Transforming Guest Communications with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next

Four languages, many lists. One newsletter programme.

The group's newsletters ran on a standalone email platform, with audience data spread across historic contact records, four language groups and loyalty groups. That made it harder to target guests consistently, manage consent and deliver campaigns reliably at scale.

The client wanted a centralised, scalable newsletter capability in Salesforce: reliable segmentation and consent, personalised communications in each guest's own language, and room to bring a much larger historic audience across.

• Know who's who: loyalty members distinguished from other guests, with audiences segmented by language and engagement.
• Carry consent across: consent preserved for every record through the migration.
• Protect deliverability: sending volumes grown gradually, so a much bigger audience did not put sender reputation at risk.

Four months from kickoff to go live.

AbsoluteLabs led the implementation working closely with the group's marketing team, taking the programme from kickoff to go live in four months.

1. 01Discovery and planning
2. 02Solution design
3. 03Build and data migration
4. 04Testing
5. 05Go live and phased warm up

A focused implementation, built around the group’s audience, its languages and its sender reputation.

• Marketing Cloud Next setup: configuring Marketing Cloud Next as the single home for the group's newsletter campaigns, with personalised content in each guest's language.
• Audience data and segmentation: setting up Data 360 to unify almost 300,000 audience records and segment them by loyalty status, language and engagement, with consent preserved for every record.
• Website sign up integration: connecting website sign ups to Salesforce through MuleSoft, so new subscribers join the same audience as everyone else.
• Controlled warm up: a phased sending plan that started with 84,880 records and grew steadily, protecting deliverability as the audience expanded.

The group's newsletters went live on Marketing Cloud Next on 20th October 2026, but the platform was already at work before then, running the warm up campaigns and a Christmas Market campaign. It is early days, but those first campaigns point to what one consolidated audience makes possible:

• 36% open rate and 1.56% click rate across 263,070 sends, in the warm up and Christmas Market campaigns, before newsletters went live.
• 99.22% delivery on the Christmas Market campaign, showing the phased warm up protected the group’s sender reputation.
• Around 350,000 more contact records projected to join Marketing Cloud Next over the coming weeks.

From go-live, the marketing team now works from one consolidated view of its newsletter audience, with reliable data it can act on. With that foundation in place, the group's next step is a wider loyalty programme built on a complete view of every guest.