New customer engagement platforms

Trying to get people better engaged with your business? Offering some real world experiences, the following experts told their stories at The CMO Club Summit in San Francisco.

• James Lonsdale-Hands, CMO of Active Network
• Jeff Rohrs, VP Marketing of Exact Target
• Paul McNulty, CMO of Unica
• Garry McGuire, CEO of RMG Networks

Here's a summary of the case studies presented and discussions that came out of the discussion

• SNS Bank, a customer of Unica, created a video to show the value of inbound marketing and Unica solutions for measuring customer behavior, especially in real time.
• For one client, Active Events (part of Active Networks) expanded the reach and ROI of an event by going hybrid between both a physical and virtual event. Extend the live event by using a virtual event. But they didn't want to sacrifice physical attendance of the physical event. They pulled it off. Attendance was the same as last year for physical (10,000) and they got 1500-2000 people to attend and pay for the virtual event.
  
• The inbox is a different environment than it was ten years ago especially in the face of social media. It's evolving to become a more unified messaging space to include all social networks and communications.
• Exact Target's client Scott's lawncare was concerned with why their mailing list dropped from 1 million to 800,000. It was a case of churn where they were moving up into a higher engagement platform, a closed loop social network. In all, they have about 2.4 million people connected via email or a social network. They know they won't get a huge number of people in its social network, but those people they do reach in those social networks will be key to forwarding their message through work of mouth marketing.
• Identify your low hanging fruit. Create personas of your existing customers and map them to new subscribers.