Eurostar SFMC

Eurostar

Eurostar is the only high speed train that directly links the UK to France and Belgium via the Channel Tunnel. They take their travellers from city centre to city centre, and have been since 1994.

Since then, they’ve carried over 130 million passengers. They take thousands of people a day to Paris, Brussels, Lille, Calais, Disneyland® Paris and more, and they also run much-loved seasonal trains to the South of France in summer and the French and Swiss Alps for skiing in the winter.

Client Challenge

Eurostar wanted help moving from Silverpop to ExactTarget.  They had three people in their email marketing team and all of them left on maternity leave at the same time.  Previously Eurostar had been using Silverpop to just send out their one stop monthly dynamic content emails that would change content and graphics based on location and language.

Funnily enough I used to build their emails when I worked at Silverpop so I already had a good start on how they worked.

With the purchase of ExactTarget they wanted to do so much more.  They wanted to move from using ExactTarget to send out marketing emails only to being their central email hub allowing for the facilitation of a 360’ view of a contact in SFDC.

 

They wanted to move from this model

Eurostar Eloqua Before

To this one

Eurostar Eloqua After

The new approach would also lend itself to all sorts of other types of email that had no previously been envisaged, for example:

  • Behavioural emails
  • Upgrade
  • Cart abandonment

 

Approach

The approach used was to increase the effectiveness of email as a channel for both transactional and promotional communications and enhance the customer experience of using Eurostar and increase the profitability of email as a channel.

In order to facilitate this the following steps took place:

  • Educate all stakeholders on the email potential through using ExactTarget
  • Define and develop the ExactTarget database structure to enable advanced email marketing capabilities
  • Migrate all outgoing email communications to ExactTarget
  • Develop a clear reporting methodology that is agreed and spans cross department
  • Collaboratively redesign email contact strategy
  • Define clear projects and timescales for the adoption of ExactTarget
  • To up skill CRM team members, improve the CRM department and increase the departments capabilities

 

The project gained traction but there was a lack of appetite from some stakeholders.  Things took a long time to get setup and moving in the right direction.  I did enjoy working with them but I feel that some of the email team did not necessarily understand the capabilities of the platform they had and did not really wish to upskill.  I think I took them on the wrong journey because in their hearts they wanted this all set up and managed by an external agency.  It was a fun project though and the people were all really nice.

Greg Staunton