Case Study

Maximizing ROI at a Fortune 100 Consumer Packaged Goods Retailer

Speeding up digital transformation with SnapLogic’s self-service integration

The Fortune 100 Consumer Packaged Goods Retailer Backstory

Operating over 1,800 stores across the US, the Consumer Packaged Goods Retailer, a pioneer of big-box stores, was founded in Minneapolis, MN in 1902. Its core principle to this day is to provide great service to the company’s most valued asset, its customers.

The Challenge

As customers became more tech savvy and interacted with multiple channels, the retailer needed a better way to engage with customers at the right time and in the right channel. With these rapid digital changes, marketers could not react fast enough to meet their customers’ needs. Although the marketing team invested in multiple marketing and analytics platforms to fuel their digital marketing strategy, the organization still lacked full visibility of its customers’ preferences and intents. Customer data resided in silos as the marketing team monitored customer insights in multiple marketing cloud applications, on-premises applications, and databases.

Without complete insights, the marketing team could not make informed business decisions, such as which channels provided higher conversions for their digital content and offers. As a result, the marketing team could not measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of its digital marketing investments.

The marketing team also relied heavily on expensive technical resources for daily operations. To retrieve customer data outside of their existing reporting platforms — from social media channels to data aggregators — they had to rely on their IT team to develop code for many Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The process of adding or modifying data took substantial time and effort that rendered the data irrelevant for the marketing team and hindered making business decisions in a timely fashion.

Marketing by customer segmentation in the new digital landscape proved to be extremely difficult for the marketing team. Without customer data integration at their fingertips, the marketing team could not deliver real-time, personalized offers to their customers.

The Solution

The lack of visibility into their customer data hindered the business, especially when today’s customers’ behavior is influenced by digital channels. Thus, the IT team began looking for an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) vendor with a toolset that would benefit their business twofold — to provide IT with a better, integrated service ticket process and to enable the marketing team to easily view their customer data from multiple and disparate applications in a single platform.

SnapLogic was a unique in the iPaaS market because it could meet both teams’ needs. IT found that they could increase their productivity due to the platform’s self-service integration functionality. Because the complexity of integration is removed, the marketing and other business users no longer needed a software programmer by their side to perform integrations. As a result, IT reduced time spent on operations-related efforts and increased their efforts on strategic initiatives.

Consequently, the platform provided an easy way for data and applications to interact with APIs from various media outlets and social media channels, enabling users to build a range of integrations from simple to sophisticated connections. The aggregated data is highly flexible and extensible and can be analyzed to inform business decisions.

The marketing team improved their customer insights with the ability to make light transformations rapidly. Projects that were historically dependent on IT and took over six months to complete, now allowed the marketing team to obtain insights in just a few hours.

Business Outcomes

With SnapLogic, the marketing team was armed with a tool to succeed in their digital marketing strategy. They effectively created a 360-degree view of their customer with customer data from multiple marketing and social media sources, allowing them to improve on customer engagement and identify opportunities for new revenue streams. Through better data analysis, the marketing team was able to pinpoint areas that needed improvement and gain insight on where to invest their digital marketing budget.

Marketing resources were freed up to take on more marketing projects that added value to the bottom line. As the ROI of their digital marketing investments increased, the retailer successfully adapted to the changing business landscape to meet customer needs, and continued their commitment to providing exemplary customer service.