How AEG cut its campaign execution from hours to minutes

5
months to implement a custom email system and Inboxable with API integration
100+
marketing users can simultaneously create content without coding
few hours
to build and execute email campaigns, down from 2 weeks

Company Background

AEG is the largest sports and live entertainment brand in the world. The company owns and operates sports and live entertainment venues and convention centers and produces global music and sporting events, concerts, and festivals. The AEG marketing teams have the daunting task of creating and delivering content for tens of thousands of events per year — one moment they may be marketing an L.A. Lakers game, and the next they might be promoting a Katy Perry concert on the other side of the world.

The Challenge

The marketing team needed to be able to quickly schedule and target their email messages to a wide range of customer segments for multiple business units and divisions. Their previous email system did not offer the customer service, user friendly design tools or depth of integration and automation the company needed to achieve its goals, so AEG began the search for a partner who could help them build a custom solution that would meet their email marketing needs and save valuable time.

Highlights

  • In only 5 months, AEG was able to implement a customized email system and an Inboxable integration for their content management system (CMS), marketing automation platform, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, and customer databases
  • 100+ marketing users can now create and deploy campaigns without coding
  • Drastic decrease in campaign execution timeframes — from 2 weeks to a few hours

Building a Custom Solution that Effectively Integrates with a Diverse Technology Stack

AEG partnered with Data Axle to integrate the vendor’s multichannel communications platform with all of the brand’s existing marketing platforms: Content Management System (CMS), marketing automation, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and customer data platforms used by three separate business units.

In addition, Data Axle customized its in-platform proprietary content tool, Inboxable, to enable AEG’s marketing users to easily create visually appealing content in a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. Inboxable delivers fully branded content to three separate AEG business units and dozens of divisions with separate branding guidelines for each.

“The CMS integration within Data Axle’s proprietary tool Inboxable allows us to create email newsletters populated with events that are selected based on criteria each user can define — like venue, date range or geographic location. In addition, as we set up the templates, the applicable brand style is already applied,” explains Meghan Bender CRM Manager at AEG Presents.

In addition, the email solution’s deep integration with AEG’s other platforms allows the team to easily select audience segments, design campaigns in minutes through the drag-and-drop functionality of Inboxable, select delivery times, and track campaign results seamlessly between platforms.

“This was an especially complicated implementation, but we were able to work with Data Axle so effectively that it ended up being the easiest onboarding I have ever worked on. Incredibly, we were able to implement this complex new system within five months of delivering the requirements.”

Richard Battersby VP, Business Intelligence and Digital Analytics at AEG, Inc.

Outcomes

The new email system and API integrations have allowed AEG to streamline internal workflows and plan and execute campaigns with minimal steps, allowing for a much faster turnaround in getting their messages to market. Instead of a large marketing team relying on a small number of employees to design and deploy all of AEG campaigns — which can create huge bottlenecks — the 100+ marketing users can easily design and deploy campaigns that are on-brand and follow style guidelines without needing any experience with HTML coding or design. In addition, integration with AEG’s custom marketing automation tool means that the company has access to near real-time campaign results and analytics in a single marketing dashboard.

“Data Axle’s Inboxable and custom email solution have saved us an extraordinary amount of time and manual effort. It’s allowed us to weave email into our campaign orchestration. What might have taken hours or even days to plan, optimize and deploy can now be done in a matter of minutes.”

Alejandro Arevalo CRM Director at AEG Presents​
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