Case study
How to successfully implement Sales Cloud with Marketing Cloud integration: fashion business case study
If you want to make the most out of your broad campaigns (by broad we mean more than 10 million individual leads within a single campaign), you have to fully optimize and automate your key business processes. When your client, one of the leading companies in the European fashion industry, needed a new CRM to fit their growing business needs, we instantly knew that Sales Cloud with a complex Marketing Cloud integration is the best way to go to improve their sales numbers.
About the client
Fashion business
Our client is a German brand that designs outfits, accessories and fragrances for women. The company was brought to life in 1975. In 2007, they celebrated their 500th store and four years later, the 600th one. 5 years ago, the company decided to launch a mobile app in some markets (Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary) to sell their products even more easily. During the past few years, the client suffered from inefficiency in handling online marketing campaigns. Some marketing activities weren’t properly optimized, and some marketing channels weren’t utilized efficiently. They reached out to Awesome Bytes to implement the best solution. They were looking for a comprehensive platform that would enable broad campaign management and at the same time, would be extremely customized.
About the project
The purpose of the project
The client needed a unified platform that would make marketing campaign management easy and automated as much as possible. What they highlighted was that the tool should have enabled to make communication with customers easier, even when campaigns had a large target audience. What the client needed was a tool that would be possible to integrate with seven platforms they used within their existing business structure. What’s also important, they needed to integrate their new system with already existing gamification options that were a crucial element of their loyalty program
Implementation
The whole task turned out to be quite challenging, but finally we came up with the fitting solution. We decided to implement the comprehensive Sales Cloud system fully integrated with Marketing Cloud. We built the complex system infrastructure, however, we took a chance on the more customized solution. Among the others, we implemented a customized lightning component framework.
When it comes to the data structure, we used three standard Salesforce objects: Account, Contact and Campaign. Each object can have Custom fields added by the user. As the client insisted on being able to build customized groups of customers, we used customized Salesforce solutions like group filtering by customer code, customer age, opt-ins etc. On top of that, we made it possible to add +10 million leads within a single campaign and integrated gamification systems. The customer’s seven existing databases were successfully integrated thanks to the cloud platform Heroku.
In order to be perfectly sure that everything worked as it should, we conducted end-to-end tests. Within the project, we also worked on the highest quality of the code itself, as well as on system release and deployment. In order to complete the project efficiently, we used tools like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bitbucket Pipelines CI/CD.
Challenges and solutions
Challenges we have faced
An option to add millions of leads within a single campaign
As mentioned before, the client needed to add over 10 million clients per marketing campaign. We decided to use a customized solution based on batch jobs. The solution is used to run large jobs that exceed normal processing limits. The processes became automated, which now makes it much easier for the customer to manage marketing activities.
Integration with numerous existing systems
As the client needed to integrate seven different distributed database systems, we decided to build a neuron ESB (enterprise service bus). This solution simplified workflow and system integration – all seven disparate systems were quickly integrated. Now, the ESB speeds the delivery and adoption of new capabilities and features which results in better time management and successful data analysis. All seven platforms can be easily monitored and analyzed at the same time.