processes. Those team members simply couldn’t keep up with the demand. They also wanted to make sure whatever solution they identified was able to respect customers’ communication choices out-of-the-box.

Goals

  • Unleash and optimize existing customer data
  • Empower marketers to segment without IT bottleneck
  • Protect customer communication choices

Results: Exponentially faster, data-driven campaign velocity

  • User-friendly interface and functionality set up non-technical marketers for success
  • Segmentation occurs in Marketing Cloud, eliminating unnecessary steps
  • Non-technical email team can parse through all customer data for highly targeted campaigns

We had a wealth of customer data available just waiting to be unleashed by our marketers. We had some technical resources that could help the marketers compile audiences with complex SQL queries but those resources could never keep up with all of the ideas our marketers wanted to try. Now our email team conducts real-time segmentation within Marketing Cloud. What used to take our marketers anywhere from 3-14 days now takes less than 24 hours.

Brad GreeneSenior Director of Marketing Technology

USAGE

How Camping World uses DESelect

  1. Marketing data is compiled in a data warehouse and then synced with Marketing Cloud, where the email team performs segmentation
  2. Functionality like predefined relationships, data sets, and templates allow Camping World to set up our marketers for success
  3. The DESelect drag-and-drop interface allows non-technical marketers to build customized and segmented lists
  4. Audit logs and notifications give admins the ability to monitor everything closely and diagnose any issues quickly
  5. Camping World builds pre-configured data sets for marketers with all the joins already done then creates templates and/or schedules runs to further streamline the process
  6. Previews that data right away to answer questions like, ‘Am I getting the counts that I expected?’ ‘Does the data in the data extension match what I’m hoping for?’ ‘Are some fields blank?’

HIGHLIGHTS

Before & After Camping World Implemented DESelect

Camping World's campaign planning schedule after DESelect

This story was originally presented in-person at Salesforce Connections 2024 in a session titled “How Camping World Optimized Salesforce Marketing Cloud with DESelect”

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