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Standardizing Email Frameworks for Salesforce Marketing Cloud Campaigns at Scale

From 2020-2022 I was the Change Manager for Digital Customer Relationship Management at AARP. I was responsible for optimizing performance to serve enterprise-wide internal clients with consumer-centric email journey automation delivery. The organization had created numerous email subscriber lists based on AARP services and interests. Myself and the team partnered with the external vendor, Shift Paradigm, to traffic strategic email campaigns while remaining in compliance with FTC regulation.  I also acted as Advisor for a team of Salesforce marketing consultants working to transition the email channel from Waterfall to Agile (SCRUM) methodology. 

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resource allocation

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portfolio management

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Change management

The Business Challenge

AARP had decentralized their marketing strategy and planning resources to the business unit level while centrally organizing marketing execution by the umbrella tech solution. This meant that requests would come in from across the business to one centralized team responsible for the build, targeting, segmentation, and deployment of all emails. Strategic requests were not submitted in a standardized format; each strategy coordinator having their own vision for what the email would look like and include. This was resulting in from-scratch email designs for each deployment, driving up execution time, cost, and visual inconsistency for the subscriber.

The Solution

Implemented a standard set of AEM templates that could be selected by AARP email strategists for their campaigns. These templates were built using dynamic templating to populate content based on audience and send priority.

Actions Taken:

  • Conducted an analysis that compared email template best practices with AARP email performance to collect a subset of templates that could be packaged to AARP email strategists as a portfolio of templates they could select from for their campaigns.
  • Using billable hours data, projected the cost savings that standardization would provide 
  • Designed and rolled out a change management plan that ensured clear expectations, roles, and responsibilities for AARP strategists, Salesforce consultants, and Shift Paradigm partners.
  • Created prioritization criteria for overlapping audience targeting and segmentation 
  • Organized project execution using a hybrid Agile methodology.

Results Delivered:

  • $80K initial cost savings over 12 months post-implementation
  • Decrease to overall cost per send
  • Increased click-thru rate by loyalty member audience(s)
  • Streamlined communication for both production teams and executives
  • Sprint Retrospectives for iterative operational performance improvement
  • A scalable Agile framework
  • Improved email performance reporting (more consistency, fewer variables)