Congratulations to the Supernova Digital Marketing Transformation Award Finalists!

As one of the judges for Constellation’s Supernova Awards for Digital Marketing, I had to cast my final vote a few weeks ago and it was a difficult decision with the caliber of finalists we had.  Before the winner is revealed at the SuperNova Awards dinner during next week’s Constellation Connected Enterprise, I wanted to highlight the award finalists who shared fantastic stories of Digital Marketing excellence. 

 

 

Albertsons Companies - Albertsons Companies is one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States and in 2015 Albertsons' acquired Safeway and sought to learn from Safeway’s successful digital marketing strategy with the launch of “Just for U” mobile app and website to turn data into personalized offers for shoppers. Safeway’s 25 years of purchase data from their loyalty program provided the foundation to build algorithms to send and alert shoppers savings on the items they frequently purchased. Albertsons' marketing focused on the traditional circulars and a pilot was conducted to learn from Safeway's program. Utilizing Alation, a catalog built to search, query and collaborate on data to achieve faster, more accurate customer loyalty insights, allowed Safeway to better serve its customers by intricately and individually anticipating its customers buying behaviors, all through the help of collaborative analytics. Consequently, the marketing focus has shifted from primarily mass traditional print flyers toward a more multi-channel approach with personalized, digital advertising using the “Just for U” app and website.

 

 

In four days, Albertsons Loyalty team proved the value of personalized digital marketing, delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional revenue, and saw a time savings-based ROI of $30 for every $1 spent on Alation. The “Just for U” program is also rapidly being roll out across Albertsons’ full line of banner stores across the nation, to include all 2,200 stores under its umbrella.

 

 

eHarmony - eHarmony is widely recognized as a premiere relationship site with over 44 million members. Known as the scientific online dating service, it’s no surprise that eHarmony leverages data to design marketing campaigns and processes that are highly measurable. With a large budget devoted to television commercials, management wanted to find a way to utilize social media to improve targeting and re-targeting, something not possible with television. Kerianne Mellott, eHarmony’s director of social media, organized eHarmony's social media efforts with Hootsuite. Daily content was created, then scheduled and published throughout the various platforms. By reaching out to successful couples, the team activated client testimonials and wedding pictures in their digital campaigns. eHarmony used an organic and paid social media strategy to find new customers. If the content is related to a specific market, Mellott added targeting capabilities such as demographic, location, and interest to reach the most relevant audience. Based on initial performance and moderating ads, she then put promotional dollars behind various Twitter and Facebook posts. As metrics tracking was a key factor to demonstrate success eHarmony utilized Hootsuite as the publishing, scheduling, app directory and campaign performance tool.

 

Due to the social media transformation’s success, the team has now expanded under Mellot to include Twitter and Facebook channels for eHarmony Canada, eHarmony Español to reach the Hispanic market, and sister site, Compatible Partners. In addition, Mellott’s team also offers overall guidance for other offices in London, UK, and Sydney, Australia. They share content, campaign ideas, and best practices to adopt in their local markets.

 

 

Royal Philips - Royal Phillips produces products in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics. The consumer health and home care division has been a technology disruptor of “smart devices” as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) advancements. The problem that faced Philips was how to harness the hundreds of thousands of customer contacts across multiple products and touchpoints to redesign their campaign and lead management process. Then Royal Philips’ Global Vice President of Digital Blake Cahill created and launched the “Digital @ Scale” initiative, an internal strategy to transform B2B digital marketing across global business units and generate better qualified leads. They looked to the Oracle Marketing Cloud (Eloqua) as their technology platform to facilitate the transformation.

 

The Digital @ Scale initiative has since been implemented across 17 global markets in 60 countries. Cahill has led his global team to generate a significant impact on the organization, including increased revenue, pipeline, and efficiencies across all of Royal Philips’ markets and business groups. 

 

Seven Feathers Casino Resort - Seven Feathers Casino Resort located in Canyonville, Oregon is owned and operated by the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe. The resort’s foundation has donated $14 million to local charities and funds a full-service medical clinic for Tribal members, resort employees and their families. Due to the resort’s remote location, they utilize creative marketing promotions to attract guests. The success of these promotions is critical to the viability and future growth of the resort, which in turn sustains the local community.  In the past, the resort and the broader casino industry, has traditionally communicated with local guests through direct mail. Seven Feathers wanted to experiment with digital campaigns but recognized that both their customers and employees were not accustomed to digital offers. The resort turned to OfferCraft, a gamification platform to assist in the effort. OfferCraft makes digital incentives more fun and effective by adding game dynamics into everyday communication pieces such as emails, events social media, digital signage, etc. Seven Feathers used the platform to translate direct mail promotions into bite-sized games with personalized, interactive rewards. In a few short months, the resort’s customers not only embraced the digital offers but started to look forward to receiving them. Free game promotions posted on Facebook (not ads) has also helped to quintuple the resort’s reach organically. In addition to the external marketing benefits, the resort also utilized the gamification program internally to motivate and engage staff.  

 

Seven Feathers has been able to transform a mainly un-digital customer base to embrace digital offers by making it fun and engaging. 

 

Please join me in extending a well-deserved congratulations to finalists Albertsons, eHarmony, Royal Phillips, and Seven Feathers Casino Resort!  I hope that you will join us at Constellation Connected Enterprise with an all-star lineup of speakers including Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, Security and Privacy Luminary Doc Searles, Best Selling Authors Whitney Johnson, Dan Heath and more.  Visit the Constellation Connected Enterprise website here.