Technology Integrations

Gibson and SAP Engagement Cloud

Orchestrating omnichannel customer journeys

In this tell-all video, discover how companies like Gibson Brands are approaching personalization, optimizing customer journeys, and driving lifelong loyalty

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We would love for you to come experience what it's like to be a Gibson Brands fan. So come on down to Nashville, see what we have to offer. But if you can't make it down, check out this video right here of Gibson and Emarsys and how we work together to build a positive customer journey for our fans. Gibson Brands is the world's leading and iconic musical instrument brand that continues to shape the sound of music for generations and all genres since the invention of recorded music. Now their business is a bit complex. They're not only selling direct to consumer, but also to their channel retail partners. Plus, they must think about how to bridge the gap between these two audiences. To support these multiple paths to market, they trust Emarsys to help them engage with each audience seamlessly and in a personalized way. So let's start with their direct to customer business. We have Sadie. She is a big live music fan who just attended an amazing show where she got to spark the idea to finally make the decision to purchase a beginner guitar. As she's searching, she discovers a whole line of guitars for beginners called Epiphone. Sadie sees this Les Paul style and it catches her eye. She browses the category and settles on the ice blue version, adding it to her cart and completing her first purchase. Now it looks like we have a new rock star in the making. Once she makes that purchase, she gets a confirmation email. This is going to ask her to download the mobile app. And now Gibson can identify Sadie across multiple channels. As she opens the mobile app, she's greeted with a warm welcome and personalized recommendations. Over time, Gibson will start to gather insights as she's interacting with the mobile app, takes lessons from legendary artists and continues her journey with Gibson. And these insights will come into play as Gibson marketers work to increase customer lifetime value. So we as marketers, we're going to start our day in Emarsys. Here is our homepage where you can see a quick overview of our campaign revenue performance. And Gibson wants to know how they can better engage their first time buyers like Sadie. So let's jump into Audience Reporting. What this allows us to do is compare two custom segments, the first of which is acoustic guitar enthusiasts. And the second is electric guitar buyers. So what we found is that there is an overlap with these two segments, but also some differences. For instance, people who purchase electric guitars like Sadie engage more on mobile channels. We also learn that they are more inclined to come in store for an event or maybe a lesson versus virtually. Now let's take a look at how we can activate these insights. So here we are in Automation Center. Let me first orient you to what you're seeing. On the top left hand corner, you can see your nodes. These are including things like your entry points that are used to activate an audience into your campaign through real time triggered events or even a target segment. Next, we have our actions. So where you can A/B test channels and campaign content or listen to consumer behaviors and engage accordingly. And below you can see all of our channels like email, web, SMS, push, ads, and now conversational messaging on platforms like WhatsApp to give this campaign a true omnichannel feel. Now, this campaign is going to kick off when Sadie's electric guitar is delivered. She's going to receive an email inviting her in-store. And because we know that she's part of our electric guitar segment, she's more inclined to engage in-person with guitar experts. So right here in our email editor, marketers can now share vouchers via mobile wallet. In this case, we'll use this as a way to invite Sadie to a free guitar lesson in store. This is great for brands who aren't quite ready for a mobile app but still want to interact on their users favorite channel, their mobile device, and connect online and offline channels together. Let's check one more thing. Back in Automation Center, we know that customers like Sadie are more inclined to engage via mobile. So right here in our campaign, we can include our newest channel with WhatsApp. So let's see what this looks like for Sadie as she's catching up with her friend in London on WhatsApp. She's interrupted by a message from Gibson encouraging her to check out a free upcoming guitar lesson. Now, this whole experience was easily orchestrated with Emarsys and triggered by Sadie when she reached a threshold of engagement with the Gibson app. Now this is letting them know it's the perfect time to reach out. It's exactly what Sadie has been looking for, so she responds yes. And this conversational message also makes it easy for Sadie to sign up for the event directly. Continuing her journey, she quickly receives a confirmation email and that includes information about the event. And she can even download the ticket to her mobile wallet for extra convenience. Later that week, it's time for the event and she can quickly scan in with her mobile wallet ticket. This is going to enable Gibson to record that she attended the event through her mobile wallet voucher, again, helping them connect the online and offline touchpoints. While she's at the event, she's given a tour of different types of guitars, especially for beginners, and how they're transitioning to more of those higher end collections. She even got to test out some equipment, check out some merchandise and understand that she is becoming a lifelong fan of Gibson. So it's great to see these types of stories come to life. I think we all as consumers can really relate to these types of experiences. But for brands like Gibson, they also have to manage the customer experience directly through their channel partners. So these are people like their retail store partners that sell their Gibson merchandise and Gibson guitars. They want to ensure that they're giving a VIP experience to every store manager. Now, to connect with these retail channel partners, you're going to need a tight alignment between your marketing team and your sales team in order to drive those personalized experiences. So let's see what this looks like. Gibson's Retail Marketing Manager is preparing for an upcoming product launch, and they want to set their dealers up for success in selling the new product. To help accelerate time to market tactics, make it easy to quickly create campaigns using pre-built automations that are based on optimal time to send, optimal channel mix, in order to meet your intended goals. And we're excited to announce we also have tactics specific for B2B and consumer products, which is perfect for Gibson. So let's use this new product launch tactic, and with a few clicks, we can build out our campaign. And with that, we can help our dealer sales reps have more meaningful conversations and help our store owners bring more consumers into their store. Now, you can see here that the marketing team has activated this tactic for their upcoming launch. They've made it unique to them and they've added in their content that's most meaningful. That's on brand for their upcoming launch. And for this campaign, we're going to target accounts that are most likely to add this new product to their stock and supply our own sales reps with higher quality leads. You'll notice that we have sales data in here and actions baked directly into the automation where we can notify sales to follow up with a phone call or even create a new lead for them to work on. Now from a sales perspective in our CRM, they can manage their accounts and opportunities. They can see all their related contacts, their details and their statuses. And you'll notice our marketing campaign that you just saw is available for sales to review. So while marketing has preselected these accounts and contacts for their region, the sales rep is on the ground. They know these contacts best and ultimately they decide who should receive the campaign based on those relationships. So while reviewing the sales reps sees a new notification come in from the marketing campaign with a task to follow up with a contact via a phone call. The phone call is a success and the channel partner is very much interested in learning more about the product launch. So how does this culminate into a personalized experience? Well, the channel partner receives this beautifully branded email sent on behalf of the sales rep by the Gibson marketing team, and it includes product launch campaign assets that they can use, and they can also have the sales rep personalize it based on that phone conversation. So just like that, we've created a connected experience for our channel partners between sales and marketing to ensure no sales opportunity gets overlooked and no shoppers like Sadie go home empty handed. So now that we've seen direct to consumer and direct to channel. Now let's see how we bridge the gap between the two to drive customer loyalty. So we're going to fast forward a bit now, thanks to our integrated data layer, we can see the hours that Sadie spent practicing in the mobile app. We can see what she's purchased online, what she's purchased in store, and we can see the preferences towards female rockers when it comes to content. Plus, artificial intelligence is baked in to give us insights to inform us that Sadie is ready for an upgrade. So the next time that she navigates to gibson.com thanks to real time web personalization, she is greeted with a web pop up that not only lets her know of a guitar that she's most likely to purchase in this case, it happens to be the one we just launched, but also recommends dealers that are in her area for her to try it out. And now you can see how Emarsys brings power to the marketer to connect with their consumers, their channel partners, and be the bridge between the two.