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How to use customer data platforms to host next-level events

Last updated: November 26, 2024

2025 is the year of in-person events. This year, media companies from The Atlantic to Payload are using them to connect with their audiences in a more authentic, personal setting. 

But events don’t just give your audience the warm fuzzies. Done well, they can help media companies replace revenue that they’re losing from traditional models like social media, advertising, and search. 

Case in point: Since launching events in 2006, The Atlantic now runs more than 125 events per year, and events now make up 20 percent of their revenue. 

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But expanding your events strategy isn’t as easy as, say, switching on some paid ads. 

Throwing any event requires considerable planning, programming and cross-team coordination. Creating an event that serves your audience and drives revenue for your brand? Even harder. 

Audience data makes this task easier by telling you how to create experiences your audience will love. But if your audience data is siloed across channels, you’re not going to have the information you need to do it. 

A CDP can help you eliminate data silos and give you a clearer picture of how everyone is interacting with you across channels. Besides streamlining planning, this also leads to improved engagement, revenue and ROI. 

Read on to learn what a CDP is, how they help you create more curated and personalized experiences, and how CDPs can help you host events to remember. 

What is a customer data platform (CDP)? 

If you’re just evaluating your MarTech options, all the different platforms and abbreviations can start to blend together. So what separates CDPs from other solutions like CRMs or DMPs? 

In simple terms, a CDP is packaged software that eliminates data silos by taking in user data from every marketing channel, storing it, and making it accessible to everyone in your organization.

This gives you a single view of each person that interacts with you, regardless of what platforms they’re using. For example: Say that Robert is looking at website content about data management and clicking links about data privacy in your newsletter. 

Without a CDP, your editorial team would know Robert was reading about data management, and your email person would know that Robert liked reading about data privacy. 

With a CDP, you can see Robert’s full engagement history all in one place. And as an event producer, you can add him to relevant marketing segments, then tailor your pre-event marketing to his interests more easily (e.g., include the sessions about data privacy and management at the top of your emails). 

And as he continues to engage with you across channels, you get even more insights that you can use to further improve his experience, which increases his lifetime value and gives you valuable revenue. 

Best of all, CDPs make it easier to do this at scale.

How a CDP can help you host more successful and profitable events in 2025

Streamline your event marketing by creating narrower marketing segments 

Say that you’re running multiple events per year, each with different target audiences. Without a streamlined way to segment your contacts, your promotional strategy will be disjointed and ineffective.

This results in one of two extremes: Either you’ll spam your entire audience with invitations that are only relevant for a small percentage of them. Or you miss opportunities to reach individuals to events that, according to your data, they’re likely to register and pay for. 

But with a CDP, you can isolate each individual’s demographics, interests and purchases more quickly — and from there, you can add them to relevant marketing segments. 

Better yet, in Omeda’s Audience Builder database, you can mix and match more than 100+ of these filters to create hyper-specific marketing segments.

So instead of sending an email to all the “19-to-35-year-olds” in your list, you can target  “19-to-35-year-olds in marketing positions that have opened an email in the last 60 days, but haven’t subscribed to our magazine yet.” 

Once you’ve identified your key segments, you can focus your resources only on people that are likely to register  — and save your bandwidth for planning the rest of your event. 

Use data to improve your attendee experience 

The more you know about your attendees, the more you can design your registration, marketing and event programming to their needs. But if you’re limiting yourself to the post-event survey that only 20% of your audience fills out, you’re missing valuable opportunities to improve your attendee experience — and get more sign-ups and sales going forward. 

But with a CDP like Omeda’s, you can see how attendees are engaging with every aspect of your event, from your registration landing pages to your emails, ads, and even every session and sponsorship booth. This way, you can see what’s working and what can be improved, long before you start planning your next event. And that’s a recipe for higher attendee satisfaction, engagement and loyalty. 

Personalize event programming to drive repeat registrations

If you want your attendees to keep coming back to your events, you can’t just appeal to the masses and hope everyone’s buying what you’re selling. Your program needs to appeal to each individual within your audience.

But if you don’t have a complete view of each attendee, you can’t really personalize your program to each individual person’s needs.  

Customer data platforms ensure that you’re getting the most complete, current view of each person in your audience. Not only are you getting their demographic info, but their website browsing history, past purchase history, content downloads, previous event attendance, engagement with ads, etc. — all in one place. 

With those insights, you can personalize sessions, sponsorships, packages, etc., to each attendee’s needs more easily — and give them an experience to remember. 

Attract more lucrative event sponsorships 

Data is the most valuable currency for sponsors now — and the organizers that provide the most accurate, predictive insights on their audience are the ones that will attract the most sponsors. 

CDPs like Omeda creates a complete, current record of how each attendee has engaged with the host across every channel, from the event itself to email, website, and ads. 

Sponsors get a 360-degree view on attendee preferences, demographics, and their engagement metrics for every sponsored ad, session and piece of content. So they can reach out to leads more quickly and drive more ROI from the event. 

Besides increasing their ROI from participating in your event, they’re also more likely to come back in the future. 

Multiply that over enough sponsors and you can start charging more for sponsorship packages (all of which you can use to strengthen your event programming, attract better speakers and get even more attendees!).

Improve post-event outreach with lead scoring 

CDPs like Omeda come with lead scoring tools that help you identify high-value attendees based on their engagement during the event (e.g., session participation, booth visits), as well as your emails, newsletters, ads, and other channels. 

This allows for more strategic follow-up, improving the chances of converting leads into paying customers or repeat attendees. Better yet, you can segment your audience based on their level of interest, then use it to sell more contextual, lucrative sponsorships for your next event. 

Keep your attendee data safe 

As we’ve alluded to (a lot) through this post, events produce a lot of data across a lot of different platforms. And with cybercrime and data privacy regulations on the rise, it’s more important than ever to keep that data safe. 

That means collecting only the most relevant, necessary information from each individual, ensuring that someone’s deletion request is honored across all of your platforms, and quickly removing people from email and marketing communications upon request.    

A CDP makes it easier to address all three of these needs. CDPs keep all of your customer data in one place, so if you delete or modify someone’s record, the changes apply to every marketing channel. (Without a CDP, someone might unsubscribe from the marketing newsletters you send from your ESP, but still get automated event invitations and reminders from your event software, for instance.)  

A centralized model also makes it easier to restrict access to personally identifiable information and segment your audience by consent status. This goes a long way toward keeping your data safe and earning the trust of your audience. 

Get more event registrations and conversions with cross-channel campaign orchestration

Omeda allows media companies to design and execute personalized marketing campaigns across multiple channels — email, social media, web and even SMS. This ensures cohesive promotion and engagement, increasing event visibility and registrations.

Struggling with siloed event data, complicated workflows, and declining audience engagement? What if you could unify your attendee data and use it to engage and convert your audience with less effort? Discover how Omeda’s integrated Audience Data Platform helps teams like yours use their subscriber data to strengthen their media businesses. 

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