Case Studies

CFE Media Automated Its Personalization Efforts with Omeda's CDP

Project Background

Personalization is becoming table stakes for media publishers: Your readers expect to receive content recommendations, communications and offers that are relevant for their needs.

However, many publishers fall short of that goal. That’s not because they want to provide bland, one-size-fits-all content experiences. But in recent years, the proliferation of marketing channels has created exponentially more user data.

And that’s made it harder for publishers to achieve personalization at scale: When you have so much subscriber data spread across multiple marketing tools, it’s hard to even get a single view of each subscriber, much less figure out what else they need from you.

And even if you do have that single subscriber view, you need an increasing amount of tools to execute even any outreach campaigns, let alone one that’s personalized to each person’s interests.

By using an end-to-end audience management platform, you can reduce much of the complexity and data management needs that prevent you from personalizing your outreach — and really connecting with your audience.

In this case study, we’re highlighting CFE Media and Technology’s use of CDP data to scale and automate their personalization efforts.

About CFE Media and Technology

CFE Media and Technology provides engineers in manufacturing, commercial and industrial buildings, and manufacturing control systems with the knowledge they need to improve their operational efficiency. They publish Control Engineering, Consulting-Specifying Engineer, Oil & Gas Engineering, and Plant Engineering magazines and digital products for a global audience of 1.3M+ subscribers.

Goals

CFE Media partnered with Omeda to address a few separate, but related, challenges:

• Their audience engagement team needed an easy way to identify what topics each individual subscriber was most interested in hearing about.
• Then they needed to create a process for quickly reaching out to new subscribers and providing additional resources related to those topics.
• To free up more time for revenue-generating tasks, the CFE Media team needed to automate as much of this process as possible.

To address these needs, CFE Media used Omeda’s audience engagement suite to create an automated workflow that assigned new subscribers to specific topics of interest, then tailor their communications to those topics of interest.

Process: The Omeda Solution

Using Omeda’s Data Loader and Lead Gen Campaign functionalities, the CFE team assigned topics to subscribers based on first-party data they had collected from online forms, as well as behavioral data like page views, content downloads, etc.

They then personalized their communications to individual subscribers based on these unique topics of interest, using dynamic content to pull in the most relevant content for each individual recipient.

Here’s how they did it:

• The CFE team identified 30-plus “core” topics that were most important to their subscribers and customers. From there, they built a “Topic” question to add to a Dragon form subscriber profile.
• Using Omeda’s CDP and Audience Search database, the CFE team then built audience queries to identify subscribers that were interested in those topics. To determine each subscriber’s  topics of  “interest”, they used demographic information collected on subscription forms, CDP data associated with eBook downloads and webcast registrations, as well as website browsing data pulled from Omeda’s website analytics solution.
• Once the 30-plus queries were built, the CFE team used Data Loader to assign the topic flags to their entire database. Then, with their Client Success Manager’s help, they built a nightly Lead Generation job that selected anyone who had qualified for the queries within the last 24 hours, then assigned them to the appropriate topics. This process also handled exceptions where a subscriber checked or unchecked the categories on their Dragon form subscriber profile — and the subscriber’s input superseded any automated topical assignments.
• CFE then used Odyssey, Omeda’s marketing automation solution, to build a welcome/engagement email series. These emails had dynamic content that was shown based on their specific topical affinity, providing content that corresponded with those topics. For example, if CFE sent an email promoting their upcoming webcasts and the subscriber was interested in Artificial Intelligence and Motors & Drives, that person would see webcasts on those two topics in the email, whereas someone interested in other topics would see different webcasts in their message.

Success

CFE launched their topic assignment campaign in 2023, but their hyper-personalization and targeted communications are already generating more engagement. Emails for their welcome series, which include dynamic content, have seen a 20% higher CTR than their previous, less targeted emails.

Watch the full session here: