ADMA Perfects Data-driven Marketing with Acquia Lift

To create the best customer experiences online, you need to start with data. Today, customers expect all brands and organizations to provide them with the right experience, on the right device, at the right time. In a presentation at the 2016 Acquia Engage conference, Katherine Raskob, Director of Communications & Customer Experience at ADMA, provided honest insight into how her team relies on data to deliver loyal and potential customers with the most personalized user experiences to date.

The Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising (ADMA) offers education courses, resources, events and expertise for creative and effective data-driven marketing and advertising across all channels and platforms. To truly represent the data-driven marketing industry, ADMA needed to deliver better customer experiences to all of its unique users. However, a disjointed digital system prevented the association from collecting data about first-time users and existing customers.

Before moving to the Acquia Platform, adma.com.au had not seen an update in five years. ADMA conducted a qualitative survey and discovered that 70 percent of its members preferred to communicate over email and to interact with an organization online. Users wanted to be able to find industry statistics, register for events and purchase education courses through a website. However, a fragmented digital platform prevented ADMA from delivering a cohesive customer journey.

The ability to book educational courses and events was allocated to two different systems, the ability to pay in another, and integration with Salesforce®’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was weak.

With Acquia, ADMA was able to manage all of its systems under one platform for the first time. ADMA’s new state-of-the-art website, built on Drupal, is positioned at the center of all its technical systems.

With a cohesive digital platform, ADMA was able to start collecting user data to discover how members and non-members consumed content and information, purchased courses, and where they received information about events.

ADMA developed six personas that distinguished location, the level of the marketer, and the type of organization in which the user in employed.

With Acquia Lift, user data is collected across all touchpoints and marketing channels, and stored in a central repository.

ADMA can use Lift to develop audience segments and run A/B tests to determine what content is the most attractive to each persona. After adopting Acquia Lift, ADMA as seen a 90 percent increase in engagement.

For Raskob and her team, developing personas was easy because they have always maintained a good understanding of their customers. Understanding how to incorporate all the new user data collected with Lift into their content strategy was more challenging. “Data can be overwhelming,” Raskob said.

“Most often, it’s best to take a test and learn approach.” Implementing a test-and-learn approach means making a hypotheses, testing it and learning from the process. ADMA started simple and began by pushing personalized event advertisements based on region. After one just one month, it witnessed a 16 percent increase in engagement on event pages.

Watch the full presentation, The True Story of a Digital Transformation Project, here: