Great technology and rich customer data are both necessary to successfully scale up personalization and automation of marketing communication. However, there is one more component, equally important but less visible – the know-how in the organization about how to effectively use tools and data available to grow its business.
NEXT Insurance is 100% dedicated to small business. They provide coverage for over 1300 types of business from cleaners to yoga instructors, all simple, affordable and tailored. NEXT Insurance is trusted by over 420,000 business owners and “led by people, powered by technology”.
Vecton is a Marketing Automation Agency: a close-knit team of technology enthusiasts and practitioners on a mission to bridge two edges of a chasm between constantly new marketing automation/CDP technology and the human ability to understand, implement and benefit from it.
The Challenge
NEXT partnered with Vecton in order to streamline and scale up the benefits provided using the latest technology for better customer lifecycle management. One of the key elements of this challenge was to constantly level up the skills and know-how among NEXT employees, in the fields of marketing communication personalization and customer analytics.
While NEXT had already integrated the advanced CDXP technology and the Bloomreach Engagement platform, the challenge was to take advantage of this platform with a wider team of employees and in more depth.
We wanted to enable our marketing team to move quickly while not needing to rely on our engineering team for changes. By working with Vecton, we were able to get our team up to speed as well as move quickly to achieve our goals. This also enabled our engineering team to focus on larger items that would drive our longer term success.
Matt Zumwalt, Head of Lifecycle Marketing, NEXT Insurance
The Solution
Vecton consultants are experienced experts in marketing automation and in Bloomreach – the MarTech platform used in NEXT. They helped to establish the environment for NEXT employees to constantly upgrade the automation and personalization skills. The environment was built around an internal wiki website, where all the video and text content was uploaded, grouped and made available to everyone in the organization. As a result, the advanced usage of the MarTech technology was democratized. Then, the magic started to happen.
If you are wondering on how to establish an environment for the employees in your organization, to continuously upgrade the automation and their personalization skills, consider the following examples implemented in NEXT:
- Vecton created a special wiki subsite with structured onboarding materials, links and lots of useful information on good practices and rules to follow, so everyone working on automation scenarios in NEXT has convenient access to all the information needed from one convenient place.
- Vecton consultants recorded a set of 15 educational videos with step-by-step tutorials on each of the important areas of the Bloomreach Engagement platform that are important for the NEXT teams. Everything from automation scenario design, through content personalization to data analytics was covered in examples and mostly used cases.
- Vecton and Next implemented a standard process of getting support and advice from experienced and knowledgeable Vecton MarTech consultants who answered questions, helped build automations and analytics, but also challenged and trained the employees in the use of the Bloomreach Engagement platform.
During the years of our work with the Customer Lifecycle team at NEXT we observed that with time the marketing automation setups there have become more and more advanced, with an increasing degree of personalization, more resistant to errors and elegantly designed. This is all thanks to the continually growing proficiency and democratization of Bloomreach Engagement use by the NEXT teams.
Arek Kustra, Vecton
The Results
As NEXT Insurance employees were trained on the features and abilities of the Bloomreach Engagement platform and became part of the constantly learning community:
- the number of use cases of the MarTech platform increased
- the advancement of personalization and automation upgraded
- the risks from incorrect marketing communication were minimized
- efficiency in creating and launching a new automation use case improved
