The Client
The Association for Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising (ADMA) is the largest marketing association in Australia. ADMA offers education courses, resources, events and expertise for creative and effective data-driven marketing and advertising across all channels and platforms.
The Situation
ADMA originated from a tradition of direct mail, where personalized customer experiences and one-to-one relationships were always a priority. As the practice of direct mail subsided, ADMA needed to support the next generation of data-driven marketing across education, events, activities and resources. The association began to migrate more of its assets, communications and content to digital environments, and recognized a new opportunity to build personal experiences for its customers.
The Challenge
A fragmented digital platform prevented ADMA from truly understanding customer journeys. The ability to book educational courses and events was allocated to one system, the ability to pay in another and integration with Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) was weak. This antiquated and disjointed environment impeded ADMA from understanding how site visitors interacted with its extensive collection of assets and properties. ADMA determined that a new technology environment was required to deliver elite data-driven marketing and to properly execute personalization.
ADMA needed to develop a new digital strategy to meet the expectations of marketers in Australia, in addition to solidifying its position as a leader in its field. In order to guarantee its new platform provided a one-to-one experience for both association members and new customers, ADMA turned to Acquia Personalization and its suite of optimization and personalization tools.
The Solution
To deliver a truly personalized customer experience, ADMA developed a new digital strategy with a state-of-the-art website at its heart. To implement personalization on its new website, ADMA turned to Drupal and the Acquia Platform. The first step was to migrate content from ADMA’s old website to Drupal and to integrate its learning management system, CRM and email marketing platforms.
With seamless integrations to Drupal’s content management system, Salesforce’s CRM and an eCommerce functionality, ADMA was able to manage all of its technical systems under one platform for the first time. With visibility into the customer’s journey, ADMA was equipped to deliver personalized experiences to all members and site visitors.
The first step in implementing Acquia Personalization was to collect behavioral data about site visitors. This data included determining how both members and nonmembers consumed content, how they purchased courses, and where they received information about events. Personalization has always been at the heart of direct marketing, and Acquia Personalization enabled ADMA to evolve its traditional marketing approaches to implement audience segments on its site.
ADMA uses personas and audience segments to influence marketing activities. With the help of Acquia Professional Services, ADMA developed personas that distinguished location, the level of the marketer, and the type of organization in which the user is employed. Once these personas were in place, ADMA used Acquia Personalization to dynamically test what content was most attractive to each audience segment. With a new understanding of the customer journey, ADMA can now craft unified user profiles to provide the most engaging experiences to site visitors.
The Results
With Acquia, ADMA was able to build unified digital platform that not only provides visitors with tailored experiences, but also drives user engagement and conversions.
- The new platform was launched in less than 18 months
- 90 percent increase in engagement on the homepage in both visit duration and continued site navigation.
- 16 percent increase in event registration.
“Technology is the glue between our business and our customers,” said Katherine Raskob, senior marketing and communications executive at ADMA. “Drupal has been an incredibly easy to use, and has offered ADMA a fantastic way to develop and enforce data-driven marketing. On top of the Drupal, Acquia Personalization has given us data-driven marketing capabilities that we never had before.”