Helvar’s marketing covers the entire customer lifecycle with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Helvar is a Finnish technology company that develops intelligent lighting solutions by combining lighting, data, and automation. The goal is to improve energy efficiency, the functionality of spaces, and user well-being in environments such as offices, educational institutions, hospitals, and commercial spaces. The company’s global operations are based on the “Brighter Spaces” philosophy, which emphasizes a human-centric approach, sustainability, data-driven decision-making, and long-term partnerships.
Helvar used Mailchimp for email communications and Salesforce as its CRM platform. However, the email system operated separately from customer data, which made it difficult to support communication across the entire customer lifecycle. Information was easily lost between systems, and collaboration between sales and marketing lacked transparency. As a result, Helvar decided to implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next and Data 360, and bring marketing onto the same platform as sales and customer data.
”Providing the best customer experience is not possible when sales and marketing operate in different systems. By adding marketing capabilities on top of our existing Salesforce CRM, we bridge the data gap and help to deliver better services to our customers. Ceili was an easy choice; from the first meeting we knew that their team was professional, reliable, and would be a pleasure to work with.”
The objectives of the Salesforce project were summarized as follows:
- Bring marketing onto the same platform as sales and customer data
- Enable marketing across the entire customer lifecycle
- Break down silos between sales and marketing
- Improve transparency and the flow of information between sales and marketing
- Enable better data-driven segmentation and personalized communication
- Implement automated communication based on customer data
What did Helvar’s Marketing Cloud Next implementation project include, and what will it be used for?
Helvar was already using Salesforce Sales Cloud to support its sales operations. In collaboration with Ceili, Helvar implemented Salesforce’s latest marketing platform, Marketing Cloud Next. Marketing Cloud Next runs on top of Data 360, which enables the handling of large data volumes and multiple data sources as well as the unification of data, so the implementation of Data 360 was also included in the project.
With Marketing Cloud Next and Data 360, Helvar can:
- Capture leads and manage lead generation in one place
- Automatically route marketing leads either into nurturing journeys or to sales
- Connect the marketing and sales pipeline
- Perform data-driven segmentation
- Send personalized communications
- Execute marketing based on data across the entire customer lifecycle
- Manage event marketing
- Run automated nurturing processes in the background
- Leverage AI in day-to-day marketing activities
- Clearly report on marketing performance
How was the Marketing Cloud Next implementation project carried out?
The implementation of Marketing Cloud Next took a total of three months. The project stayed on schedule according to the initial plan, and the agreed deliverables were successfully completed. Some changes were also made on the Sales Cloud side to ensure that marketing and sales work seamlessly together on the same platform.
The project included a kick-off, one definition workshop, and two user training sessions. In addition, progress was monitored through weekly status meetings throughout the project. At the very beginning, responsibilities were clearly defined between Ceili and Helvar. This helped distribute the workload, build Helvar’s Marketing Cloud expertise from the start, and enable collaboration that leveraged the strengths of both parties.
During the definition workshop, the required processes, the work involved, the content to be migrated from Mailchimp, and other project deliverables were reviewed. After this, the agreed components were built independently by Helvar and Ceili in Marketing Cloud Next, while coordination took place via Teams throughout the process. In the user training sessions, Ceili introduced all the tools within Marketing Cloud Next and guided Helvar in using the system.
The first use cases implemented were:
- Integration and automation of existing forms
- A custom object between marketing and sales, along with automation of its processing
- A weekly nurturing automation
In addition, all necessary templates and background automations supporting daily marketing activities were built. Data was also migrated from Mailchimp to Marketing Cloud Next.
After the project, Ceili has supported Helvar in using and further developing Marketing Cloud Next and Data 360. And proactively provides new ideas and recommendations based on Release Notes and other updates.
How did the collaboration between Helvar and Ceili go during the project?
”The Ceili team provided exactly the kind of support that we needed, acting not only as a Marketing Cloud expert, but also as a proactive consultant for improving our ways of working as a commercial team. I couldn’t recommend them more and I’m excited to continue our collaboration together.”
“The collaboration with Helvar went very smoothly. The project was clearly led from Helvar’s side, joint sessions were well prepared, decisions were made efficiently, and there was a strong commitment to the project. This made it easy for the project to succeed. Helvar worked extensively on items such as content independently, based on examples and guidance from Ceili, which significantly accelerated the project. It also helped Helvar adopt and understand the system at a very early stage and at a fast pace.”
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