This is a guest post written by Bloomreach Ambassador Simon Löfgren, Marketing Automation Manager at Proffsmagasinet.
There’s a common misconception I come across when I talk to my colleagues in other marketing teams: a bigger, bolder marketing strategy requires more people to make it happen. But this isn’t always the case.
With the right tools, you can do a lot with a smaller marketing department. I know from firsthand experience as the Marketing Automation Manager at Proffsmagasinet. Our company is a leading ecommerce destination for do-it-yourself home owners in the Nordics, and all our marketing efforts rely on a talented and efficient team.
The idea that complex campaigns require more people comes from a narrow view of how marketing campaigns are built. It presumes that the operational tasks like creating, designing, and orchestrating campaigns are inherently labor-intensive simply because they have always been this way.
But developing campaigns that continuously get results doesn’t have to be a time-consuming endeavor. You just need the right marketing platform that can automate your efforts.
At Proffsmagasinet, our marketing team harnesses Bloomreach Engagement’s marketing automation capabilities to handle sophisticated campaigns without the need for heavy developer attention or a dedicated troupe of specialists. With the right approach and Bloomreach’s powerful features, we can create, monitor, and calibrate campaigns that don’t demand constant supervision to get incredible results.
Here’s how we’re able to do more with less using Bloomreach.
How Bloomreach Streamlines the Automation Process
One of the biggest advantages of Bloomreach Engagement was how fast we implemented the platform and started reaping the benefits. Even with a smaller team, we were able to hit the ground running after a streamlined and easy configuration process.
Once our channels and data were synced, we got to work building the campaigns we knew could get results. We created a thought-out, automated strategy with campaigns that could stand on their own, utilizing templates that streamlined the build process.
Plus, after the initial setup, our developer team didn’t need to play a huge role in making our campaigns work effectively. Emails didn’t have to be manually built from the ground up, and tailoring messages to specific audiences didn’t require a whole new duplicate message.
Bloomreach made it so that one team member could keep campaigns running, reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time.
Automation in Action: How Bloomreach Optimized Our Email Newsletters
One of the most successful examples of this streamlined, automated process is the outstanding performance of our email newsletters. Before Bloomreach, we built these emails every week, manually plugging content from the website into our newsletters and sending them out to our audience.
To make this process easier in Bloomreach Engagement, we decided to build a template to automate our strategy. Our development team helped set up the nuts and bolts of the campaign, creating a template we can persistently use and integrating our website and product data with our email marketing.
Using Bloomreach’s cataloging features, we now automatically scrape our website to find and insert relevant content into our newsletters, populating these emails with meaningful, data-driven messaging without having to painstakingly gather it all and piece together an all-new campaign.
This was a welcome process for our development team. “The implementation was quite easy, and once it was set up, I didn’t need to be heavily involved for ongoing campaigns to be successful,” explains Proffsmagasinet’s Senior Developer, Jiri Petrnoušek.
Plus, we can tailor our emails to serve multiple audiences without having to reproduce our messages to meet each one’s needs. Proffsmagasinet serves four markets with customers that speak multiple languages (via proffsmagasinet.se, staypro.dk, staypro.fi, and staypro.no) and we previously had to copy and paste each email to be manually translated. Bloomreach’s language features make it easy to automate this step without the need for parallel campaigns — our single campaign can automatically display the right language to the right customer depending on which audience they are in.
All this automation adds up to our current high standard of operational efficiency. Now our newsletters are created in a fraction of the time they used to take. These messages previously required 15 to 20 hours of work every week, but with a fixed template that routinely refreshes and translates our content, there’s no need to invest so much valuable time in one campaign.
As the person in charge of building these newsletters, I can personally attest to how game-changing this process has been. I now spend an hour or two each week on our newsletter emails instead of the two to three days I used to devote to making sure these campaigns are purpose-built and operational.
Instead, I can focus on leveraging more of Bloomreach’s capabilities to bolster our efforts and tackling the big-picture tasks that make the most impact on Proffsmagasinet’s bottom line.
Bloomreach Has Broadened the Scope of Our Marketing
With automation, Bloomreach has turned our most valuable channel into an even more powerful asset. Our email campaigns are key revenue drivers and we can iterate our success at scale by building campaigns with automation in mind.
Plus, the time saved on building campaigns has opened the door for a more robust marketing strategy. In my own role, I now have time to work on truly impactful projects like creating better customer segments for our campaigns, expanding our marketing channels, creating a tailored customer journey, and more.
Since adopting Bloomreach, Proffsmagasinet has optimized all its marketing channels — including SMS, push notifications, and ads — which I can coordinate without the need for a huge team. Our company has been able to reengage dormant customers, target hyper-relevant audiences on Google and Facebook, and serve tailored content to audiences at key moments in their customer experience.
This is the power that Bloomreach offers small teams. It has broadened the scope of what I can build, execute, and accomplish in my individual role, and it has elevated our team as a whole to new heights.
