Merkle: Enterprise Campaign Orchestrator
Redesigning a legacy enterprise marketing platform into a modern campaign operating system that reduced workflow complexity, improved usability, and enabled Fortune 500 marketing teams to launch omnichannel campaigns significantly faster.
Year
Role
Lead Product Designer
Project Type
Enterprise SaaS · Marketing Technology · Customer Experience
Duration
July 2024 – August 2025
Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Fortune 500 marketing teams relied on fragmented legacy systems to manage increasingly complex omnichannel campaigns. A single campaign required users to move through fourteen disconnected screens, interpret inconsistent patterns, duplicate data, wait for approvals, and manually reconcile analytics after launch.
The business needed scale and governance; users needed clarity and speed. Marketing managers thought in workflows, but the product was organized around internal modules. Campaign managers needed confidence before launch, but critical status, audience, content, approvals, and analytics lived in separate places.
The existing experience created cognitive overload: inconsistent UI patterns, poor information architecture, dense advanced filtering, weak analytics visibility, and no unified operational dashboard. The design challenge was to preserve enterprise depth without making users feel trapped inside enterprise complexity.
Design vision
Transform disconnected marketing tools into one intelligent operating system — a task-first workspace where every campaign has a single source of truth, every decision is made in context, and every user can move from strategy to execution with confidence.
Understanding the Business
The business context was larger than campaign creation. Fortune 500 marketing teams were coordinating customers, channels, legal requirements, data quality, delivery windows, personalization rules, executive reporting, and regional governance at the same time.
The product needed to serve multiple enterprise personas without forcing them into the same workflow.
Marketing Manager
Goals: align campaign strategy, channel mix, calendar timing, and business outcomes. Responsibilities: define the campaign brief, coordinate teams, track readiness, and communicate progress. Pain points: fragmented visibility, unclear status, and slow approvals. Success metrics: faster launches, fewer escalations, and cleaner reporting.
Campaign Manager
Goals: build campaigns accurately and move work forward. Responsibilities: configure channels, manage reviews, validate content, and prepare launches. Pain points: duplicate work, disconnected setup screens, and fragile handoffs. Success metrics: fewer errors, lower rework, and predictable campaign setup.
CRM Specialist
Goals: create accurate segments and personalization logic. Responsibilities: audience rules, suppression lists, data validation, and reach estimation. Pain points: advanced filters were difficult to understand and easy to misuse. Success metrics: targeting confidence, reusable segments, and fewer list-related mistakes.
Marketing Analyst
Goals: understand campaign performance and explain business impact. Responsibilities: monitor results, compare channels, identify patterns, and prepare readouts. Pain points: delayed analytics and metrics without context. Success metrics: faster insight generation and more actionable reporting.
Director of Marketing and Legal Reviewer
Directors needed portfolio visibility, risk awareness, and adoption signals. Legal reviewers needed traceability, focused review, and a clear audit trail. Both groups required confidence without being pulled into unnecessary operational detail.
The Problem
The existing journey exposed the core problem: users were not struggling because the work was simple. They were struggling because complexity was scattered across the product.
Fourteen disconnected steps
Strategy intake, campaign brief, channel selection, audience rules, suppression lists, journey setup, content creation, personalization, QA, legal review, business approval, launch scheduling, monitoring, and analytics all lived as separate moments rather than one connected campaign workspace.
Pain points
Information overload made each screen feel heavier than it needed to be. Context switching forced users to reconstruct campaign state repeatedly. Duplicate work increased operational risk. Navigation confusion slowed new users. Approval delays created bottlenecks. No unified dashboard meant teams lacked shared campaign visibility.
Quantitative signals
60% of tested users became lost inside advanced filtering. Support tickets remained high around setup, permissions, and analytics interpretation. Campaign launches were slower than business teams expected. New users described the learning curve as steep, especially when configuring audiences and approvals.
The product did not need more features first. It needed a clearer operating model.
Research
Research was designed to understand how enterprise marketing work actually happened, not just how users clicked through the current interface.
Methods
The team used stakeholder interviews, user interviews, usability testing, Hotjar heatmaps, Google Analytics, journey mapping, competitive analysis, and affinity mapping. Research included marketing managers, campaign managers, CRM specialists, analysts, legal reviewers, and leaders.
Research artifacts
The process produced interview notes, research boards, journey maps, friction maps, workflow diagrams, usability observations, heatmap summaries, and opportunity clusters. These artifacts helped align Product, Engineering, Research, Data, and Business stakeholders around the same product narrative.
Key insights
Marketing managers think in workflows, not features. Users constantly switch between dashboards because campaign context is fragmented. Users need progressive guidance, especially when configuring audiences and launch rules. Campaign approvals create unnecessary bottlenecks when ownership, risk, and status are unclear.
The strongest research insight was simple: users did not want the product to feel smaller. They wanted it to feel more organized.
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