Press Release
The independent, international scientific publishing house De Gruyter with headquarters in Berlin has recently started relying on the advantages of the combined Salesforce solutions »Salesforce Marketing Cloud« and »Salesforce Sales Cloud«. With the help of the digital agency dotSource, the interfaces of the publishing house’s system landscape were extended in a future-proof way. All the B2B as well as B2C customer data is now managed centrally and can be used for marketing and sales purposes from there.
In search of an implementation partner for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the scientific publishing house De Gruyter approached the Jena digital agency dotSource. Before the beginning of the project, De Gruyter used a complex system landscape, consisting of Salesforce Sales Cloud as a CRM solution, an e-mail marketing tool and an ERP system. Every year, De Gruyter publishes about 1,300 books, more than 900 subscription-based and open access journals and a variety of digital products. Incorporating Salesforce Marketing Cloud as an addition to the existing Salesforce Sales Cloud was an agreed project objective in order to be able to manage all the customer data centrally and to reduce the complexity of the system landscape in the future.
Professionally maintaining customer relationships with the Salesforce Cloud platform
Besides the existing Salesforce Sales Cloud which was hitherto used as a CRM solution, an ERP system and a marketing tool for e-mail campaigns were used. An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) enabled the data exchange between all systems. However, the individual software solutions acted as separate data sources and thus posed a challenge: Reactions to marketing e-mails sent as well as the depiction of completed double opt-ins were exclusively archived in the respective mailing lists. As a result, this information could not be saved or accessed, neither in the contact nor in the key account, and a transparent, central data administration was thus impossible. With the help of an additional interface, however, both the complex data structure of the ERP system and all the customer data (B2B as well as B2C) can be displayed in Salesforce Sales Cloud which means that it can be used as a uniform CRM system in the future.
In order to create targeted marketing campaigns for customer acquisition and retention, Salesforce Sales Cloud was also connected to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The connection via Marketing Cloud Connect renders the old e-mail marketing tool redundant and ensures that all contacts for sales and marketing activities are now available. With Email studio, De Gruyter has already designed target-group-relevant, personalised e-mails; for example, new leads were generated through a campaign in which inactive existing customers are offered a free test access to the diary collection of the Romance languages scholar and politician Victor Klemperer. If the user accepts this offer, a new lead is created in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and a corresponding task is assigned to the account owner in Salesforce Sales Cloud. If the user does not react to the e-mail, he automatically receives a reminder after a certain period of time.
It is envisaged that sales staff will create target-group-relevant landing pages with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, plan and realise user-specific advertisements for customer acquisition as well as reactivate existing customers with Advertising Studio, even completely without programming knowledge.
Achieve comprehensive transparency with a homogeneous system landscape
The harmonised business processes provide advantages for the publishing house in many ways: a uniform data base and a uniform user interface as well as the handling of interfaces, in particular with regard to updates and new releases, are very relevant topics for De Gruyter.
Apart from this, central data management is an important basis for professional marketing and sales strategies. Through the connection of the Salesforce solutions, this foundation was laid and enables a professional customer approach throughout all channels.
»By implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we now have the possibility to precisely address our customers and advance the automation of our marketing communication. The dotSource team professionally supported us in interlinking the data dispersed in our complex system landscape and creating an overall picture for the digital marketing communication. In particular, this allows us to expand our customer relationships and to optimise them. We are looking forward to further successful collaboration,« says Natascha Barrett, Senior Manager, Marketing CRM at De Gruyter.