Emarsys’s Power to the Marketer Festival kicked off with our live Omnichannel Masterclass digital event, held June 7-8, 2023, and we’re still buzzing from the excitement and thrill of all the brilliant speakers who presented.
For those who joined the Omnichannel Masterclass live, you were treated to two days of world-class marketers and technology experts sharing amazing insights, tips, and strategies.
For those who couldn’t make the live event, but are suddenly feeling a heavy wave of FOMO sweeping through your body right now — good news! Not only can the entire Omnichannel Masterclass event be accessed on-demand for free, but this recap blog will offer you a day-by-day walk-through of everything covered, giving you some choice highlights to sink your teeth into — and links for those who want to dive back into the full sessions.
Let’s get into it!
If you’re just now discovering this festival, here’s a quick overview of what it’s all about:
Our Power to the Marketer Festival was created to celebrate marketers and the
The first event, our Omnichannel Masterclass, was a live two-day digital event, split into the following categories:
So now, let’s begin with the recap, starting with Day 1!
“If you master both the art and science of marketing, your reward comes from your customers, and your reward comes [in the form of] true loyalty. And brands that achieve this, that master both art and science, they achieve true customer loyalty — which isn’t [only] about long-term relationships, but it is also about better business outcomes.”
Sara Richter
CMO, SAP Emarsys
To begin the event, SAP Emarsys CMO Sara Richter gave an overview of what we mean when we talk about the art and science of marketing, and put it in the context of the tightrope that many of today’s marketers must walk to satisfy both their customers’ needs and their business’ objectives.
Although this balancing act can seem intimidating and difficult, Sara assures us that, for those who master both, true customer loyalty is the result, which leads to happier customers and a happier business.
Watch the clip below, and register for on-demand access to learn more:
After Sara’s wonderful introduction, we moved on to the first session of Day 1. During this illuminating session, we heard from key SAP Emarsys visionaries and technology experts, including:
Kelsey started the session off giving some insight into how the Emarsys Customer Engagement Solution is purpose-built to help marketers solve their most unique and pressing challenges. We learned how, with Emarsys, marketers and their teams are more empowered to build, launch, and scale personalized cross-channel campaigns that drive business outcomes.
Next, Anthony dove into some of the exciting advancements and features added to the Emarsys platform based on feedback received from customers. In the past year and half, Emarsys has added more than 75 features, including these three most requested features:
One of the most exciting moments of the session was when Kelsey announced that SAP Emarsys launched a new channel.
Although I hate to give away a spoiler, in this case, I can’t help myself:
Mobile Wallet is officially here!
“I’m excited to announce today that we will be launching Google and Apple Mobile Wallet. This gives marketers the ability to launch campaigns with those wallet passes: Think vouchers, think coupons, think your loyalty cards. [Customers] no longer have to carry that physical wallet. And now this is truly bridging that gap between the online and offline [experience], really creating that ability for marketers to engage on mobile with convenience and ease.”
Kelsey Jones
Global Head of Product Marketing, SAP Emarsys
The launch of Mobile Wallet expands the suite of Emarsys’s mobile capabilities and will help marketers enhance their omnichannel mix. Using Mobile Wallet, Emarsys users can natively launch personalized campaigns with mobile wallet passes such as digital vouchers, coupons, tickets, and loyalty cards.
Following the announcement, Senior Solutions Consultant Nick Odom gave an in-depth walkthrough of the product to show us how this channel works within the Emarsys platform. To see it for yourself, be sure to get on-demand access and watch the session.
Session 2 rolled right into topics that are top of mind for today’s marketers: Customer loyalty, retention, and revenue.
During this session, Sara Richter moderated a panel of the the following marketing experts:
The session was full of so many great insights, too many to share them all here, but here are some of my favorites:
“We have [such] dedicated customers [who are] knitters and crocheters. And actually, they really want to engage with us, as I see it. Loyalty comes also from engagement, from the customers. If you can get your customers to actually communicate with you, then you have gone a long way in [driving] this true loyalty measure, I believe.”
Marianne Colding Oxholm
Head of CRM & Retail Marketing, Hobbii
There’s absolutely an art to creating highly personalized experiences, and that was reaffirmed in this exciting session about how e-commerce leader Brandsdal Group works with Movable Ink — one of Emarsys’s technology partners — to deliver 1:1 experiences that provide a consistent revenue stream… or in some cases, revenue waterfall.
During the session, we heard from:
Here are some highlights:
“[We use] a “super waterfall,” which is an evergreen block that is easily added into Emarsys for that extra personal touch. For instance, if a customer has added an item into their cart within the past week, that product will be shown in the email… And if the customer didn’t add any products to their cart, [but] browsed some products within that week, the recently viewed product will show. And, if the customer doesn’t fall into that logic, then a trending product within a relevant category is shown.”
Amalie Nilsen
Digital Marketer, Brandsdal Group
If you read 22X ROI and thought it was a typo, think again. Those are the actual results fabric and home decor company Spoonflower achieved using what may perhaps be “the future of marketing” (according to one of the panelists).
In this session, we learned about the power of conversational commerce and the major ROI that comes from using an AI-powered two-way conversational platform (from Emarsys’s partner Attentive) called Concierge.
Session speakers included:
Here are a few stand-out bits that I really enjoyed:
“I love the idea of conversational commerce, and I think it’s the future of marketing. While I would love to enable our internal team members to answer every [customer] question on every channel, we simply cannot scale up. … So what I love about [Attentive’s Concierge] is, I like to say, it feeds two birds with one scone. For me, it’s effective, it’s cost efficient, and it’s highly personalized.”
Suz Pozzo
Director of Email Marketing, Spoonflower
Day 1 was all about the art of marketing, with a primary focus on things like content, channels, creativity, connection. Well day 2 is all about the “science” of marketing, which entails data, revenue
Much like the first day, the second day was equally packed with meaningful insights and martech wisdom. Let’s look at each of the sessions and some of the highlights.
Marketers love using their creativity to deliver compelling content that resonates with their audiences. But as satisfying as it is to flex some creative muscle, it’s also crucial to focus on the nitty gritty detail that helps drive conversions and deliver business outcomes.
This first session gave us a first hand look at how Ochsner Sport, the largest sporting goods retailer in Switzerland, bridges the gap between the online experience, incorporating both creativity and conversion through collaboration with Emarsys’s partner Dynamic Yield, experts in personalization.
In this session, we heard from:
Key highlights include:
“What we did was [we] put in sneaky, quick-win campaigns to get buy-in from the management to do more complicated stuff. Lots of things, what we did, were small campaigns … but [they] gave us a lot of good data, a lot of revenue, to convince management to give us more time, and more money and resources, for bigger campaigns.”
Jan Cahlik
Team Lead, Online Shop Management, Ochsner Sport
IT and Marketing don’t always see eye to eye, and seemingly are aligned to their own disparate goals and agendas. But the truth is, when these two teams align and work together toward a solitary vision, they can cohesively create the kind of innovative customer experiences that today’s shoppers want (and that businesses want to deliver).
Getting IT and Marketing to align, however, is easier said than done.
Fortunately, in one of the most insightful sessions of the entire two-day event, we had five retail and e-commerce experts join us to shed light on how brands can align IT and Marketing to drive CX innovation.
In this session, we heard from:
With so many experts and so much great content crammed into one single session, it’s hard to unpack it all here. So I highly encourage you to rewatch it on-demand. But for now, here’s some of my favorite takeaways:
“We are starting to invite the IT teams [at] the beginning of the projects, at the brainstorm stage, because they can understand, in that way, the thought process behind any requirement […] As an example, it’s not the same to just send the IT team a request to create a million new customer profiles on the ERP, instead of explaining to them the importance of having a full profile of each of our consumers and the
impact that these can have in terms of lifetime value, customer segmentation, and ROI per person.”
Cristian Serrano
E-commerce & Omnichannel Regional Director, Tekmovil
Marketers can promote their brands all day long, hoping to convince a prospect why their brand is the best choice. But when it comes to convincing a new prospect to check out your brand, nothing is as powerful as a referral from someone they trust.
In this session, we learned how BrandAlley leverages that all-powerful brand advocacy and turns it into major growth for their brand. We heard from:
Session highlights include:
“So we’ve recently started using the specially built tactics within Emarsys for Mention Me, and we’ve rolled out automation campaigns in our email marketing. These tactics actually use referral data to enhance the CRM performance and deliver the right message to the right customer at exactly the right time.”
Michelle Hurney
Head of Marketing, BrandAlley
Whether it’s personal or professional, romantic or platonic, communication is the key to any successful relationship. So it makes sense that communication is also the key to success for brands looking to build stronger relationships with customers. That’s exactly what Sinch taught us in this inspiring session with Sinch that looks at the science of building stronger customer relationships.
In this session, we heard from:
Here are some of my favorite stand-out moments:
“Intermarché … took the usual grocery experience that we as consumers find mundane, dared to be different from the competition, and delivered a fun experience [that] increased revenue. The solution was mobile messaging campaigns using Sinch Rich SMS [to create] fun, engaging content, and conversational AI. And the result was true differentiation, leading to higher customer engagement and campaign visibility — 59% chatbot engagement rate increased revenue.”
Susan Stjernberger
Senior Account Manager & New Sales, Sinch
Data was a major theme throughout the entire Omnichannel Masterclass, especially on Day 2. So it was only fitting that our final session of the event doubled down on this critical topic, and revealed some of the challenges today’s brands face when it comes to viewing, organizing, and consolidating data to attain the greatly desired 360-degree customer view.
In this session, led by Chris O’Hara, Head of Global Product Marketing and Solutions, SAP, we learned:
“99% of brands really calculate lifetime value exactly the same. But you can’t really do that. You got to dig a little deeper. You have to get into the back end of business data to start truly doing personalization.”
Chris O’Hara
Head of Global Product Marketing and Solutions, SAP
The Omnichannel Masterclass event, part of our year-long Power to the Marketer Festival, featured so many great speakers and so many great insights that this blog can only scratch the surface.
So if you like what you’ve read about the event so far, I highly encourage you to register for on-demand access to the entire event. It’s free, plus you’ll get access to other great resources and content to supplement everything you will learn.
Of course, our Omnichannel Masterclass was just the beginning. For the 2023 Power to the Marketer Festival, there’s much more to come, including our first in-person event of the year.
On June 13 in Munich, Germany, the Power to the Marketer Festival continues. This in-person event, in association with Vogue Business, will be held at the lavish Famtain Member Club. Those who attend will learn about the art and science of loyalty, and have the opportunity to connect with like-minded senior marketers in the heart of the city.
Be sure to check out the links below:
