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How Emarsys achieved global event scale by switching to ON24
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1,670
LIVE attended sessions
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9,000
session registrations (people going to two to three sessions each)
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3,000+
unique registrants from 30 countries
Capabilities
Industry
Use Cases
- Event marketing
Number of Employees
- 251 to 1,000
About
Emarsys empowers digital marketing leaders and business owners engage customers to accelerate business outcomes. By rapidly aligning desired business results with proven omnichannel customer engagement strategies — crowdsourced from leading brands across industries — its platform enables you to accelerate time to value, deliver superior one-on-one experiences and produce measurable results fast.
Introduction
Emarsys empowers digital marketing leaders and business owners engage customers to accelerate business outcomes. It provides automation, CDP, personalization, AI marketing, loyalty, analytics and integration capabilities across email, ads, web, mobile and direct mail. The company serves e-commerce, retail, travel, and other industries.
Problem
50 sessions across 4 time zones built in 100 days
To help prospects and customers navigate the ever-evolving retail landscape, the Emarsys team partners with ecommerce experts every year to host Retail Renaissance, an annual online event for marketers, ecommerce professionals and digital leaders.
Already adept at hosting their festival virtually, the Emarsys team was ready to go with a business-as-usual event strategy for 2020 – that is, until companies across the globe started moving their cancelled in-person events into the digital world. “We didn’t want to organize just another global conference,” said Gabriella Mihaly, Head of Events & Field Marketing at Emarsys.
The team knew that to cut through the digital noise and stand above the competition, they would need to create a digital experience that went above and beyond the standard webinar experience.
“We wanted to create a digital experience that went beyond a webinar. By offering all of our event content on-demand through ON24 Engagement Hub, we were able to continue driving engagement long after the event date while collecting data that ultimately helped us accelerate business outcomes.”
Tom Ball, VP Global Demand Gen
Solution
A digital experience that generated actionable data from global audiences
With only weeks left to reimagine their event, the team turned to the ON24 platform to create an interactive virtual festival capable of standing out in a sea of webinar and digital event invitations. “We wanted to make an impact on the market and bring and connect people together to collaborate around ideas for how retailers could push forward during a difficult time for them.”
The event took place over the course of three days and included over 50 sessions in three languages and four different time zones. Regional timing offered globally accessibility while virtual lunches and happy hours gave attendees the opportunity to network, unwind and enjoy a drink of choice from the comfort of their homes. The event also included webinars and interactive sessions outside of ON24, including cooking classes, cocktail hour, art classes, cultural stuff and fitness sessions.
To connect customers, partners and the wider business community, speakers included ecommerce experts and representatives from the world’s biggest retail brands and every session was recorded and broadcasted using ON24 Webcast Elite. The sessions covered a range of topics from customer engagement to omnichannel commerce, and each webinar (or session) console was customized to showcase the Emarsys brand.
“For something of this scale, it was essential that we were able to represent the Emarsys brand,” said Sara Richter, Emarsys’s Chief Marketing Officer. “We wanted audiences to come to the engagement hub and feel that they were engaging with Emarsys.”
Over 50 digital breakout, keynotes and speaker sessions were made available through ON24 Engagement Hub so attendees could create their own individualized experiences within the event. “We wanted to recreate the feeling of an in-person event where visitors could choose the tracks and sessions that interested them,” said Tom Ball, VP Demand Generation.
But that’s not all. By consolidating these tracks on the ON24 Engagement Hub, attendees who were unable to attend the live date could still access the content after the fact. “One of the great features that ON24 offered us was to run a live session, and within an hour, make that available on-demand,” said Richter.
“By offering all of our event content on-demand through ON24 Engagement Hub, we were able to continue driving engagement long after the event date while collecting data that ultimately helped us accelerate business outcomes,” said Ball.
With ON24 Intelligence, the company collected engagement data based on how attendees behaved during the webinar and the always-on sessions. Leads that “scored” were then fed into Marketo and Salesforce through ON24 Connect. By tracking the topic, language and location of the sessions attended, Emarsys built a buyer intent model to deliver personalized messaging matched to an attendee’s interest, at scale, and triggered by real-time updates.
Results
“I don’t think there’s another platform on the market that would have allowed us to deliver the experience that we wanted to create around the festival, with multiple sessions attendees could easily dip in and out of, and have the flexibility of being able to create digital experience all in one place, as well as integrating with our marketing automation & CRM platforms” said Ball.
Emarsys created — from inception to execution — a full-fledged event within 10-12 weeks, including the time it took to procure, onboard, train and integrate with the ON24 team and platform. The live event welcomed more than 3,000 unique registrants from more than 30 countries with more than 1,000 content downloads in three days. Better yet, the event generated more than 9,000 session registrations, suggesting that each registrant attended at least two to three sessions.
“I honestly don’t think there was another platform that could have done what we needed it to do in the time we needed to do it. We were absolutely delighted with the results that we had,” said Richter.
"I honestly don't think there was another platform that could have done what we needed it to do in the time we needed to do it. We were absolutely delighted with the results that we had."
Sara Richter, CMO
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