Why We Built Campaign Studio

Stephen Rosenfeld is the Director of Project Services at Lev, and most recently worked as a Principal Platform Architect for Marketing Cloud. He has been recognized for his innovative Marketing Cloud work by both Lev and Salesforce, and is the creator of Lev’s in-house product suite, Campaign Studio. 

Today, he’s sharing his story behind Campaign Studio, what it is, and how it has proven to help marketers be more successful in their roles.

[Lev Marketing] Stephen, what inspired you to develop Campaign Studio?

Put simply, it was our customers. While working as a Marketing Cloud Solution Architect, the campaign teams we work with were voicing concerns over the difficulties and inefficiencies of having to rebuild similarly structured campaigns over and over again. There was a need to improve accuracy and speed.

I would get brought into conversations with a campaign team to review the logistics in executing specific campaign workflows. The questions were typically, “Are we doing this in the most efficient way?” or, “Is there a way we can reduce the amount of time it takes for us to build a campaign to provide more value in what we are doing?” 

Each time I reviewed the workflows, I found that the campaign team was using a standard checklist to track what assets needed to be built within the application to support the deployment. When I suggested a more technical approach, the team would respond that the current workflow was done this way because we need specific functionality available to us in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that would prevent the more streamlined approach from working. 

I started thinking about how we could do this at scale – where a non-technical marketer could create a campaign template solely within the Marketing Cloud user interface, decide what Marketing Cloud assets should be built within the template, and what attributes of those assets should change between builds. Thus, Campaign Studio: Accelerate was born.

[Lev Marketing] Can you tell us a little more about Campaign Studio: Accelerate, and how it has evolved into several other solutions within the Campaign Studio product suite?

With Accelerate, marketers spend less time cycling through deployment checklists and more time on the strategy and content for their campaigns. This deployment management tool simplifies and modernizes your campaign deployment process to save time and eliminate errors. What takes a typical team up to 45 minutes to complete is now reduced to less than 1 minute.

The days of our customers creating data extensions, folder structures, queries, send definitions, and emails are officially over.

As Accelerate continued to grow, another question in the Marketing Cloud space was consistently getting asked. “We have to migrate from a legacy (1.0 or 2.0) account to a new Enterprise 2.0 account. Is there a way to streamline this process?” I still remember the day it all clicked. An account migration is like a really large campaign (like really large). Sure, there are a few key differences, but at the core of the process we are rebuilding assets based on a predefined structure. 

We can now streamline the movement of assets between entirely different Marketing Cloud accounts with Campaign Studio: Migrate.  While the process of migrating between enterprises is often a song and dance of review, build, and audit, our team now has the tools to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to get a new Marketing Cloud instance operational — allowing us to focus more time on providing insight and strategy on the tools our customers now have in their new instance of Marketing Cloud.

Next, we developed Campaign Studio: Publish. With the foundation of being able to move many dynamic assets between business units behind us, we started focusing on how we can help customers move assets between a QA and production environment. Now we have the ability to manage quickly and accurately rebuilding assets.

The next step was a natural evolution to mix the two concepts of Migrate and Accelerate to allow marketers to test campaign builds in one business unit, and then push that campaign into another business unit. It is similar to a migration but the nuances behind it differ enough that it warranted its own iteration of the existing tools.

The challenge is that there are no tools that enable teams to move their tested and approved changes from lower-level BUs. Campaign Studio: Publish solves that problem. It allows teams to move any asset in their SDLC process from lower-environment BUs to higher-environment BUs programmatically.

The newest of the Campaign Studio family is Campaign Studio: Monitor. It was created to provide better insights to our customers. Marketing Cloud does a good job of making you aware when something isn’t working due to an error in the platform, but what if something stops working because of what is happening outside the platform?

Campaign Studio: Monitor offers real-time monitoring of events within Marketing Cloud both in and outside the platform — including API sends that may not be working like you expect them to.

This proactive monitoring tool gives our customers peace of mind knowing those critical processes are running smoothly that should be set and forgotten.

[Lev Marketing] Wow! Can you share any success stories with us on customers using Campaign Studio? 

One of our large Gaming customers was deploying more than 2,000 emails a month with a very lean marketing team. The accuracy of the campaign sends was suffering due to human error as a result of manual processes. Because more time was spent on repetitive, tactical tasks rather than focusing on marketing strategy and messaging, they faced an inability to implement desired marketing campaigns at scale – ultimately impacting revenue.

Within three months of launch, Campaign Studio increased existing staff capacity by 100 hours per week, and substantially reduced the time spent on repetitive tasks. This allowed their marketing team to truly focus on strategy and innovation, and dramatically increased campaign accuracy.

Want to learn more about Campaign Studio? Let’s get in touch.