Learn how MERGE helped James Hardie prepare for the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection launch through strategic email development in Marketo.
James Hardie
Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection announcement email and the Request for sample confirmation email:
Preparing for the launch of a new collection involves a multitude of projects. From developing emails in Marketo to creating assets and website maintenance, announcing a new collection is no easy feat.
When our client, James Hardie, a global building materials company, was preparing for the launch of the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection, they wanted to ensure they were meeting deadlines and operating according to best practices in Marketo. That’s why they called in support from MERGE.
One of the biggest overarching problems the James Hardie team faced was ongoing issues with their Marketo instance, specifically with Salesforce sync errors. They were spending more time fixing things in Marketo than progressing, which is oftentimes a tell-tale sign that it’s time for an audit.
James Hardie was looking for assistance in the following areas:
Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection
There were several action items to prepare for the collection launch:
Marketo Audit
The James Hardie team partnered with MERGE to ensure their instance was as optimized as possible before the launch. Not to mention, this would also lay a stable groundwork for the future and ensure scalability.
We called in the support of seven team members, including a project manager, client director/solution architect, senior technical consultant, two senior consultants, and two consultants. Our team developed solutions for the following areas of work:
Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection
The MERGE team executed the announcement email that was sent to 60k+ homeowners.
Brochure Download Program
Our team partnered with MERGE’s experience technology team who owns all of James Hardie’s website development work to create the brochure download page and embed a Marketo form. From there, we built an ongoing program in Marketo to capture form fills and send emails with the brochure asset.
Redesign Sample Request Drip Program
When a user filled out the Sample Request form, they had the option to choose from a wide range of siding samples. Upon launch, we added the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection to the sample request form. This process also involved setting up velocity scripting in Marketo to capture customers' sample order details along with their email address and integrating the new, hardcoded emails into the existing sample request program. Finally, we created a new drip program specific to the Magnolia Home | James Hardie Collection sample selections.
Marketo Audit
MERGE executed a Marketo audit to ensure there was structure to their instance. These were the four goals of the Marketo audit:
MERGE also provided documentation so that in the event something broke, it doesn’t take as long to fix. The post-audit worksheet also serves as a roadmap to gain alignment and work toward the four goals outlined as our primary objectives over the next 12 months.
“We were the most impressed with the dedication to documentation – MERGE provided a high level of detail in the technical design document.”
The James Hardie team now has increased confidence in their Marketo instance. Now, their instance is set up according to best practices and there’s an enforced structure. They are no longer running into issues around things breaking in Marketo, which has already saved their team plenty of time.
“MERGE has influenced our thinking – now, we do things the right way the first time around.”
The launch of the Magnolia Home | James Hardie collection was also successful – through our work in deploying the announcement emails, redesigning and updating the sample request drip program in Marketo, and developing the brochure download form, the James Hardie team saw some noteworthy metrics:
“It’s been valuable that MERGE has such deep relationships with Adobe and Marketo, that if we need to pull in those partners and make sure that we’re connecting the dots, they can really help us do that."
