Exact Media

About Exact Media

Exact Media connects brands and retailers for the purpose of product sample distribution. Working with the most reputable online ecommerce sites, Exact Media helps measure the sales impact of distributing samples.

Challenge

Exact Media operates in the “insert marketing” space, providing a real-world connection between brand companies and their target markets. Brands, such as P&G, Unilever, and L’Oréal need to increase awareness and loyalty and acquire new customers. On the other hand, retailers, such as Sacks Fifth Avenue, Foot Locker and Zulily, are seeking to delight their shoppers and monetize their existing eCommerce parcels by renting the empty space inside their packages. As a mediator between brands and retailers, Exact Media processed a very large number of bids and requests that allowed both parties to do business. While Exact already used Sales Cloud they needed a customer-facing solution to facilitate conversations between the brands and retailers – and automate transactions between them.

Solution

AppCentrica worked with Exact Media to create a self-service Communities platform, now branded: Connections by Exact. Brands submit briefs that detail their sampling objectives, the target demographics and product specs, and retailers can submit bids that outline their ability to meet the campaign requirements, along with the costs. Brands and retailers can view and comment on each other’s posts and use Chatter to collaborate and negotiate deals. In addition to configuring Salesforce Customer Community Cloud as a base for Connections, AppCentrica built sharing rules in Apex to meet the complex data sharing requirements and VisualForce pages to streamline the user experience for brands and retailers. Lastly, Salesforce Knowledge articles were setup to serve as an FAQ database for prospective users.

Outcomes

With the Connections solution built on Salesforce Customer Community Cloud, customers – both brands and retailers – are deriving greater value. Connections campaigns average a 61.2% trial rate and 19.4% conversion rate four weeks after samples have been delivered. The new platform has bolstered Exact Media’s revenue growth and made their business partnerships stronger and longer lasting. In addition, activities of relevant brands and retailers are better tracked, providing insights into the quickly changing market.

“We’ve used AppCentrica as our Community consultant for nearly a year now. They have been a great partner from the start. Easy to work with and responsive to our aggressive release schedules! We were looking to use Community in a very out of the box way making the projects quite complex and they have been able to provide innovative ways to solve our requirements. I’d recommend their team to anyone looking to fix, enhance or develop their Salesforce project. In particular really appreciate the diligence and client focused approach from Arnold Mo, the lead developer on our project. Available whenever required and always looking for cost effective solutions to our programs. Thanks for the great work!”

Julie Dumencu, Director of Operations, Exact Media

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