The best way to introduce Vandersanden, is by telling you what they do – Vandersanden produces bricks: facing bricks, facade systems, brick slips, and clay pavers – but that doesn’t say it all. Vandersanden is so much more: they focus on a better future, and develop innovative products. Just a few months ago, they launched a CO₂-negative brick named “Pirrouet®”. 

Vandersanden is not only innovative in their products – but the company is also currently going through a digital transformation. Their main goal: creating a better customer experience and 360° customer view. Implementing Salesforce Sales & Service Cloud was step one, migrating from Selligent to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE), is step two. While Vandersanden is currently active in 10+ European countries, their marketing team is centralized in Belgium. They were looking for a local partner to rely on for strategic marketing automation advice and MCAE expertise. One thing led to another, and we kicked off the replatforming project in 2023! 

1. Strategic workshops 

We set our strategic minds to work almost at once, by hosting three strategic workshops with key stakeholders at Vandersanden. During these workshops we discussed – among others – their current and future technology stack, data management within Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Sales & Service Cloud, and their ideal marketing-sales funnel. We got a clear view of their processes and requirements, and based on that information, created a solution design for the initial setup in MCAE. 

2. Replatforming in co-creation 

Vandersanden wanted to give their marketers more control and ownership over the lead to ROI customer journey, campaigns and marketing (and sales) data. That’s why they chose to move away from Selligent and embrace a more user-friendly platform like MCAE. This meant migrating all emails, forms, automation flows,… from Selligent to MCAE and, in the process, optimise where needed. 

To achieve this, we worked in close collaboration with Brightfox (Vandersanden’s Sales & Service Cloud partner, and also a member of the Spire group) and Vandersanden’s marketing team. 

HAVIK layed the building blocks in MCAE: 

• A state-of-the-art email template; 
• A beautiful, branded email preference center; 
• Logic and flows for opt-in management and double opt-in emails; 
• Automated source campaign assignment based on UTM-parameters; 
• Logic and flows for lead qualification and lead management. 

Brightfox developed additional Salesforce functionality: 

• A custom object to log form submissions; 
• External actions to create tasks in Salesforce for lead follow-up. 

After a few hours of training about creating forms and emails, the Vandersanden team migrated most of their marketing assets themselves. This kickstarted an intense period of co-creation and working together closely – Vandersanden getting familiar with their brand new marketing automation platform, and HAVIK supporting them whenever needed. The HAVIK team took up more complex campaigns: some automated flows required a custom setup in MCAE, and to make the connection with more advanced tools on their website, an API integration was required.  

In the end, we migrated: 

• 200+ forms 
• 130+ emails 
• 35+ campaigns 
• 35k+ prospects 

Pirrouet® mini-launch 

While the replatforming project was in full motion, Vandersanden launched their new Pirrouet® brick. Given the importance of this product and the campaign surrounding it, we decided to set it up in MCAE. This presented a few challenges – after all, we were going to launch a new campaign in an environment that was still “under construction”. 

HAVIK took the lead in creating the campaign assets and setting up Engagement Studio Programs for lead nurturing and lead management. On September 5th, Pirrouet® was launched successfully! 

3. A successful “go live” 

With all processes in place and assets migrated, we came to the final phase of the project: migrating existing contacts from Selligent, activating the sync with Salesforce, and officially kicking off the “go live” with an IP warming email to their most engaged prospects.