Migrating toward greater personalisation: Purple Square supports Milk & More’s transition to Salesforce Marketing Cloud

As with any service, customer satisfaction, loyalty and recommendations are paramount. Milk & More thrived during the pandemic, winning hearts, minds and shopping orders from a growing customer base. Like other doorstop and delivery services, however, its growth began to slow as shops re-opened. Customers were ordering less, pausing their memberships or closing their accounts altogether. Milk & More was also transitioning as a business from being a full subsidiary of the Müller Group to a standalone entity.

Time for change

The team was already outgrowing their existing CRM system and realised that it was time to invest in new technology to help support their efforts to improve their customer marketing through more targeted personalised communications and campaigns. Milk & More also needed to transition their website and marketing channels from part of Müller Group’s to their own, independent strategy.

“The senior management recognised that CRM and customer marketing were key components in improving Milk & More’s commercial performance,” explained Jim Bessey, Head of CRM, Retention and Loyalty at Milk & More. “They realised we were missing an opportunity to derive better value and improve the loyalty of our customer base.”

Purple Square had done some initial work with Milk & More, auditing their old marketing automation platform and helping to fill in resourcing gaps when it came to campaign development and execution. They helped support Milk & More’s selection process in choosing Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) as their new platform. As such, the Purple Square team was well equipped to manage the migration from their legacy CRM system to SFMC and Milk & More brought them in for the project.

Setting up for success

To ensure everyone was working toward the same goals from the start, Purple Square worked with the Milk & More team to agree the objectives, KPIs and success measures for the migration project. The end goal was clear: that SFMC would provide the foundation for best in class customer marketing.

Once in place, the new platform would enable Milk & More’s small marketing team to produce, deliver, evaluate and measure their own campaigns. It would rely on data to help Milk & More to create highly targeted and personalised campaigns across multiple channels, aimed at increasing customer retention rates and customer value across the business. Ultimately, Milk & More wanted its marketing investment to help grow its customer base and increase repeat orders from its existing customers.

In line with these objectives and with a view toward achieving a timely return on Milk & More’s investment, Purple Square created and agreed the design, plan and requirements for the migration, as well as how to build the data infrastructure and system configuration to achieve the results they were aiming for. As part of this, they were tasked with migrating the content and existing campaigns to the new platform, ‘warming up’ the new environment by delivering personalised emails successfully to customers and working with the Salesforce partner to support API integrations into the new environment.

“Purple Square handled the project exactly as I would have expected. They were proactive in terms of recommendations on how to deliver the project and conscientious in the delivery of their tasks.”

Keeping on track

With the initial migration underway, Milk & More worked behind the scenes with their internal teams. This meant coordinating with their IT team to help them juggle their full workloads and prioritise the building of data feeds to SFMC that were needed.

Jim Bessey joined Milk & More during this phase and – with the support of Purple Square – made sure the necessary work was in place to ensure a smooth transition. They reviewed the go-live plan and project timeline.

“Purple Square had managed and progressed the project well. They had kept it ticking during the team transition and were ready to hit the ground running,” commented Jim.

Testing, training and going live

A key part of the migration’s success was ensuring that Milk & More could make the most of the SFMC platform once it was up and running. As part of the process, Jim worked with Purple Square to build in sufficient time for loading and testing data and training Milk & More’s CRM team of three.

“Between us, our knowledge and experience with Salesforce was limited, so we needed Purple Square to provide hands-on training to ensure we could get the most out of our new platform,” explained Jim.

The data feed work was completed and a range of activities took place in advance of the go live, including data and platform user acceptance testing, ramping up the IP with four week communication sends and the migration of the customer data.

“We started business as usual campaigning from the SFMC platform in November and by January 2023 we ceased sending campaigns from the old platform and decommissioned the platform,” continued Jim.

And, thanks to Purple Square’s training and development support, the Milk & More team were building new campaigns and automations in Salesforce in January 2023.

“Purple Square provided clear and documented training for the Milk & More team, both at the platform launch and since, as we have explored SFMC’s functionality,” said Jim. “Their data dictionaries and infrastructure blueprints have also been invaluable in helping our team to understand the available dataset.”

In addition to their ongoing training and support, Purple Square has provided a dedicated resource to the Milk & More CRM team, sharing their knowledge and helping to support general campaigns and programme execution and delivery. They have worked together to develop bespoke segmentations, targeting tools, contact history and reporting capabilities.

Measuring Success

Milk & More is already seeing the benefits of SFMC as a vital marketing resource. While it’s still too early to measure whether there’s been an increase in their customers’ tenure, the following actions are a direct result of Purple Square’s work in getting the SFMC platform live and providing additional resource to support analytics and campaign execution at Milk & More:

• 100+ standalone email campaigns driving customer spend and retention.
• 10 automated email programmes managing customer challenges from onboarding/first shop, to establishing recurring orders, preventing reduction in order size, and preventing churn/dormancy.
• 10 bespoke segmentations currently in use in a range of CRM campaigns and programmes.
• A product recommendation model ready for live testing.
• Self-serve campaign reporting dashboards allowing the Milk & More CRM team to understand campaign effectiveness across a range of key metrics.

Jim continued: “Purple Square handled the project exactly as I would have expected. They were proactive in terms of recommendations on how to deliver the project and conscientious in the delivery of their tasks. They had the requisite level of expertise to deliver the project and support the Milk & More team to a high level of quality, were flexible and available at all times and ensured problems were quickly resolved and delays were avoided.

Purple Square provided a great implementation and great delivery.”

Looking ahead

Following the successful migration, Milk & More’s CRM team agreed that they needed an outside resource to provide support to help make the most of their new SFMC platform.

“The business didn’t have a CRM history and we knew we needed a mix of support and analytics skills to keep SFMC up and running,” explained Jim. “In addition we were looking for a team that could support us on delivering campaigns and customer journeys as well as to provide CRM analytical services including segmentation and model builds.”

After initial talks with 12 -15 organisations, Jim and his team narrowed the pool down to six, including Purple Square as the incumbents. Ultimately, they chose Purple Square.

“Purple Square had proven themselves and we had a level of trust in them,” said Jim, “They also presented a compelling commercial case. We knew they understood our platform and business, were doing a good job and would deliver a good value service. We believed they would be able to support the analytic side of the brief and remove the overhead we would need to hire and re-train a new team.”

Purple Square continues to provide dedicated in-house support to Milk & More and using analytics to provide insight and guidance for campaigns. The team is also building analytical models such as a product recommender to ensure Milk & More’s new SFMC platform meets its objectives: to support best in class customer marketing, helping to reduce churn and increase customer tenure and value across the business – now and into the future.

“I expect us to continue to work with Purple Square as we continue to develop our CRM programme,” Jim concluded.

“Purple Square provided clear and documented training for the Milk & More team, both at the platform launch and since, as we have explored SFMC’s functionality.”