Thermo Fisher Scientific – Privacy Management

Implementation of centralized, granular privacy management architecture for multiple outbound marketing instances.

Situation

Thermo Fisher Scientific has grown primarily through mergers and acquisitions to become one of the largest and most respected biotech companies in the world. Initially created by the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific, the company acquired numerous leading biotech companies such as Life Technologies, Advanced Scientifics, Affymetrix, Patheon, etc. to become an S&P100 component with a market cap of about $140 billion, as of mid-2020.

In the process, Thermo Fisher ended up with six comprehensive marketing platforms with minimal or no integration between them – in addition to a large number of smaller marketing platforms functioning completely independently. Operating more than 240 brands in five major groups, Thermo Fisher had a significant challenge in offering customers and prospects the capability to manage their privacy as part of outbound cross-brand communication, especially via email.

Solution

Thermo Fisher hired Transiris due to our deep expertise with outbound marketing technologies, data management, and privacy. Being an established, trusted advisor and technology partner at Thermo Fisher, we were able to plan, design, build, test, and deploy a permissions management solution in record time: we completed two out of three phases within two quarters with deliverables every month.

After gathering requirements and socializing a comprehensive analysis document, we devised an architecture to integrate opt-ins and out-outs between all Thermo Fisher marketing instances to enable global compliance with privacy requirements, while maintaining the capability for individual brands to reach out to their customer bases and prospects effectively. We implemented this functionality company-wide within Phase One, with an aggressive schedule of just three agile sprints.

In Phase Two, we implemented the features enabling opt-in and opt-out granularity by brand, allowing customers to choose the categories of communication they are interested in, and the company to selectively communicate relevant and desired materials segmented by customer/prospect interest. Customers/prospects gained the ability to indicate interest selectively by brand group: Thermo, Invitrogen, Applied Biosystems, Fisher Scientific, and Unity Lab Services.

Outcomes

The project ensured Thermo Fisher’s compliance with regulations and its own privacy policy. In the first three months post-implementation we measured impressive performance across our three primary KPIs.

34
%
Granular opt-in/opt-out
61
%
Global opt-out reduction rate
85
%
Overall opt-in increase