The Challenge
As Haymarket evolved, so too did their strategy — and their digital ambition.
They became very interested in the power of customer data and what it could do. In 2017, they installed Customer Data Platform (CDP) Lytics on their website to help their team target first-party data based in specific interaction, and began to push their platform to its limits, resorting to workarounds and hacks to access data at the granularity they needed.
They recognized that the platform that grew with them for so long was not the tool that was going to power their evolution, and kicked off a comprehensive search for their next engagement platform, evaluating 13 total vendors over the course of a year.
“Segmentation doesn’t just help with email and click rates, it helps with inbox deliverability. In the end, the bottom line impact is all that matters. Sending to smaller, more thoughtful segments increases your chance of reaching the inbox and decreases the likelihood of opt-outs. Our goal is to send as little as possible while improving existing engagement levels.”
The Solution
The biggest use case Haymarket was looking to solve for was the ability to trigger personalized email automatically, populated with dynamic content based on a readers demographic information and historical interactions with Haymarket’s brand.
Haymarket’s medical publications include 20 separate publications, each targeting a different professional specialty, so it’s important for them to be able to personalize the content each person sees and A/B test to optimize their program.
For example, if Clinical Advisor is trying to fulfill a lead generation goal for a client in their medical business, it’s not enough to know that a reader is an oncologist – they want to know exactly what kind of oncology content they read and how often in order to re-engage them with relevant content.
With Maropost, Josh’s team can target anyone that clicked on a link containing, say, a specific drug name in an email or on their website website and enter them into a re-engagement campaign to serve them up an email with the latest content relating to the ailment they’re researching.
According to Josh,
“I especially love how we can make these journeys diverge and converge again – it made whiteboarding things like this so much easier. Setting up such a robust program would have been impossible in the past, and overall we can deploy automation about 10x faster than we used to be able to… In Maropost, I can set up touchpoints four follow-ups deep in about 3-4 minutes, whereas previously it would take me more like an hour.”
The Results
Let’s be honest: it’s a massive lift for any company to transfer systems – especially for a company like Haymarket who manages so many brands and complex customer journeys.
“Maropost expressed genuine interest in understanding our business and wanted to be a true business partner. That’s really important to us for the technologies we work with. We want to learn from you, and grow with you. We wanted our vendor to be as invested as we were in the relationship.”
Josh worked closely with Maropost’s on-boarding specialist Katharine Nowlan through implementation, and today considers Rebecca Pan, Maropost’s Strategic Customer Success Manager an extension of his team.