"Salsify is what builds our brand online. At the end of the day, the digital shelf is for driving sales, and Salsify helps us do that."
— Carrie Mesing, Director of Ecommerce Marketing Strategy, Danone
When I arrived at Danone during the start of the pandemic in 2020, we already had a partnership in place with Salsify. But we weren't leveraging the platform and hadn't used it to syndicate product content.
The pandemic accelerated the need for ecommerce, making it a top priority for my team. I knew it was time to look at exactly why we hadn't taken full advantage of Salsify — and change that.
My name is Carrie Mesing, and I'm the director of ecommerce marketing strategy at Danone. After I joined Danone, I was able to hone in pretty quickly on why we hadn't launched on Salsify: We just didn't have the right resources to be able to take action and extract value from the platform.
This issue was fixed by getting the help of a good implementation partner and some support from the amazing Salsify community. But we still had to work fast and work smart to be successful in this new ecommerce-driven world.
A New Approach to Ecommerce
It was imperative for us to get some quick wins so we could demonstrate to the organization that there’s a lot of power in Salsify if we can action it effectively.
We started by launching a 90-day sprint with our implementation partner. This sprint enabled us to get over 1,000 items live. We launched these products across four platforms and were able to link close to 15,000 digital assets.
On top of getting these quick wins, we also streamlined our collaboration and processes. Before we launched on Salsify, we had fragmented work streams sitting across teams without a unified perspective.
Using Salsify as a centralized system of record, we could better connect the dots between different teams. We can now bring together various cross-functional stakeholders from across the organization to understand how their responsibilities fit into the bigger picture.
Salsify Workflow is a big part of what has made this collaboration possible. Workflows have enabled us to get better cross-functional stakeholder alignment while also accelerating our speed to shelf.
Before we started using these workflows, it would take a long time to get things done, and tasks would sit in inboxes with no visibility into their statuses.
Now we can better connect each part of the process while also making the overall workstream more efficient. It also enables us to parallel path certain processes to speed things up even more.
Moving Nimbly With Salsify Syndication
Now that we’ve implemented Salsify Workflow capabilities and achieved better collaboration, we can take full advantage of Salsify Activation.
For us, what’s most exciting about syndication is the ability to impact our digital shelf in real-time. We’re much nimbler and more flexible, able to be proactive in response to changes instead of reactive.
For example, we recently needed to react to competitor activity on Instacart. If we had to rely on a manual process as we had before, it would have taken weeks to see our optimized content live. But we were able to react in a very short window, thanks to Salsify.
Not only that, but we’re able to adjust and optimize the content regularly. We have hundreds of digital assets that are getting updated regularly as we make micro-adjustments and micro-optimizations to drive sales.
Customizing for Consumer Experience and Retail Partner Needs
Being able to update regularly helps us customize content for different retailer needs, different use cases, and different platforms. Before, we were taking a copy-and-paste approach — and using the exact same content across the board.
But now that we can customize content more agilely, we’ve become much more reactive to what our retailer partners really need.
The end result is that the user experience for the consumer is much richer. We can curate the content we provide consumers to bring our brand story to life in a really exciting way. We’re now working on enhanced content syndication, and Salsify is key to helping us push that enhanced content live effectively.
Driving Sales With Salsify
Salsify has become our ecommerce system of record for all types of content — from enhanced content to written content and optimized imagery. In addition to the cross-functional alignment Salsify provides, this is what moves our initiatives forward faster than we could move them on our own.
Salsify is what builds our brand online. At the end of the day, the digital shelf is for driving sales, and Salsify helps us do that.
It's incredible when I think about the progress we've made in a short period of time: going from zero items to over 1,000 products syndicated — and linking over 15,000 digital shelf assets.
We took something that didn't even exist on a page and made it a real working machine — and that is really energizing.
