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Adobe Digital Marketing Suite Success Story
Scholastic
Renowned children’s publishing, education, and media company uses
Adobe® Digital Marketing Suite to help engage six million visitors on
average each month and increase conversion in some cases by up to 13%
Scholastic
www.scholastic.com
Industry
Publishing/education/media
Challenges
•Measuring online customer
engagement
•Providing more relevant content
•Increasing conversions, clickthroughs, and sales
Solution
•Online analytics
•Content optimization
•Targeted messaging
Scholastic is using Adobe Digital
Marketing Suite to collect, analyze, and
leverage customer data across its web
properties to deliver more relevant,
engaging content and offers for higher
conversions and sales.
Results
•Converted on e-mail marketing
campaign by as much as 13%
•Provided tools to marry online and
offline customer data to create new
engagement opportunities
•Helped to uncover new “wish list”
opportunities for shopping carts,
boosting conversion by 10%
•Supported data-driven online
marketing and optimization strategies
Systems at a glance
•Adobe Digital Marketing Suite.
Components used include:
Adobe SiteCatalyst®
Adobe Discover™
Adobe Genesis™
Adobe Consulting
Staying ahead of the curve
For more than 90 years, Scholastic has been inspiring young people to read and learn. Over the decades, the
company that started as a single classroom magazine has grown into a global leader in children’s education
and entertainment—including books, magazines, educational technology programs and services, interactive
media, television, and film. The company has also created some of the most well-known series of children’s
franchises in the world, including Clifford the Big Red Dog®, Goosebumps®, and Harry Potter.
Fulfilling its mission to encourage young people to learn requires continuous engagement. To stay ahead
of the curve, as traditional publications give way to interactive and multimedia content, the company is
moving beyond its traditional sales methods to continue reaching children, parents, and educators around
the world.
Today, with the help of Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, Scholastic brings quality educational and entertaining
children’s products to the digital marketplace, extending its significant reach in schools and libraries, and
at retail. “We have a complex mix of online and offline content, commerce, and communities,” says Xuan
Huong Luong, director of business intelligence and analytics at Scholastic. “We adopted Adobe Digital
Marketing Suite because it gives us a unified perspective of what’s going on in our businesses to better
serve our customers.”
A data-driven approach
As Scholastic’s business evolves, so too do its marketing needs. The company’s operations today include
robust online services that complement sales in traditional book stores and in school-based book clubs
and book fairs. Scholastic also offers teaching and parenting resources, student activity programs, games,
and apps—all online.
Each service or product serves a specific target audience and the company wanted to create more relevant
and impactful content and offers across all of its properties to drive customer engagement, conversion, and
sales. “We have such a robust mix of users coming to our site for different reasons,” says Luong. “We want to
be able to measure all their interactions to better understand their unique needs and then deliver content for
the best experience possible.”
Adobe Digital Marketing Suite solutions give Scholastic marketers a powerful, intuitive, and flexible platform
for collecting, analyzing, and acting upon customer data. Specifically, the rich data gives Scholastic managers
insights into the products or services that merit further investment or others that need revamping in order to
better serve customers.
Using the software’s extensive segmenting and analytic capabilities, Scholastic marketers can take a
deeper look at the organization’s businesses and identify opportunities for growth. Adobe solutions
enable segmentation of real-time data collected across the company’s expansive website. Marketers can
generate richly detailed reports about page views, customer clicks, purchases, and other online customer
activities that provide valuable insights into the kinds of content most likely to engage customers and result
in conversions.
Scholastic uses Adobe Digital Marketing
Suite solutions to evaluate customer
interactions with product feature sites.
Based on data, marketers can adapt
content, messaging, and images to create
a more relevant, engaging, and impactful
experience that drives conversion and
increases sales.
“We adopted Adobe
Digital Marketing Suite
because it gives us a
unified perspective of
what’s going on in our
businesses to better serve
our customers.”
Xuan Huong Luong
Director of Business Intelligence and
Analytics, Scholastic
For example, with the popular franchise The 39 Clues®, marketers and the editorial team can get
greater insight into which features in the multiplatform program kids enjoy most and incorporate
those concepts more robustly in later releases and in online game updates.
With Adobe web analytics solutions, marketers can associate relationships between various online
events and activities such as site traffic, book sales, or how many users are consuming interactive
content, to help steer modifications and feature site changes to drive higher traffic.
“We use a new data-driven approach that helps determines the additional content we develop for
various programs and how it’s delivered to maximize user engagement and conversion,” says Luong.
Targeted marketing
With Adobe Digital Marketing Suite solutions Scholastic also identifies segments of prospects with
whom marketers maintain a continual communication well after they’ve left the site.
“We use Adobe solutions to extract and segment data from visitors who made it to the shopping cart
checkout, but did not finalize the purchase,” Luong says. “From there, we can create personalized,
targeted e-mail marketing campaigns to reengage customers and drive conversion in one business
by as much as 13%.”
“Seeing which customers were online and understanding what they expressed interest in at a live
event gives context to follow up offers via e-mail campaigns or other means,” Luong says. “Adobe
Digital Marketing Suite solutions help us better target customers with relevant content and offers
that create another layer within the purchase process and keep them engaged with our brand longer.”
Adobe Digital Marketing Suite solutions used by Scholastic
Solution name
Solution type
Adobe SiteCatalyst
Provides Scholastic managers with actionable, real-time online user data
Adobe Discover
Allows Scholastic marketers to analyze and segment any quantity of Web and
customer transaction data in real time
Adobe Genesis
Provides online marketers rich solutions for integrating data from multiple
sources into a single user interface
Adobe Consulting
Offers strategic industry insights and best practices for onsite optimization
“Adobe Digital Marketing
Suite ties together every
aspect of our online
marketing strategy to help
us reach more people with
more relevant and impactful
content. We can get a
comprehensive view of our
entire business from end to
end, which helps us be more
agile and more responsive
to our customers’ needs.”
Xuan Huong Luong
Director of Business Intelligence and
Analytics, Scholastic
Proactive marketing strategies
In addition to recovering lost sales opportunities, Scholastic uses Adobe solutions to take a more
proactive approach to attracting new visitors and converting web visitors into web purchasers. Adobe
digital marketing solutions provide greater visibility into Scholastic’s social media reach and engagement.
Marketers can actively monitor how frequently visitors to a company Facebook fan page arrive at
its product site and then evaluate which products they view. Once customers have reached the site—
either by organic search, keyword campaigns, or from social media click-throughs—marketers use
segmented data to deliver more relevant content and navigation to drive conversion.
Based on customer data, the company has also increased its keyword search database for more
accurate search results even when search terms are misspelled. Additionally, Scholastic has revamped
its add–to-cart feature to now include a “wish list” option, giving customers a user-driven reengagement
and resulting in a 10% lift in conversions.
“Adobe Digital Marketing Suite ties together every aspect of our online marketing strategy to help us
reach more people with more relevant and impactful content,” Luong says. “We can get a comprehensive
view of our entire business from end to end, which helps us be more agile and more responsive to
our customers’ needs.”
For more information
www.adobe.com/marketing
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San Jose, CA 95110-2704
USA
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