JODI ESPOSITO Get in touch
← All case studies
CRMMarketing operationsEmailNational Music Publishers' Association2024–2025

A CRM built for how the music industry works

In music, one manager often represents several songwriters, and a standard email tool can't tell them apart. I led a three-month project to replace Mailchimp with a custom Salesforce CRM, so every invitation reached the right person and said who it was for.

3 months

from vendor search to launch, on a budget I managed

1 → 5

personalized invitations for a manager with five songwriters, instead of one generic email

1 system

for advocacy outreach, club membership, and awards invitations

The challenge

The External Affairs team at the National Music Publishers' Association ran all of its outreach through Mailchimp: advocacy communications, membership updates for the Gold & Platinum Club, and invitations to awards events.

Mailchimp is built around one person per email address. That breaks in the music industry, where a manager or agent may represent many songwriters. Mailchimp sends each address one email, so a manager whose clients were all invited to the same event got a single message with no way of knowing which client it was for. Songwriter contacts had no real home, and there was no record of the personal emails staff sent alongside the bulk ones.

The fix

Send to the songwriter, deliver to the manager

BEFORE · MAILCHIMPABCDEShared managerYou're invitedOne email. Which songwriter is it for?AFTER · SALESFORCEABCDEShared managerInvitefor AInvitefor BInvitefor CInvitefor DInvitefor EFive emails, each personalized to one songwriter.
The approach

How we built it

  1. Set the requirements and hired the vendor
    • Defined what the team needed, starting with sending to songwriters whose contact details belong to someone else
    • Researched Salesforce partners, hired the vendor, and managed the budget
  2. Designed a contact model around relationships
    • Gave every person their own record: songwriters, managers, agents, and other industry professionals
    • Connected a songwriter to whoever handles their contact through typed relationships, from manager and agent to spouse and friend
    • Added fields for Gold & Platinum Club membership and each songwriter's song and award history
  3. Made email work the way the industry does
    • Added an email marketing tool inside Salesforce that sends by songwriter and doesn't deduplicate shared addresses, so each email is personalized to one client
    • Connected Salesforce to Outlook so one-to-one emails are logged next to bulk sends
  4. Cleaned, tested, and launched
    • Cleaned up the contact data before migration
    • Tested the system against real outreach scenarios, then launched and managed it for the team
Manager Agent Spouse Friend and more relationship types
The result

What changed for the team

Before After
Songwriter contactsEmail lists in MailchimpOne organized record per person, linked to their representatives
InvitationsOne email per address; managers couldn't tell which client was invitedOne personalized email per songwriter, even at a shared address
Communication historyBulk sends only; personal emails lived in individual inboxesBulk and one-to-one emails tracked in one place
Club reportingAssembled by handQuick reports on Gold & Platinum Club members, speeding up quarterly updates
My role

I owned the project from start to finish: I researched and hired the vendor, set the requirements, managed the budget and timeline, tested the system, cleaned up the data, and managed the finished tool for the External Affairs team.

What it shows

Good marketing depends on good data. When the tools don't match how an industry actually works, the fix isn't a workaround. It's a system built around the real relationships between people.