How Matt Downing and Endeavor Business Media Reactivated 500,000 Audience Members with Omeda
Note: Endeavor’s reactivation program won the Best Marketing Automation Program award at our 2024 Omeda Idea Exchange conference (learn more about the rest of our award winning campaigns here!). This case study was adapted from their presentation at OX. Prefer video? Scroll down to watch the presentation!
Managing 10M+ audience members is hard enough. Keeping them invested and subscribed long-term — without overworking your team — is even harder.
Matt Downing, Associate Director of Digital Engagement of Endeavor Business Media, knows this challenge all too well. At Endeavor, he and his team are responsible for managing 13 million audience members across 85+ brands, each with their own specific needs, interests and knowledge levels.
The Endeavor team relies on automation to engage with their 10M+ audience members while maintaining time for more strategic work.
“We’ve worked hard at Endeavor to fully automate as many campaigns as possible,” Matt Downing, Endeavor’s Associate Director of Audience Development, said. “That way my team isn’t consumed with random and one-off promotions. Having as much as possible automated allows a team to focus on bigger priority tasks and higher initiatives like onboarding emails and paid campaigns. It also allows the team to dig deeper into performance metrics.”
But reaching audience members is one thing. Giving each one the exact content they need to re-engage is another thing entirely.
So when they were designing their recent re-engagement campaign, Downing needed a way to curate content for millions of audience members without requiring extra manual work from his team.
The solution: By combining Omeda’s marketing automation solution and content recommendations engine, they created a re-engagement campaign that automatically gave each recipient content that was personalized based on their previous browsing and engagement history.
Below, discover how Downing and his team used Omeda’s marketing automation solution and personalized content recommendations to reactivate over 500,000 lapsed subscribers, save $1 million in acquisition costs and free up time for creative work.
About Endeavor Business Media
Endeavor Business Media is one of America’s largest B2B media companies, with 13 million audience members across 90 brands and 40 conferences and exhibitions across diverse high-growth industries. This mix of trusted brands and the breadth and depth of their audiences gives Endeavor the foundation to deliver advertising, marketing and lead-generation services.
Problem
The Endeavor team noticed that too many of their audience members were dropping off. And they knew that with the right content, they could reconnect with those audience members and establish their credibility.
But manually personalizing content for millions of audience members would take even more time the Endeavor team didn’t have. So they needed to create a campaign that effectively curated content for millions of audience members, without requiring too much manual effort from their team.
“This is a campaign that we run across all of our brands at Endeavor, and when you’re trying to replicate across 80+ brands, you really have to put a lot of thought into how to make the campaign easy to execute,” Downing says.
Endeavor’s re-engagement campaign: combining automation and content recommendations to connect with and convert lapsed subscribers
The Endeavor team combined Omeda’s customer data platform, marketing automation solution, and content recommendations tool that didn’t just reach audience members, but connected each one with the best content and resources for their needs. Here’s how it looked:
1. Identify lapsed audience members with a single audience view.
First, the Endeavor team needed to identify at-risk audience members. Because Omeda’s CDP pulls in data from every channel, Endeavor could see how each of their audience members was interacting with their entire brand — not just email — in one search. This way, they could find the right audience with one search — and know they were reaching the right people with the right message at the right time.
2. Create an automated re-engagement campaign across email and their website.
Then, using Omeda’s email and marketing automation solution, the Endeavor team developed a series of emails and on-site personalizations that reintroduced audience members to their webinars, whitepapers, articles and newsletters, and offered up their most compelling assets.
The campaign consisted of three emails sent two weeks apart, along with multiple on-site personalizations prompting visitors to opt back into email communications.
3. Use content recommendations to automatically provide the most personalized content to each recipient.
In Downing’s words, this is where the magic happened. “But for us, the real magic happens in the dynamic content where we use it to make sure that we’re sending the right message to the right people.”
Until recently, the Endeavor team needed to manually update the content of each message, or switch links based on their audience segment’s needs. But now that they use Omeda’s content recommendations, each recipient gets content that’s personalized based on their individual browsing and engagement history.
Downing experimented with using Omeda’s website content recommendations on their website, but found better results in email.
“I’ve tested a few different ways to incorporate content recommendations from Omeda,” Downing says. “I started with exit personalizations and did some inline [personalizations], but we’re honestly seeing the most engagement with content recommendations in our emails, which is two emails in the series,” Downing adds.
Each of Endeavor’s 1M+ lapsed subscribers get the resources they need to re-engage — and the Endeavor team can stop manually uploading content to their campaigns.
“What’s great here is now with content recommendations in email, I can finally stop updating content and set it and forget it,” Downing said. “So I think content recommendations can be a real game changer when it comes to making sure more of our audiences are seeing the content we’re producing.”
Personalized recommendations also serve as a curation tool for Endeavor’s audience, saving them from parsing through Endeavor’s 85 brands of content.
“It’s a quick setup and like everyone here, our site has lots of content and that can be overwhelming to both new and returning visitors. So we’re using content recommendations to help cut through the noise and show audiences content they might be missing out on.”
Thinking about using content recommendations? Consider these pro tips from Downing:
- Templatize your content recs for team use: “With so many brands, it’s great to be able to quickly make templates in Odyssey in the designer and then share it with the team so they can easily replicate it,” Downing says.
- Curate your content recommendations with exclusion rules: Downing and his team can also use Omeda’s exclusion rules to prevent certain pages or articles from being recommended to recipients. “The other thing that I really enjoy is the exclusions. We use exclusions a lot to make sure we can manage everything easily. We’re excluding around page types, URL parameters, and even full URLs. So I’m already excited by the results I have, and I’ve already been thinking about where else we can plug in content recommendations to boost engagement.”
“But the fact that we can run fully automated, set it and forget it campaigns, using just Omeda’s functionality, might be the highlight of my year. The days of updating content libraries are hopefully behind us.”
4. Automatically manage deliverability and moderate sending cadence with campaign planning tools.
Automation is a life-saver when you’re managing a database of more than 10 million people. But mass-sending to millions of people is risky business: Maybe you forget to clean your list one month, or you accidentally send to the wrong list. Now you’ve got hundreds of thousands of annoyed audience members, and you’re much more likely to experience deliverability issues.
Sure, you could check in on your list daily or weekly. But that would defeat the purpose of automation, especially for a busy team managing such a large audience.
Fortunately, the Endeavor team could use Omeda’s campaign planning tools to manage their deliverability and moderate their sending cadence automatically. By setting fatigue and goal filters, they could filter out recipients that had already re-engaged, and temporarily pause sending to recipients displaying email fatigue.
So despite sending to millions of recipients, they could scale up or down based on each individual audience member’s response to previous messaging (and they could message millions of audience members without hurting their deliverability or annoying their recipients).
The team could use Omeda’s email and marketing automation solution to target custom audiences built in their CDP, design emails, schedule and adjust sends — all in one place.
They could also review opens, clicks and link performance for each email — as well as impressions and clicks for personalization — throughout the campaign. This way, the team could pulse check their campaign, then adjust messaging, swap content assets or change their targeting in real time.
Results
Pairing automation with personalization has already helped the Endeavor team reactivate more subscribers, while saving time for more strategic work.
“We’re already seeing really good results,” Downing says. “5% of the audience we’re sending to is engaging with the brand side again, and we’re seeing 1% higher click rates and 1% more of the audience hitting the goal than my previous content recommendation solution.”
“Plus again, with recommendations in Odyssey, I don’t have to jump back and forth between various vendor software to get everything set up and running.”
In 2023, the reactivation campaign helped keep 150K audience members on their active lists, and has since risen to over 500k reactivated audience members in 2024. This resulted in a savings of over $1 million in audience acquisition costs. Metrics aside, automating their reactivation efforts gave the Endeavor team more time to create new campaigns, develop new revenue sources and connect with their existing audience.
“We get a wealth of data on the campaigns using Omeda’s reporting, but we actually need that time to analyze,” he added. “Automating allows us that time. We also get to spend more time strategizing and coming up with solid plans. So when it’s time to launch a new campaign or discuss new tactics, we’re ready.”
Prefer video? Watch Matt Downing’s success story presentation at OX7 below!