Calix Drives Omnichannel Marketing with Mailchimp Integration

Calix, Inc. has launched the seamless integration of email marketing platform Mailchimp with Calix Marketing Cloud. This is the first step in a journey to enable broadband service providers (BSPs) to adopt a simple model for planning and executing fully integrated omnichannel marketing campaigns.

These campaigns will be targeted with insights from rich behavioral data and executed through automation to create timely and relevant touchpoints that attract new subscribers as well as increase loyalty among existing subscribers.

Broadband service provider marketers can now access audience segments from Calix Marketing Cloud—which is purpose-built to help BSPs leverage subscriber data to grow revenue and build brand loyalty—directly in Mailchimp, eliminating the need for cumbersome, manual spreadsheet exports. These marketers can then execute automated and highly targeted campaigns against these audiences. Calix Marketing Cloud will also include a new dashboard that provides real-time visibility into campaign performance metrics, including open rates, click-throughs, unsubscribes, and bounce rates. As a result, marketers can easily understand the impact of each analytics-driven campaign and tie marketing campaign investments to revenue. This latest enhancement to the Revenue EDGE solution marks the first in a series of planned integrations, including a major Facebook integration scheduled for next quarter.

The journey to radically simplify processes for marketers begins with the comprehensive integration between Mailchimp and Calix Marketing Cloud, and will extend to other marketing and social media platforms so that BSPs can:

Automate marketing to deliver timely, relevant experiences: Combining data from Calix Marketing Cloud and Mailchimp enables marketers to automate and deploy tailored campaigns to enriched audience segments based on specific events and behaviors. For example, BSP marketers can identify subscribers exceeding their usage limits and send them automatically to Mailchimp for email activation while simultaneously delivering a Mobile Notification upgrade offer in the stunningly new and brandable CommandIQ® mobile app.

Adopt an omnichannel approach to reaching subscribers: In addition to unlocking the power of email automation, this integration will enable marketers to add more channels within the Mailchimp platform, such as social, digital ads, and landing pages, that can be activated to craft the perfect subscriber journey. Future releases with direct integrations to social channels such as Facebook will further amplify these capabilities.

Maximize return on investment (ROI): With more direct and focused social channel integrations on the horizon, marketers can continue to uncover actionable insights that increase campaign take rates and grow their business through acquisition, cross-sell, up-sell, and reduce churn.

Elevate marketing campaigns with actionable insights: A new campaign performance dashboard in Calix Marketing Cloud provides end-to-end, real-time visibility into key performance metrics such as open rates, click-throughs, unsubscribes, and bounce rates, as well as performance reporting for in-app mobile notifications, giving marketers the data and agility to optimize their marketing campaigns efficiently.

In a survey Calix conducted that included both customers and non-customers, Mailchimp ranked as the most popular email marketing software among respondents. As a leader in this space, Mailchimp provides a one-stop-shop for managing email, direct mail, website, and social campaigns.

“We use Mailchimp extensively for our email marketing, and this integration with Calix Marketing Cloud is a welcome enhancement that will simplify our ability to manage email lists and audience segments from one platform,” said Chris Armstrong, director, sales and marketing for CityWest, a BSP located in British Columbia. “As marketing becomes inherently more social and our subscribers increasingly more connected, we continue to look for new and innovative ways to deliver premium services. We are eager to build on our successes to date with Calix by integrating even more of our social channels with Calix Marketing Cloud in the near future.”

Calix Marketing Cloud is the only marketing platform purpose-built for the BSP marketer, using contextual, behavioral data alongside built-in intelligence and machine learning to simplify processes and generate hyper-focused segments and audiences. As a result, marketers can create relevant, targeted, event-triggered communications that excite subscribers. For example, Wisconsin-based service provider Norvado is leveraging Calix Marketing Cloud to better understand subscriber usage patterns to personalize offers—contributing to a 99 percent uptake of its premium Wi-Fi service.

Meanwhile, Nemont Telephone Cooperative in Montana tapped the advanced behavioral analytics of Calix Marketing Cloud to create a highly targeted campaign aimed at upgrading members to an optimal service tier, resulting in a year-over-year revenue increase of 65 percent.

“Today’s announcement marks the first of many integrations with marketing technologies that bring sophistication to broadband businesses of all sizes,” said Matt Collins, chief marketing officer at Calix. “Calix is committed to arming service providers with the tools they need to succeed against the consumer giants. By integrating Mailchimp data directly into Calix Marketing Cloud, marketers can enjoy all the benefits of intelligent automation while extending their marketing capabilities in an efficient, cost-effective manner. There has never been a more exciting time to be a marketer in the broadband industry—with deeper insights, marketers can uncover timely, relevant opportunities and craft campaigns across key channels designed to excite their subscribers and grow their value for generations to come. Our goal is to help our customers make their marketing so good it feels like a service. This launch is another big step in that direction.”

To help customers accelerate adoption and time to ROI, Calix has enhanced features of the Premier Customer Success Services offerings. These include best practices and guidance to help marketers take their campaigns to the next level and maximize subscriber engagement. Complementing these features are comprehensive updates to the Education Services curriculum for Revenue EDGE, which is a core pillar of the Success for All program available to all Calix customers.

Calix is the only organization that provides customers with EDGE Enablement resources that are ready-to-use, fully built marketing campaign assets, including email templates that will enable marketers using Mailchimp—arming them with new services, courses, and market activations. Marketers also benefit from direct-to-subscriber guided self-help, a new feature of EDGE Suites that enhances the subscriber experience and helps build trust and brand loyalty.