As the number of channels consumers interact with on a daily basis have exploded, CRM has evolved. Businesses simply can’t grow sustainably without consistently leveraging information about their consumers at every touchpoint. Granted, a key challenge is connecting that information to tangible business outcomes. This is a particularly common theme in industries that are not outwardly direct to consumer, like Consumer Packaged Goods. But while challenges exist, it’s an exciting time for marketers because businesses are being driven towards more internal creativity and collaboration in order to meet the needs of their consumers. As marketers, we must keep a pulse on the “now” – what’s happening in society, where the overlap for our brands is, and how we can activate that overlap in a way that adds maximum value for consumers. That’s the journey we’re on.

Consumer centricity is critical to us at Pernod Ricard, as our goal is to be the leader in spirits. Over the past 43 years, Pernod Ricard has built a unique premium spirits portfolio of brands with international reach. Today it is one of the most comprehensive and innovative spirits companies in the marketplace. As the lead on Performance Marketing for our USA portfolio, I’ve partnered with the Malibu brand team – Pernod Ricard's premium rum brand – to focus advertising investments around capturing consumer information on as many touch-points as possible. One of the initiatives I'm most excited about is a new pilot program we just launched for Malibu, leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Advertising Studio. It’s focused on using consumer data from Facebook Lead Ads to power meaningful follow up Email communications that lead to product purchase and enrollment in the brand’s most prominent activation campaign: #BecauseSummer.

“Every summer we aim to create a wealth of exciting, inspiring content for our Malibu audience. Salesforce is enabling us to distribute this content in a smart and efficient way, and providing us with invaluable insights into how and when these messages are being consumed -  continually helping us to build a more sophisticated digital eco-system.” -Jilly Gray, Digital Manager, Malibu

With Advertising Studio, we're able to reach existing consumers that fit our target segments and deliver relevant ads to them on Facebook (where they spend a large amount of time) based on their interactions. We’re also able to acquire new prospects with Facebook Lead Ads using two key tactics:

1. Create Lookalike Audiences of our best customers.
2. Target people interested in music festivals our brand is sponsoring, or who have liked the Malibu and other rum pages.

Since we don't want the relationship to end there though, we're also adding these audiences to a custom journey in Journey Builder, using Salesforce's Lead Capture App, to send leads directly into Marketing Cloud as soon as they come in. This way we can provide more information on offers via email or re-target consumers who don't engage with emails by using ads to re-engage them.

After just 10 days, we’re seeing phenomenal results with 1,300 net-new leads, and open rates of journey emails between 43%-77%! What stands out to me here is how incredibly qualified the leads are and how relevant the content is to viewers. These results would not be achievable without the Malibu brand team creating a powerful platform to reach consumers, coupled with consumer data at the center, helping us bring in audiences that demonstrate affinity for our offering and are efficient to capture.

This pilot has not only blazed the way for CRM-driven advertising programs at Pernod Ricard, as nothing like this has been done before, it's also raised awareness of the tremendous possibilities around being more and more consumer centric. It's brought to life new KPIs like “journey completion rate,” surfaced important tactics for the company to start thinking about around consumer engagement, and highlighted high-performing strategies to double-down on. It’s an exciting time and we're just getting started!

In an ideal world, we will have a universe of relevant customers that we can regularly engage, and associated business outcomes that align to both our corporate and marketing KPIs. We don’t want to just optimize the funnel – we want to optimize the journey. Fundamentally, there is a huge difference as optimizing the journey means we don’t operate as if there are exit points in our communications with consumers. If we want to achieve this and continue to be innovative, data-driven, and consumer centric, it’s critical that we work between stakeholders to enable the ideal state of individual consumer-level marketing, as that will only be as good as the people and processes involved.