Dynata Increases Customer Engagement by Automating Marketing Communications Using Amazon Pinpoint

Dynata is a global market research company that reaches more than 67 million consumers and business professionals. The company gathers marketing data from the people who opt in to member-based communities, which Dynata manages and maintains.

To obtain the customer data, Dynata sends out emails and other communications to drive engagement to surveys on member websites. This communication process is highly complex because it is multi-regional and meant to drive engagement to both subscription-based member websites and other non-subscription channels. “We work in multiple countries and languages, which means we manage around 200 separate domains,” says Aleister Cachón Guillén, director of software engineering at Dynata. “Each domain has different templates, content, and configurations, and we didn’t have a way to easily manage it all.”

The complexity of its communication system also meant Dynata required visibility into marketing campaign effectiveness. “We didn’t have a good way to get insight into click rates or deliverability,” says Cachón Guillén. In addition, the company’s existing campaign management system lacked the automation required to easily scale to support thousands of campaigns across multiple locales. Dynata needed a full omnichannel solution. “We wanted to move beyond email communications into other areas including SMS and push notifications for mobile devices leveraging a single service instantiation,” Cachón Guillén says.

A long-term AWS customer, Dynata chose to move its email communication platform to Amazon Pinpoint, a scalable outbound and inbound marketing communications service. Amazon Pinpoint helps companies connect with customers over channels such as email, SMS, push, voice, and in-app messaging. “Amazon Pinpoint is a service for builders, and we knew it would integrate easily with our existing technologies while also offering full omnichannel capabilities,” explains Cachón Guillén.

Dynata engaged AWS Professional Services to implement Amazon Pinpoint and create an omni-channel marketing communications solution. “AWS Professional Services was great to collaborate with, and they helped us build what became our actual business solution,” says Cachón Guillén. “The AWS team was very knowledgeable about the technology and our industry, so they were instrumental in helping us create a seamless solution that went live easily.”

The AWS team developed an Amazon Pinpoint custom channel to support dynamic templates with specific content and email parameters to drive demand generation. AWS Professional Services integrated Amazon Pinpoint email activity into the Dynata internal data store for reporting so Dynata can measure the success of its communications. The Amazon Pinpoint custom channel also enabled Dynata to automate the management of templates, campaigns, and customer journeys within Amazon Pinpoint.

Using Amazon Pinpoint, Dynata has a single, centralized solution that automates sending promotional emails and mobile push notifications. Now, Dynata can manage 200 domains centrally, even though each domain uses a different template. “With Amazon Pinpoint, it’s much easier for us to launch and manage marketing campaigns without having to replicate things over and over,” says Cachón Guillén. “We can send standard emails, surveys, ad hoc campaigns for multiple customers, plus integrated omnichannel campaigns without having to spend time managing it all separately.”

Dynata has improved marketing campaign effectiveness because more of its emails are sent directly to customer email inboxes instead of promotional inboxes. “Because people are seeing our emails more through Amazon Pinpoint, this helped us increase our number of completed surveys,” explains Cachón Guillén. “It also helped us increase our email click rates from around 1 percent to around 3.7 percent. That will ultimately help us increase revenue.”

Additionally, improved campaign visibility has enabled Dynata to look more closely at what campaigns work better. “Previously, we would have to query our database, look at completed surveys, and send emails to those people individually,” Cachón Guillén says. “With Amazon Pinpoint, everything is in real time because we integrated with our promotion engine that tracks everything automatically.”

With more effective marketing and increased campaign visibility, Dynata is delivering a superior customer experience. “Amazon Pinpoint helps us increase member engagement and send more timely communications that make it less likely for people to have a bad experience and tune us out,” says Cachón Guillén. Next, Dynata is exploring AWS machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) technologies to drive further campaign improvements. Cachón Guillén concludes, “Our goal is to engage people in deeper ways on our platform, and we trust AWS to help us do that.”