How Cru brought its global marketing under a single umbrella

With more than 19,000 staff operating in nearly 200 countries, Cru is one of the world’s largest and most complex parachurch organizations. Its immensely popular campaigns and programs range from the annual NFL Superbowl Breakfast, to global initiatives like FamilyLife seminars, to campus events for students.

This is a transformational time for Cru. More than 70 years after it was founded, the organization is rethinking its approach to digital marketing with Adobe to speak to its global audience in a more consistent and personalized way. With Adobe Campaign and Adobe Experience Manager, Cru is unifying its digital marketing and websites under a single umbrella, while improving the privacy and security of its audience data.

“We use many paths to reach people, from our conferences around the world to our Athletes in Action ministry,” says Cru marketing operations team leader, John Wilcox. “It was impossible to bring consistency to all of these activities before working with Adobe, and while we still have work to do the benefits of unifying our marketing on a single platform are undeniable.”

Bringing clarity to a complex landscape

Cru began its digital transformation in 2014. Its teams on the ground still ran local campaigns and initiatives in siloes at the time and using programs like Excel and MailChimp to send out marketing emails. While these programs met Cru’s basic needs, teams had no way to track their performance or improve engagement, much less deliver a consistent look and feel for the brand.

Adding to the sense of urgency was Wilcox’s desire to improve governance and privacy across Cru’s customer data. With its users increasingly favoring digital channels, be it email for its longstanding members or SMS and social platforms for students, Cru needed to standardize its data onto a single platform for greater control and transparency.

Further complicating matters was the fact that Cru operates under different names around the world. On top of aiming for consistency between marketing campaigns, the organization needed to rearchitect its website so that in-country teams could create consistent copies tailored to their audience.

“Looking across our marketing processes in 2014, the view was full of siloes and complexity. We had grown and were reaching more people than ever, but we needed to bring clarity to our approach. That’s where Adobe came in,” says Wilcox.

Building a strong and consistent brand

Cru was an early Adobe Campaign adopter when it implemented the solution in 2016, building on its previous investment in Adobe Experience Manager. Three years later, Wilcox and his team have seen a step change in the volume and quality of messaging Cru sends to its audiences around the world.

From half a million marketing emails in 2016, Cru now sends between 5 and 8 million emails to its customers and prospects each month. Just as importantly for Wilcox, open and delivery rates for marketing emails have gone up across the organization, leading to an increase in donations.

Crucially, Adobe Campaign helps Cru drive successful re-engagement campaigns, a central pillar of its commitment to building long term customer connections. One 2021 email campaign achieved a re-engagement rate of 14 percent, inspiring 42,000 people to reconnect with the brand after more than six months of inactivity.

Cru’s focus today is to streamline and consolidate campaigns between teams to ensure relevance and avoid redundant messaging. By measuring how many emails and SMS messages customers receive each month and tracking whether they receive the same information multiple times, Wilcox’s team can better coordinate their campaigns.

“Over-messaging can really hurt a brand, but it’s a common issue when you have many teams trying to reach the same audience,” says Wilcox. “Adobe Campaign is helping us to break down our marketing siloes so we avoid stepping on each other’s toes and compromising the quality of our customer experience.”

In parallel, Cru uses Adobe Experience Manager Sites to build its global and regional websites. Cru has built nearly 100 websites on Adobe, generating nearly 3 million page views per month, and more local teams are set to migrate sites to Adobe Experience Manager soon.

For Adobe Experience Manager product manager, Alex Bateman, the holy grail is to move every Cru website to the cloud, with Adobe Experience Manager as the centralized foundation that ties them all together. He and his team are now implementing Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Service to bring that vision to life.

“This transition won’t happen overnight because we encourage each team to migrate at their own pace, but I’m confident this is just the beginning of a long and fruitful cloud journey,” Bateman says.

A data-driven future

Both Wilcox and Bateman agree that the next step for Cru is to drive more data-driven decision-making and customer experiences. Drawing on information from Adobe Campaign and Adobe Experience Manager, Cru’s marketers will gain deeper customer insight that will help them to modernize their approach and reach audiences in an increasingly targeted way.

Cru is also on a mission to distance itself from personalization based on third-party cookies, a practice that is on the verge of extinction and delivers only superficial levels of customer insight. Instead, it is fostering a friendlier data value exchange that inspires visitors to create Cru profiles and share their information willingly, in exchange for experiences that deliver genuine value.

“Our target audiences have matured, their needs have matured, and our approach to marketing has matured in response to these changes,” says Wilcox. “Best of all, our teams are past the early adoption stage of our new Adobe solutions and are beginning to explore our investment to its full potential.”