Beyond Email: The Shard Case Study on Advanced Data Capture

The Challenge: Driving Public Engagement for an Iconic Brand

For its recurring festive celebration, The Shard hosts a spectacular light show from its spire, aptly named #ShardLights. To ensure maximum public engagement with the show, the REM marketing team wanted to run a high-profile photography competition, encouraging people to take pictures and share them online.

As an existing Enabler client, the REM team tasked our campaign management experts with creating a seamless campaign that fulfilled three key requirements:

• Securely host the entire photography competition.

• Reliably collect all competition entries and associated entrant data.

• Send an automated trigger email to every entrant upon submission.

The Solution: A Bespoke Landing Page with Integrated Data Capture

Our team determined that a standard email campaign was insufficient for these goals. The optimal solution was to leverage Enabler's advanced feature set to build a unified system.

The solution included:

• A Standalone Landing Page: Designed, built, and hosted entirely within the Enabler platform to serve as the central hub for the competition.

• An Integrated Enabler Form: Built into the landing page to capture all entrant data and, most importantly, their image file uploads.

• An Automated Trigger Email: A workflow that instantly sent a branded confirmation email to each entrant, confirming their submission and encouraging social sharing to maximize the campaign's viral reach.

The Build: Prioritizing Bespoke Design and Seamless Data Flow

For an iconic brand like The Shard, a generic-looking form was not an option. Our designers worked to ensure the landing page was visually stunning, incorporating parallax scrolling images while keeping all competition information clear and accessible.

The most critical technical element was ensuring the bespoke, high-design frontend form was perfectly linked to the Enabler database on the backend.

Why a 'Form Post' Was Critical (vs. an <iframe>)

There are two primary ways to embed an Enabler form.

1. The Simple Method (<iframe>): This involves embedding a snippet of code that displays your form exactly as it appears in Enabler. It's fast and simple but restricts custom styling.

2. The Advanced Method ('Form post'): This is a much more technical and flexible approach. It allows your developers to build a 100% custom frontend form—matching your brand's exact design—which then "posts" the submission data to Enabler's secure servers.

To meet The Shard's high-end design requirements, we used the 'Form post' method. This allowed for complete design freedom on the webpage while ensuring every submission, from text fields to image files, was captured directly and securely within the Enabler database.

Upon submission, entrants saw a confirmation message on the page and simultaneously received the automated trigger email, providing instant peace of mind and clear next steps.

The Enabler Difference: A Bespoke Image Gallery for Judging

A standard text-based data export was useless for a photography competition. The REM marketing team needed a way to view all the submissions to select a winner.

To solve this, our development team built a custom, secure image gallery directly within the Enabler platform. This bespoke solution allowed the REM team to:

• View all submitted images at a glance in a clean, gallery format.

• Click on any individual photograph to see all the associated entrant details.

• Easily manage the judging process from one central, secure location.

This demonstrated Enabler's flexibility not just as a marketing platform, but as a robust solution for complex data management.

The Outcome: A High-Impact, High-Engagement Campaign

The competition was a resounding success, receiving a total of 871 entries.

This project showcased the true power of the Enabler platform when used beyond standard email. It highlighted how integrating sophisticated, custom-designed data capture forms with powerful email automation workflows can help iconic brands achieve their marketing goals and drive massive public engagement.

If you want to learn more about Enabler's advanced form and landing page functionality, contact our team today to discuss your next project.