15,264 links, moved on schedule.
A global hotel group was launching a new website. Its transactional emails lived inside a vendor platform with no content management system and no record of how past link updates were done, and the email team had little contact with the web team overseas. Digineer took ownership of the email side of the launch and delivered it on time.
At a glance
- Client
- A global hotel group
- Program
- Transactional email rebrand and new-website link migration
- Scale
- 25 campaigns in up to 16 languages; teams in two countries
- Engagement
- Management consulting, project management and business analysis, 2018 to 2019
- Capability
- Transformation & Value Management
The situation
A website launch the email team could not see
Content for the triggered emails lived entirely inside a vendor’s application. Every change was slow and expensive, and the scope of any link update depended on the vendor’s help.
Knowledge of how mass link updates had been done left with the previous email marketing manager and director. The new website was being built by a team in Europe that worked in a silo, and requests for project deadlines went unanswered. Turnover in the department meant reporting lines changed three times during the engagement.
Warning signs
- No content management system for triggered emails
- Know-how gone with departed leaders
- A web team working in a silo overseas
- Partner milestones missed without notice
- An earlier project already three weeks behind
What we did
Own the timeline, then make it repeatable
Digineer set up weekly working sessions with the email manager and director, built a working relationship with the web team overseas and pinned down the milestones the email work depended on.
Management consulting
Created openings in the timeline and identified, escalated and managed risks. When upstream partners missed deliverables, Digineer held them accountable and rebuilt the plan, three separate times.
A repeatable API process
Digineer drove the vendor requirements for a $49,000 API process that pulls and updates every link in the transactional emails, leaving three processes the team can reuse instead of paying for manual updates.
Analysis down to the link
Old URLs were mapped to new ones through a common page-name identifier, the data was cleaned, language codes were reconciled between IT and analytics, and every campaign variation went through quality checks.
The outcome
An uncharted launch, delivered on time
On-time rollout, brand by brand
Digineer managed the brand-by-brand rollout in step with the new website, and a project with no precedent deployed on schedule.
Reusable for the next change
Three repeatable processes replaced costly manual updates for future mass link changes.
A $330,000 gap surfaced early
In the translation phase, Digineer found a $330,000 budget gap and gave leadership a language-by-language gap analysis so they could choose what to include.
Fifteen more projects
Fifteen additional email projects followed, including brand template refreshes, logo lockup changes across all templates and new automated replies.
Program management
Is your launch waiting on teams you cannot see?
Digineer takes ownership of the messy middle: the dependencies, the vendors and a timeline that has to hold.
Client name withheld for confidentiality.