Challenge

DHL Express is part of the DPDHL Group, the most international company in the world. They serve and operate in more than 200 countries and territories. When it comes to digital marketing, DHL Express had some lighthouse markets, but overall had fragmented approaches, little systems integration and little governance. Their marketing activities were mostly deployed by countries and regions, with a compact global team providing central platform support and maintaining a global website. In order to grow towards quality lead generation, targeting at the right point in the customer journey and using business intelligence to drive marketing decisions, they decided to switch from traditional Email Service Provider and landing page tools to a fully integrated Marketing Automation platform in 2018.

After an extensive RFP/POC process, Marketo Engage was selected as a platform to start a pilot in the Netherlands. Chapman Bright was closely involved in making the pilot a success, starting with the Netherlands as the first country to roll out. After the pilot, the decision was taken to deploy globally. This decision was based on several goals, for example the need to provide customers and prospects with a personalized experience, gaining insights in the customer journey, increasing the marketable database and increasing conversion of MQL’s by optimizing the customer journey.

Solution

Chapman Bright focused on unpacking the box, configuring the Netherlands, training staff, and migrating all old campaigns to the new Marketo environment. After that, the focus was on globally rolling out Marketo for DHL, through which we created a scalable platform. We started with updating the integration design and data quality management based on previous learnings from the pilot. We designed a templatized country onboarding process and a modular user training portal. We leveraged the expertise from initial country users in each region to build a strong internal super user and trainer network. These trainers played a role in deploying new countries.

Our role in this project was to design the architectural and organizational deployment model and assist in delivering this architecture. We gradually handed over the global technical support role and transferred our knowledge to the global team and super users so they could enable employees from other countries. On the other hand, we managed the countries’ onboarding journeys and took the lead in developing a multi-year roadmap and an advanced user training sequence.

Results

In the initial pilot, the implementation and integration went live within 4 months, after an extensive UAT. The pilot was extended for another year because it was too soon to start rolling out other countries, due to the results not yet being as desired.

Chapman Bright proposed to introduce their agile business value creation through innovation cycles method Chaploop™. Momentum was accelerated with numerous successes and new sub projects and sub pilots. The analysis showed that marketing now greatly contributes to revenue. The significant increase of new names generated matches the growth of committed revenue. Within 6 months after that, we implemented a new architecture and established six additional (country) teams. Early 2022, we were fully ready to deploy to global markets.

We are currently busy with the roll out of a large amount of countries. We’re leveraging efforts at local, regional and global level to nurture leads jointly. Initial results show that lead flows in the different countries have improved. We are actively sharing the local best practice programs to other countries, with a roadmap being developed to connect these local initiatives into a sound onboarding sequence. Check back in soon to see the final results of this global project!