Optimizely
Optimizely Boosts its Online Event Registrations 1,000% with RingCentral Events
10x
the number of registrants since the company switched to RingCentral Events
40%+
engagement at their online Opticon events–from nearly 0% with previous tools
Hundreds
of attendee comments and questions received during each virtual event
We’re getting so much value from RingCentral Events–the ability to host bigger and more complex online events than ever, higher engagement from attendees than ever, and more qualified leads from virtual events than ever. We couldn’t be happier with this platform.
Sopiko Heldebro
Senior Director of Global Marketing Campaigns
The industry’s first operating system for marketers
Founded in 1994 as a CRM company, Optimizely innovated frequently over the years, adding new solutions to its marketing software suite. Eventually, the company became the world’s leading digital experience platform provider.
Then the company innovated again, creating an entirely new software category: an operating system for marketers. Today, that operating system–Optimizely One–gives marketers a one-stop shop to create, manage, test, optimize, and deliver content and campaigns. The company’s solutions have proven so effective that many of the world’s most successful businesses–including Toyota, PayPal, and Zoom–depend on Optimizely to enrich and grow their brands.
INDUSTRY
Software
HQ
New York City, NY
YEAR FOUNDED
1994
EMPLOYEES
1,600
An online event platform far from optimized
In-person events play a key role in Optimizely’s sales and marketing efforts. The company’s teams regularly exhibit and speak at marketing-industry conventions around the world as well host their own, Optimizely-sponsored live events.
Sopiko Heldebro, Senior Director of Global Marketing Campaigns, explains that for years the company has supplemented these in-person gatherings with webinars to draw additional leads, particularly from industries and regions of the world that the live events don’t reach.
But by 2020, Sopiko says, her global campaigns team found an unexpected challenge with their webinars. “We thought the COVID lockdowns would increase our webinar registrations and attendance, but we realized people were being bombarded with similar promotions, and they were probably developing webinar fatigue. Our registrations dropped off substantially.”
And although her team put in a lot of time manually creating the materials for each webinar, Sopiko explains that these online events generated essentially zero attendee engagement. “We realized our webinar platform just wasn’t designed to encourage real-time interactions, like a physical event. That’s when we started looking for a dedicated events platform.”
RingCentral Events had the functionality we needed to create a lively, engaging event where attendees could participate, ask questions, and help each other–and our team could learn more about the attendees, so we’d know how to follow up with them. The chat, the Q&A, the polling … we’re using all of these tools to create online events we simply couldn’t with our old webinar solution.
Sopiko Heldebro
Senior Director of Global Marketing Campaigns
RingCentral Events becomes their online-event operating system
With their previous webinar platform, Sopiko points out, her team could host only a simple, linear online event.
But with RingCentral Events, the team could now digitally recreate the experience of attending even one of Optimizely’s largest and most complex in-person gatherings: Opticon.
Once we had RingCentral Events, we knew that for the first time we could run our Test & Learn event completely online. And the platform lived up to its promise. The registration count was huge–upwards of 2,000, which is 10 times the typical 100 or 200 signups we had for our webinars before. The engagement was extremely high as well–something like 45% of attendees participated in some way.
Sopiko Heldebro
Senior Director of Global Marketing Campaigns
Thrilled with the results of their first Test & Learn hosted on RingCentral Events, Sopiko’s team hosted the next one, a few months later, the same way. As she explains, the results were equally impressive: more than 1,500 signups, 40%+ engagement, and hundreds of comments posted in real-time by attendees during various sessions.
In fact, Sopiko adds, those hundreds of comments represent some of the most valuable business intelligence Optimizely has ever received from an online event.
“People don’t want to fill out a long survey form after an event. Besides, we find their feedback more valuable when they leave it in real-time, which is why we’re so happy to see attendees adding comments and questions in the chat during a session. That lets us know what they’re interested in and how to keep making these events more valuable for them.”
In short, Optimizely’s global marketing campaigns team had found its new operating system for online events.
Optimizing workflows further with a Marketo integration
A key benefit of RingCentral Events for Optimizely’s sales team, Sopiko explains, is that by asking attendees specific questions during these events, the team can classify prospects into the various lead categories–tier one, tier two, etc.–and the sales reps can follow up accordingly.
What makes this process even more efficient and productive, she notes, is that her team uses the RingCentral integration for Marketo.
The RingCentral Marketo integration lets us sync our registrant data into RingCentral Events and then right back into Marketo. That makes it easy to create leads for our sales reps, add relevant data to those lead forms based on what we learn about an attendee during an event, and help our reps create personalized follow-ups after the event ends.
Sopiko Heldebro
Senior Director of Global Marketing Campaigns
Another workflow efficiency RingCentral Events has enabled, Sopiko explains, is the ability to quickly stand up new virtual events using the platform.
“The platform is very easy to use, both for our internal team creating the events and for our attendees,” she says. “With the templates we create for one event, we can basically cut and paste to set up the next one.”
Unlike with our old webinar tool, with RingCentral we really don’t have to do a lot of legwork on the day of the event. We can just enjoy the interactions with our attendees.
Sopiko Heldebro
Senior Director of Global Marketing Campaigns
Next up for Optimizely: hybrid events
As Sopiko points out, her team’s previous webinar platform limited their ability to create a true hybrid event; the solution couldn’t enable a digital experience with a main stage area, breakout rooms, and other self-guided options to mimic the full experience of attending a live event.
But with RingCentral Events, Sopiko’s team will soon host their first-ever online component to match the company’s massive multi-location physical event, Opticon.
“Our upcoming event will take place simultaneously in three different locations around the world, and the fourth location will be online – and that’s possible only because we now have RingCentral Events.”
As pleased as we are with the capabilities of RingCentral Events, I’m even happier with the support we’ve gotten from the RingCentral team. They’ve been so responsive and helpful every time we’ve had questions or requests. There are a lot of great tools out there, but what’s more important to me is knowing the solution we choose comes with a team that cares about our success. With RingCentral, I know we’ve found that.
Sopiko Heldebro
Senior Director of Global Marketing Campaigns