A custom offer platform for a major loyalty program.

A loyalty program's emails depend on its partners' offers, and every offer has to carry the right content and the right branding. The idea was to let partners prepare their own offers from a library of pre-built layouts, while the program's team keeps control of the brand and the final approval. Nobody has to assemble each email by hand.

We built one platform from scratch around that process, and each kind of user has a different job in it.

• Partners choose a layout and write their offer as a block, in English and French, preview it and send it for review. They only ever see their own organization's blocks, and once a block is approved it's locked for them, so any change starts with an edit request to the program's team.
• The program's team approves each block or sends feedback, answers edit requests, decides which of the program's own blocks appear in the partners' library, and builds the campaigns.
• Administrators invite and manage the people at the program and at each partner.
• Developers at the marketing agency add and update layouts themselves, with a tool we built for them that previews and checks each layout before it is pushed live.

Everyone gets notified in the platform and by email when something needs them, and every block and campaign keeps a history of who did what.

A campaign is one email with several versions. Each version has its own languages, subject lines and preheaders, its own blocks in order, dragged in from a directory of blocks, and its own audience: rules for who is included and who is left out. A block inside a version can carry rules of its own, so one email can show different offers to different members.

The campaign sets the send date and the control group. Legal marks in the offers are numbered when the email is built, so each version's legal copy matches what it shows. And when two people edit the same block or campaign, the platform catches it and asks before anything is overwritten.

• A pre-flight check. The date, the control group, every version's subject lines and languages, the blocks' dates, every block approved, every link and image reachable, and a test sent since the last change.
• A test send to a short list of addresses, sent through Salesforce Marketing Cloud, like the real one.
• Scheduled. Scheduling locks the campaign's blocks. Unscheduling pauses the send and unlocks them. Several campaigns can be scheduled at once.
• Afterwards. Campaigns are marked as sent, and blocks expire at their end date, overnight and without anyone having to do it.

The platform doesn't replace Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which still delivers the email. It gives partners and staff a simpler place to work, and it fits the automations already set up in Marketing Cloud: it passes each campaign's content and audience rules across, runs the test send, and sets or pauses the schedule.

The program's marketing rules stay where they were. Contact limits and the control group are applied in Marketing Cloud as each send runs.

We built a tool so the marketing agency's developers can add and update layouts themselves, without relying on us. The platform shows each block in HTML, while Marketing Cloud needs it in AMPscript, its own template language. A layout keeps the HTML, the AMPscript and its form fields together. In the tool, the two are previewed side by side, the AMPscript rendered by Marketing Cloud itself, and a preview email can go to any inbox.

When a layout is ready, it goes to staging first and to production once approved. A deployment step checks it, updates the library and Marketing Cloud at once, and posts the result in the team's chat.

The platform runs on AWS: serverless functions for the application, a managed database on a private network with no route from the internet, and queues for the notifications and emails. The infrastructure is defined in code, and every change goes through a staging environment before production.

A system this close to a major brand has to be locked down too: multi-factor sign-in for everyone, sessions that end when idle, a strict Content Security Policy, a firewall in front, and automated threat detection that alerts the team.

The work didn't end at launch. We still support the platform day to day: new layouts, the alarms and alerts, and whatever the program's team needs next.