Making customer experience a science.
Avantor brings personalisation to its martech operations and sees revenue and customer loyalty soar.
120%
Increase in digital marketing revenue over 1.5 years
Objectives
Increase revenue through marketing automation and personalisation
Boost critical ecommerce business on website and reduce abandoned baskets
Increase customer loyalty through a frictionless buying experience
Results
120% increase in digital marketing revenue over 1.5 years
45% year-over-year increase in digital campaign revenue within four months of implementing Real-Time CDP
Abandoned basket campaigns YTD revenue up 182%
Getting personal
Life sciences giant Avantor is the secret behind some of the world’s most innovative science and technology inventions and services. Serving over 300,000 biopharma, healthcare, education, government and advanced technology customers in 180 countries, Avantor manufactures products that help cancer researchers improve health outcomes, astrophysicists go deeper into space and mobile phone engineers develop the latest mind-blowing features. As a provider of mission-critical products and services, the stakes are always high and quality and details really matter.
This ethos of accountability and quality extends to its marketing team as well—and when identifying the right digital solutions to communicate with customers, those standards must be met. This standard of excellence guides every decision Avantor’s senior manager of marketing automation, Brittany Berliere, makes. Leading a team that promotes products and services that, in many ways, advance human innovation, Berliere has spent her career tracking customer behaviour. Her goal is to give Avantor’s ecommerce customers an experience free from friction and wasted time and one that meets all their needs—crucial elements that lead to repeat business. However, accomplishing this requires both high volumes of customer data and a system that can organise, integrate and distribute that data across multiple platform streams at the speed of consumer decision-making.
“Humans are only able to sort data at a certain level. Our customer base is so large and complex and we were getting to the point where we didn’t really know who our customers were,” says Berliere. “To better serve them, we needed an advanced solution.”
She found it in Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform B2B Edition. Once she realised the detailed audience segmentation, custom workflows and strict data compliance of Real-Time CDP was the solution she’d been looking for, Berliere began to evangelise her vision for a digital transformation to company leadership. It was one that would centre the solution as her team’s primary technology to achieve deep personalisation. Plus, it seamlessly integrates with Adobe Marketo Engage and Adobe Target, which Avantor had relied on for years as their marketing automation and testing platforms.
Personalisation to the Nth degree
When a company has a customer base that extends into six figures and beyond, personalisation is more critical than ever. Sunil Unni understood this when he joined Avantor as vice president of digital marketing, strategy and platforms. In his previous role, Unni spearheaded the digital transformation of retail giant Lowe’s. Now, it was his task to help bring to life Avantor’s mission to focus on data-driven personalisation to empower its customers. Whether streamlining product searches for lab researchers or tailoring recommendations for procurement managers, Avantor helps its clients reduce friction and save time, empowering these innovators to focus on their core mission—advancing science and technology.
While Avantor is in an entirely different industry, Unni says he leads with what he knows best: selling products and services to customers—and he’s challenged himself to apply it in a new industry. His goal to achieve marketing automation and personalisation for Avantor was only the first step—he was also determined to foster an experimentation-orientated culture that would disrupt conventional thinking and spark innovation.
Unni quickly recognised that Berliere’s vision aligned with this mission and that it had significant business value. Given Avantor’s average basic size, he saw the revenue potential this transformation could have on Avantor’s bottom line.
“As we started digging deeper into buying patterns and customer behaviour, we recognised they had a choice to make,” Unni says. “It’s important for us to differentiate ourselves by knowing our customers intimately and offering a very personalised experience. We needed to eliminate steps and get customers to the product faster. And in Brittany, we had the person in place who could make it happen.”
“We were able to better our customer experience by enabling a consistent message across marketing channels. From the email they receive to the content shared with them when they visit our website, our customers are engaging with content that’s relevant to them.”
Brittany Berliere
Senior Manager of Marketing Automation, Avantor
Passion leads to profit
With EY as its partner, Avantor’s implementation of Real-Time CDP was smooth and quickly showed results. After an initial test that expanded two pre-existing, well-performing campaigns, the solution was rolled out as a pilot across the US market. The results were better than expected. According to Berliere, the ability of Real-Time CDP to find anyone who could qualify for a certain campaign based on multiple data sources led to a 120% increase in digital marketing revenue over 1.5 years.
“We were able to better our customer experience by enabling a consistent message across marketing channels. From the email they receive to the content shared with them when they visit our website, our customers are engaging with content that’s relevant to them,” Berliere says.
Berliere was even able to revive old campaigns that had become stagnant, turning a once-manual process into a fully digital experience with targeted data and the ability to expand years-old campaigns onto new platforms. “We’ve seen consistent audience and revenue growth with campaigns that we once thought were dead in the water,” she says.
Overall, Avantor saw a 45% year-over-year increase in digital campaign revenue within four months of implementing Real-Time CDP. Drilling down, the company experienced three times higher seasonal promotional revenue than the previous year and saw profits from abandoned basket campaigns jump 182%.
“We set out to prove that knowing who our customers are and being able to drive campaigns in a more automated and targeted way would aid in increasing revenue,” says Berliere.
“As we started digging deeper into buying patterns and customer behaviour, we recognised they had a choice to make. It’s important for us to differentiate ourselves by knowing our customers intimately and offering a very personalised experience.”
Sunil Unni
VP Digital Marketing, Strategy and Platforms, Avantor
A new culture and a bright future
Integrating Adobe solutions has not only improved Avantor’s customer experience and revenue but also had positive effects on internal teams. Unni came to Avantor with the hope of becoming the “disruptor in chief,” shaking things up and encouraging a culture of experimentation. In Berliere, he found a kindred spirit and together, they not only streamlined their martech operations but created an environment that has led to greater collaboration, more risk-taking and a general feeling of enthusiasm.
“Everyone on the team is very excited about the Real-Time CDP journey,” says Unni. “There’s been a lot of visibility and attention from the business around what we’re trying to do here.”
Berliere agrees: “Everyone’s seeing the success that we’ve had so far and it's been very empowering.”
Avantor’s journey isn’t over. As its customers evolve, it’s also set up to evolve right alongside them with a scalable Adobe martech stack anchored by Real-Time CDP and Marketo Engage.
“I take pride in seeing what Brittany and the team worked on and brought to life with different stakeholders, both on the technology side as well as the business side,” Unni says. “And Avantor now has a vested interest in making sure we build on this success.”
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