• YEAR 2022
  • CLIENT Indigo
  • PROJECT Transactional email migration
  • INDUSTRY Retail

About the client

Chapters/Indigo is the largest Canadian book, gift, toy and lifestyle product retailer. It operates online as well as in stores in all 10 provinces and one territory.

challenge

Indigo required email technical support from BDG to migrate 30 transactional emails over from Responsys to Sailthru without jeopardizing the current standard of customer experience. This entailed a full email rebuild and update of all dynamic content elements using Zephyr, the templating language by Sailthru.

plan

01.

Integrate with Indigo’s email production team

to build, QA and deploy over 30 transactional emails in Sailthru without disturbing the customer experience.

02.

Appoint a dedicated, round the clock point person:

Considering the large scope, speed and need for accuracy in this project, BDG appointed a full time resource for this initiative to ensure a complete and efficient knowledge transfer that wouldn’t require any back and forth. Having one dedicated resource to create the migration plan, execute, make decisions on the spot and report back to the executives was imperative to the success of the project.

03.

Create detailed documentation

for all emails to be used internally for future updates. Due to the project’s extreme level of detail surrounding data architecture, triggers and personalization, it was essential to provide a solid reference point for any future migrations to promote autonomy and efficiency.

bdg process

  • Get familiar with Indigo’s marketing Stack

    BDG’s extensive technical expertise allowed for a fast onboarding, but before executing the email migration, it was key to quickly get up to speed on how the Indigo team uniquely utilizes and leverages their tools such as Responsys, Sailthru and Segment.io to ensure a seamless transition.

  • Build the new templates in Sailthru

    The BDG team rebuilt each transactional email using the content builder in Sailthru, ensuring Indigo’s brand guidelines were respected and that the emails mirrored the original HTML emails. BDG likewise updated all the dynamic content in the templates using Zephyr, Sailthru’s templating language.

  • Perform a thorough QA and fix bugs

    Transactional emails are a crucial component of the product and customer experience, which is why BDG worked with Indigo to establish a thorough QA process to review the email copy and test the dynamic and personalized content. To ensure a rigorous QA, BDG created a new dev environment in Sailthru, which set up triggers for all transactional emails and allowed tests to be run using sample data. Litmus was then used to ensure all emails rendered properly in all email clients.

  • Deploy and monitor the emails

    Once the QA was performed, BDG copied the templates and triggered campaigns to the production environment, deactivated the emails from Responsys, activated the emails and monitored the sends in Sailthru to make sure everything ran smoothly. To further ensure things were working, the BDG team compared old open rates and total deliveries per day from Responsys to Sailthru, looking out for any discrepancies in total sends.

  • Document the process to build autonomy

    To further the thoroughness of the project’s documentation, BDG implemented a section to track updates and new versions of the emails, a functionality not offered in Sailthru. This section allows the team to view all the changes that were made, as well as when and why. BDG likewise included code in the templates to specify the precise date the emails were last updated.

The outcome

  • Effectively migrated over 30 transactional emails in the requested turnaround time.

  • All emails were deployed without any bugs, rendering issues or disturbing the product and customer experience.

testimonial

Working with BDG allowed us to migrate all of our transactional emails from Responsys to Sailthru quickly and effectively. Thanks to their team’s unique technical knowledge and experience with migrating to a new platform, they were able to jump in quickly and start executing right away. Their involvement made the process easier from start to finish. They kept us on pace to reach the delivery deadline and set us up for a much more straightforward future migration due to their rigorous documentation. We feel very reassured and prepared thanks to BDG!

Ian Richards

SVP E-commerce & Marketing Chapters Indigo

more case studies

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info@benjamin-david.com
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H3G 2C1 Montreal, QC Canada

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