How Emarsys achieved global event scale by switching to ON24

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.

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.