SaaS Company Take it_ makes the dream of a smooth transition come true for Emarsys

About Emarsys

Emarsys, a SAP company, is an omnichannel customer engagement platform that empowers marketers to build, launch, and scale personalized, cross-channel campaigns that drive business outcomes.
They partner with more than 1,500 companies from global enterprises to fast-moving mid-market brands across industries.
While their corporate website is built on Wordpress, they reached out to take it_ agency to revitalize their Brand Management site on a different system.

About take it_

It’s tech, everything is possible. This is the philosophy behind take it_, a design and web development agency from Berlin. They are specialized on Storyblok based websites. Their portfolio consists of simple landing pages and complex corporate websites with integrated headless shops that are connected to your favorite marketing and CRM platforms.

The project

Until the end of last year the Emarsys Brand Manual website, like their corporate website, was built on Wordpress. Together with take it_ they took the bold step to move away from the monolithic CMS area and experiment with a headless system.
Since the project itself was simple, the risks were also limited. Nevertheless, they had a, albeit short, list of requirements.
First on the list was to find a system that can be handled easily both by developers and designers. While most systems are handled easily by developers, it is not as simple to find a system that is also user friendly for designers and marketers.
Secondly, Emarsys was looking for an intuitive CMS that would allow them to make changes quickly and would enable them to implement their complex designs with no tweaks.
And, last but not least, they wanted a system that would allow them to migrate their current content from Wordpress easily, but also upload new content effortlessly.
For take it_ there was a straight answer to this list of specifications: Storyblok.

Why Storyblok

Although take it_ has been a short time on the market, they are an established agency with a great portfolio. We learned from their experience that more and more clients, not only know about headless CMSs, they specifically want their projects built on a headless system, as they are aware that it’s a better solution. This trend corresponds to the ever growing demands and needs of users.
They experimented with other headless systems, like Prismic, Contentful and Sanity, which they concluded were pretty strong contenders. In the end, however, they decided that Storyblok was their best option and first recommendation to all their clients. The Visual Editor was a weighing factor, but also the fact that both developers and clients enjoyed working with it. More than that, they found a solid partner in Storyblok, in terms of support and reaction to needs.

As mentioned, Emarsys took the leap and went with take it_’s recommendation to use Storyblok. They made their list of requirements and their conclusion was simple, but powerful: It was delivered.
Going into more detail, Emarsys see the new system as self-explanatory, almost no onboarding was necessary. Developers and designers immediately understood how to use and extend it and content creators were able to quickly and conveniently upload the content. They also found that it required very little effort to migrate their existent content.

Project development and timeline

Emarsys approached take_it shortly before Christmas and they started working on the project in January. Three weeks later they gave access to Emarsys to start uploading the content.
This quick delivery was due to an effort on both sides. The agency commends the high quality and well-structured designs they received. Likewise, Emarsys, applauds the toolbox system, take it_ implemented.
To be more specific, take it_’s strategy was inspired by the atomic design. They identified the similar sections and broke them down into smaller parts, to the smallest unit (eg. headline), which they reused across templates and types of pages. Essentially, they created a toolbox of elements which can be used by Emarsys to create endless variations via the visual editor.
A very astute observation made by take_it, Storyblok’s architecture fully supports this approach. It is built on this principle of reusable elements down to the smallest item.

Conclusion

This was a small project but with great impact for Emarsys. They had a short timeline and trusted take it_ to fulfill their dream of giving them an easy to handle system which enables them to effortlessly manage their content. They delivered.

The newly revitalized Brand Site became an internal point of reference and a reason for Emarsys to possibly use Storyblok for more complex future projects.