Speaker: Adam Sarner

Principal Research Analyst, Gartner
 
Adam Sarner is an analyst in Gartner Research. Mr. Sarner is responsible for Gartner's coverage on CRM, campaign management, e-marketing and e-commerce strategy and technology.
 

Read full biography on Gartner.com 
 

Multichannel campaign management will prove to be the key to customer interaction orchestration for acquiring, retaining and improving customer relationships. Companies will have an opportunity to increase customer profitability and revenue by understanding what customers will want when they want it. Fueling this new face includes investments in e-marketing functionality, such as contextual marketing, addressable branding, community marketing and transactional marketing, that will uncover and deliver relevancy in "customer-aware" channels to create competitive advantage. Customer response to one-channel, outbound mass marketing will continue to diminish.

 
 

In five years, the biggest influence on all customer purchases will be their virtual experience. Companies will respond by spending more money trying to shape this experience than money spent offline. Web 2.0 signaled a "Vday" shift of control from company to customer, where powerful virtual worlds, social networking and communities proliferate. While traditional wisdom has focused on customer identification for one-to-one targeted marketing campaigns, cross-selling and so on, the reality of multiple anonymous personas (such as Second Life and World of Warcraft), blogs, online communities (such as YouTube and Digg) and the sheer power of their unstoppable influence means every customer will have an alter-ego driving your relationship with them. Discovering customers’ true identities will be impossible and irrelevant. Markets will shift toward consumer applications, eventually arming customers with automated artificial intelligent self-learning "personabots" seeking out customers’ needs and wants 24/7. Companies will need brand new skills and techniques to engage. This presentation will introduce these disruptive threats to your organization’s continuous relationship with customers, and present the critical steps you should take today to meet those challenges.

 
 

This Magic Quadrant (MQ) session will provide the opportunity for a discussion into the key vendors within the campaign management market and provide insight into the evaluation criteria and differentiators between the vendors. Strengths and cautions will be discussed for both leading campaign management vendors and emerging niche players.

 
 

Join Gartner and 1to1 Media as we acknowledge the Customer Award winners and present the 2008 User’s Choice Award winner for excellence in delivering the customer experience.

 
 

Many customers go through similar buying processes when making purchases. Mass adoption of the Web channel among customers has shifted a typical buying process of need/want recognition, information search, evaluation and purchase from an offline to an increasingly online activity. Within each stage of the buying process, community-enablement technologies have an opportunity to improve the customer experience and influence the customer through all stages toward a purchase.

 
 

In 10 years, the largest influence on all customer purchases will be their virtual experience. Companies will spend more money online trying to shape this experience than offline. While traditional wisdom has focused on customer identification for one-to-one targeted marketing campaigns, cross-selling and so on, the reality of multiple anonymous personas (e.g., Second Life, World of Warcraft), blogs, online communities (e.g., YouTube and Digg) and the sheer power of their influence means that every customer will have an online persona driving your business relationship with that customer. Companies will need new skills and techniques to engage and remain relevant. This presentation introduces the most disruptive threats to your organization's continuous relationship with customers and present critical steps you should take today to meet those challenges.

 
 

Our surveys show that growing and retaining a profitable customer base at the top of the business agenda of CEOs and CIOs. But powerful social networking forces are leading customers to turn to their own communities for answers, pricing, etc.,. This undercuts projects to improve customer experience. We examine how businesses can use this trend to competitive advantage.