Situation
Mercedes-Benz AG is one of the biggest suppliers of premium passenger vehicles, and expects that by 2025 it will generate a quarter of global car sales online together with its sales partners. This digital sales channel is supplementing physical retail sales.
The foundations for innovative automobile marketing have been created at the organisational level with the transition to a central agency. One of the challenges was to incorporate agile teams and processes into the car manufacturer’s engineer-driven corporate culture. The automobile industry is also globally focused as a whole, though with sales organisations and dealers at national level acting independently of one another.
The customer journey and the entire marketing funnel are optimised in an agile setup, and customers are addressed in a targeted and individual manner based on personalisation and retargeting options.
Salesforce Audience Studio and Marketing Cloud were chosen as a central platform to support the marketing and sales processes. As well as designing the solution and launching it on the market, the car manufacturer also focuses on operative support and local expertise.
"Transforming the client’s marketing strategy has required integrating its 100-year-old corporate culture with Salesforce’s capacity for fast-paced innovation. Mastering this challenge has been both demanding and satisfying for the client and PwC in equal measure."
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Solution
PwC’s marketing advisory experts are pursuing an innovative approach together with the experienced team on the customer side. The objective is to enable an agile and coherent DevOps approach for the design, implementation and global rollout of a digital marketing solution.
The main element of the approach is the ‘enhancement track process’. Requirements with regard to standardisation, efficiency, new modules and tools – and how they are to be used – are adopted at an early stage and prioritised in terms of value added and effort.
In short, agile sprints, test and pilot products are developed by PwC based on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and the BXT approach (Business, Experience, Technology). Rollout packages are then put together and made available to everybody.
These BXT packages are processed by an agile team, which cooperates closely with the ‘enhancement track team’, and are implemented worldwide. The rollout takes place on site, online or through activations that can be used on a self-service basis. In this way, over the space of two years more than 37 markets have been enabled with a wide variety of use cases in the fields of personalisation and retargeting.
For example, a customer segmentation package has been developed which makes it possible to address larger target groups in a targeted manner and to suppress undesired target contacts. Central monitoring of all platforms ensures that the implementation of marketing measures in the markets can be calibrated and optimised (Salesforce Datorama).
Results
The new digital marketing strategy is yielding some impressive results: Click-through rates in selected campaigns were increased by up to 160%. Optimised customer segmentation and targeted campaigns have led to a reduction in scatter loss and company-wide cost savings as a result. Integrating different data sources and a frequency management system has made it possible to optimise the reach of the campaigns. Ongoing personalisation campaigns also help to keep conversion rates high in the marketing and sales funnel.
For this project, PwC was awarded the Partner Innovation Award 2020 in the field of marketing by IDC and Salesforce.
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Contact our experts
Lingli He
Paolo Gatti
