SUCCESS STORIES | GSMA
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Maximising Mobile World Congress Barcelona ticket sales with smarter website personalisation
GSMA is a global organisation representing the mobile and connectivity industry, with major event brands including the Mobile World Congress series and M360 events. Having used Salesforce Marketing Cloud for marketing automation for several years, the business built on this foundation last year to include Marketing Cloud Personalisation for better web experiences.
Clevertouch supported GSMA on a website personalisation campaign for MWC Barcelona, helping the team deliver more relevant user journeys and improve event pass conversion.
As GSMA's flagship event, MWC Barcelona was the natural place to begin. The project gave the team an opportunity to test personalisation at scale on its biggest event, while building a model that could be adapted for future campaigns across the wider event portfolio.
The Challenge
GSMA wanted to use website personalisation to better support pass sales for MWC Barcelona by serving more relevant content to users already showing intent. Rather than targeting all visitors equally, the focus was on identifying people in the consideration phase and tailoring their on-site journey based on the type of pass they were most likely interested in.
The core objectives:
- Increase MWC Barcelona pass registrations
- Personalise journeys for users already showing meaningful interest
- Differentiate content and messaging by event pass type
- Test what content formats and message performed best
- Build a framework that could be reused for future events
As Chris Stradling, Senior Content Strategist at GSMA, explained:
"The key point was that there were people visiting the site that we knew we could be pushing further to making that purchase decision. The question was how we could best achieve this with Salesforce Marketing Cloud personalisation."
Our Approach
Clevertouch worked with GSMA to build a website personalisation campaign around two key pass types: the Leaders Conference Pass and the Exhibition Pass. Audience segments were created based on user behaviour ad content consumption, helping GSMA infer likely interest and serve more relevant messages and experiences at the right point in the journey.
The campaign combined personalised banners, richer content blocks and A/B testing of copy and titles to identify what would drive the strongest engagement and support conversion. The structure was designed not only to support MWC Barcelona, but also to create a repeatable model for future personalisation campaigns, with scope to scale further over time using AI-led recommendations powered by 'Einstein Recipes'.
This included:
- Audience segmentation based on pass intent and on-site behaviour
- Personalised journeys for Leaders and Exhibition pass audiences
- A/B testing of messaging, copy and content formats
- Fast-turnaround campaign support close to the event date
- A scalable framework for future event personalisation
"The availability and flexibility of the team was really good and created a strong trust and reliability... we felt we had expert service, and that's why we want to continue working with Clevertouch"
Chris Stradling
Senior Content Strategist
The Results
The campaign helped GSMA improve engagement and support conversion more effectively at a critical point in the MWC Barcelona journey. Users who received personalised content engaged better than non-personalised users, giving the team confidence in the value of the approach and a strong basis for future optimisation.
The testing also delivered useful insight into what worked best. Richer content blocks outperformed simple banners on click-through rate, helping GSMA refine how it approaches personalisation across different stages of the campaign. The work also gave the team a stronger foundation for future testing, iteration and scale, including:
- Better engagement from personalised users versus non-personalised users
- More effective conversion rate optimisation
- Clearer insight into which content formats performed best
- Greater internal confidence in personalisation as a growth lever
Looking Ahead
Following the success of the Barcelona campaign, GSMA is now looking at how to scale personalisation across more events and more of the user journey, from awareness through to conversion.
Building on this momentum, the team is exploring tailored Marketing Cloud training to enable simpler personalisation activity to be managed in-house at greater scale. This will also form the foundation of dedicated training tracks for both developers and content managers, equipping GSMA's team to manage and evolve activity independently, while continuing to work with Clevertouch on more bespoke and strategic projects.