How to leverage single Emarsys account for multibrand solution?

[ermal]

Dear Community,

We are currently exploring the possibility of implementing a multi-brand strategy within our SAP Emarsys (EMS) account, and we would appreciate your input on how to effectively manage this scenario. Specifically, we aim to utilize a single EMS account while maintaining only one customer account per contact. Our primary objective is to avoid the need for multiple accounts associated with the same email address for subscription management.

While we see several advantages in consolidating our accounts in this manner, we also recognize potential challenges. One significant challenge is that by doing so, we will have various brand-related emails, campaigns, and newsletters coexisting within a single account for each contact. This can potentially make it difficult for our marketing teams to track and analyze how a contact interacts with specific brand-related content, especially when it comes to newsletter campaigns.

Additionally, there's only a single opt-in/out field in Emarsys (that defines whether an email can be sent to a specific contact), for a multi-brand solution sending emails from the same Emarsys account, there could be the case when a customer signs out from communications from a brand, but not from another.
Within Emarsys, the possibility of opting-out from one brand and stay opted-in in another is not enabled in a standard way.

To provide you with more context, here is a similar Brand structure and the corresponding preferences for multi-brand strategy:

Brands:

1. Brand X
2. Brand Y
3. Brand Z
4. ...

Preferences for Each Brand:

• For Brand X:

  • Preference 1
  • Preference 2
  • Preference 3
  • Preference 4

• For Brand Y:

  • Preference 1
  • Preference 2
  • Preference 3

• For Brand Z:

  • Preference 1
  • Preference 2

• ...

We understand that managing communications and tracking interactions within this multi-brand, single-account structure might pose certain complexities. Therefore, we kindly request your expert advice and suggestions on the best practices and strategies to address these challenges effectively for a multi-brand solution within a single EMS account while maintaining only one customer account per contact.

Our primary concern revolves around ensuring that our marketers can accurately assess how each contact engages with brand-specific campaigns and newsletters, enabling us to tailor our communication and marketing efforts accordingly.

Your insights and recommendations for this specific use case would be invaluable in helping us optimize our SAP Emarsys setup for a multi-brand strategy within a single EMS account.

Thank you for your help!

Sincerely,
Ermal

[WillYoung]

Hi ermal,

Thanks for that great question! It is true that in Emarsys we have one standard email opt-in field, but in your scenario we would probably advise creating a customer field for the marketing opt-in for each brand and then creating segments which you can then use to direct the traffic, in a number of ways. For example:

1. You can combine the brand opt-in segment with the segment used for the launch list of a marketing campaign, to ensure that only opted-in contacts receive that campaign.
2. You can also exclude opt-in segments from a campaign for a different brand - although that means a contact who has opted in fo rboth brands would be excluded.
3. You can use the participation check node in the Automation Center to make sure that contacts do not receive too many similar messages for different brands.

By using such opt-in segments as the core method for creating your launch lists, you can then use the same segments in Audience Reporting to look for trends among customers of different brands, or use them to create bespoke reports for each brand on the Campaign Analytics page.

In other words, there are plenty of ways to satisfy your use cases, and the final decision will depend on your exact use cases and the resources you have available to manage it.

To clarify one point, Emarsys does not have a central preference centre for multiple opt-ins. But that is the goal of the SAP CDC - to be a central place for consent and identity management - and Emarsys will soon be taking advantage of that.

[ermal]

Thank you Will for your prompt response. I appreciate your insights on this matter.

[juanescab]

Thank you for the great question and valuable insights!

@WillYoung, in addition, could you please offer further guidance and insights on handling multiple website domains with regards to Web Channel and Web Extend? I understand that configuring multiple domains is possible with Web Channel, but integrating Web Extend may pose challenges in distinguishing tracked web behavior across different domains.

Your expertise on this matter would be greatly appreciated!

Best,
Juan Cabrera

[WillYoung]

Hi Juan!

That is a great question. For Web Extend, there are two things you need to pay attention to - which contact ID you use to identify customers, and your product catalog. Web Extend can happily track customers across different sites if there is a universal ID. And as long as the products they are viewing are consistent (i.e. they share a product catalog), then the product recommendations and so on will all work fine.

In other words, tracking contacts across multiple domains (e.g. regional or localised) for the same brand poses no trouble for Web Extend. And you can use tags to differentiate which website is being viewed, if you want.  

But if the different domains have different brands, with different products, then we would always strongly recommend having an Emarsys account for each brand. Otherwise Web Extend will be tracking behaviour relating to different sets of products, and cannot provide the same insights.

Since Web Extend is quite flexible, and every business has its own challenges, I would always tell customers to speak to their Success Manager to evaluate which option is the best for them. Even if the answer is to have separate Emarsys accounts, you can still use the Unified Account Reporting to bring all the responses together in one place.

Hope that explains it a little...