Healthcare Publisher Migrates from Salesforce to HubSpot, Integrates Snowflake
MJH Life Sciences takes advantage of deep data partitioning, dynamic email templates, and a ETL sync with Snowflake to streamline operations.
INTRODUCTION Dynamic data & asset migration of 60+ brands from Marketing Cloud into HubSpot.
MJH Life Sciences® offers healthcare professionals comprehensive, firsthand information from industry leaders and reputable organizations through print, video content, and digital channels across a portfolio consisting of 60+ brands.
The MJH staff was struggling to manage a host of communication and publications in Salesforce, as the Marketing Cloud they were leaning on was simply incapable of serving their growing needs for accuracy and efficiency. The inability to properly automate email journeys within a single, partitioned marketing automation environment was strapping the staff with a mountain of manual labor and duplicative efforts.
To make matters worse, Marketing Cloud didn't have the ability to personalize communications, restricting the marketing team's ability to leverage intelligence to personalize one-to-many emails.
As MJH looked to HubSpot as a potential upgrade, Instrumental Group supported the evaluation by developing a multi-phase implementation plan that would effectively re-platform the team into HubSpot.
CHALLENGES Dozens of brands, hundreds of assets, and millions of records to carefully migrate.
MJH had a set of larger challenges they faced as they approached a move to HubSpot. The implementation process would need to address the following gaps, needs, and obstacles:
- Past technology implementations had been largely unsuccessful, leaving a bad taste in the team's mouth.
- Large sales contracts with their partners had to be successfully fulfilled, leaving them with no choice but to maintain 100% uptime of all campaigns.
- Complex deliverability challenges for their 60+ brands required careful setup of dedicated IP and extended warming process to ensure deliverability through all of their rotating IPs.
- A massive amount of data needed to be cataloged carefully, with serious concerns about data governance and segmentation through migration.
- The WordPress website was constructed with a host of landing pages built in a combination of CloudPages and Drupal, which needed to be rebuilt in HubSpot Landing Pages.
- All data for all brands needed to integrate in and out of a Snowflake database, requiring a complex bi-directional data sync.
- The timeline was tight, requiring a collaborative effort and shared workload between the MJH and Instrumental Group teams.
SOLUTION Migrating to a single, deeply partioned HubSpot environment via Snowflake.
The implementation project was set to be completed over a three-phase timeline and both teams would share execution responsibilities:
- Phase 1: Instrumental Group would lead the first lift, ensuring HubSpot was onboarded, configured, and integrated with proper data governance and dynamic templates to ensure a seamless transition of marketing activities.
- Phase 2: Instrumental Group would set up a prioritized list of 32 brands without downtime for related campaigns.
- Phase 3: The MJH team would then tackle additional business units and brand setup, ensuring the remainder of the brands were activated successfully and ahead of the Marketing Cloud expiration date.
HubSpot Marketing Enterprise Onboarding
At Instrumental Group, we have a dedicated team for HubSpot Onboarding and offer a host of services to help new customers activate their new HubSpot license quickly. Our HubSpot Success Managers (HSMs) are Master Training Certified by HubSpot themselves, ensuring they have a well-rounded and complete understanding of the entire HubSpot Suite. We introduced the MJH marketing team to their dedicated HSM and set forth to complete the following steps.
- Kickoff and Goal Setting: We begin all onboarding projects with a dedicated kickoff call. The call covered introductions, the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder, the project's priorities, and areas of focus for subsequent training calls.
- Global License Configuration: We offer to pick up all the initial settings and global configurations on new HubSpot licenses. We started with a workbook to ensure we had the proper branding elements, then jumped in to set up the Marketing Enterprise features to ensure their instance was ready for customization.
- Primary license brand elements
- Custom contact & company fields
- Website integration to pull all web consumption into HubSpot
- Template Setup & Styling: One of the big value-adds we offer new Marketing license owners is build-ready templates for landing pages and emails. While this project would require cloning and styling these templates for every brand, we started by migrating and styling these templates for the parent brand, MJH Life Sciences.
- Project-long User Support: Our HSM also reviewed early progress, offered advice and direction, and set up their first training call. A master training dashboard was built in HubSpot to house helpful resources and training recordings. This one-stop shop was developed to ensure the MJH marketing team had everything they needed to execute their job roles confidently in HubSpot.
Configuring Business Units & Dynamic Templates
Business Units
HubSpot Business Units would be the key feature set for this implementation project. Business Units will allow the management of multiple brands from one HubSpot account. Assets, contact interactions, communications preferences, reporting, and branding are divided by brand while allowing for campaigns to cross-sell and reach every segment of your audience.
Our ability to leverage Business Units would allow for effective data governance and partitioning for each of the MJH brands. With the large amount of Business Units in play for this project, this was where the phased approach really shined.
Instrumental Group implemented the assets and functionality for the 32 Business Units in phase 1 and 2, implementing the following functionality:
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Dedicated domains, branding kits, content settings, and email settings.
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Shared assets with localization.
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Domain setup, data partitioning, team roles, and portal permissions setup.
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Landing page themes styled for each brand.
- Save the team time. Now the team could save countless hours of manual creation of emails by developing master templates for each brand with the ability to dynamically feed in content from the Snowflake database.
- Improve personalization. Now the team could leverage smart content to quickly pull in personalization items directly from their contact database and Snowflake database. This advancement in personalization capabilities was the power up their marketing team was looking for as they strived to improve email performance with each of their brands.
A nifty integration strategy with the Snowflake database.
The Snowflake database integration was earmarked as a critical inclusion for multiple reasons. Most critical was the need sync brand data and publication resources directly into email templates. While this could be accomplished with a one-directional sync from Snowflake to HubSpot.
The other priority was to continually update the Snowflake data tables with changes in email preferences and contact information of their existing database while ensuring new contact records created through marketing efforts were also synced into Snowflake.
We would need a multi-faceted integration strategy as there was no bi-directional sync options on the marketplace and the team couldn't afford the cost and time for a custom API solution.
HubSpot to Snowflake Native Integration
Because MJH had invested in HubSpot Operations Hub Enterprise, they had access to the HubSpot-built native integration. Our team worked with the MJH IT team to assess the Snowflake data structure, map requirements against the confines of the native integration, and successfully configure the native app to sync desired data directly into HubSpot.
Snowflake to HubSpot ETL Integration
To avoid the need for a complex API integration Instrumental suggested Hightouch ETL solution to sync data from Snowflake into HubSpot. Hightouch was configured to connect to both solutions. Then the contact records and desired fields were mapped with on-creation and on-update triggers to ensure changes in data were updated via extract-transfer-load technology into Snowflake.
Reinventing hundreds of forms, landing pages, and email templates for dozens of brands.
With the technical foundation in place, the race was on to recreate all of the marketing assets for each brand. Again, this was a team effort and managed within the same phase structure as the Business Unit configuration. Our teams would work in tandem to manage the workload for the first two phases, and the MJH marketing team would handle all of the asset recreation in the final phase.
With a master workbook carefully cataloging the different types of assets for each brand, the teams set to work rebuilding the list in HubSpot. Over 300 hours of agency contribution by Instrumental Group produced hundreds of assets including:
- Landing pages and forms
- Email templates
- Workflows
TRANSITIONING Empowering a capable internal team.
As the second phase of the project neared completion, the MJH marketing team was ready to take the rest of the work internally. Instrumental Group successfully trained the MJH team on how to configure business units, create all types of marketing assets, and execute their contracted duties by successfully managing the communication and education demands for each of their brands. The future was bright for their team, as the power of HubSpot would unlocked on a daily basis.