How Questex improved event experiences by harnessing audience feedback

Note: Questex’s post-event NPS survey won Best Damn Idea 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 their presentation at OX7!

Media companies are turning to events to replace lost ad revenue. But there’s a disconnect between what event organizers provide and what attendees value, according to the Freeman Trends Report.

Audience feedback helps you close the gap and create experiences your audience will love. But what if your post-event survey is disjointed and clunky? What if you can’t collect the data you need to improve your attendees’ experiences — or get it to your event team quickly enough to make an impact?

Questex, a leading information and event services company focused on the experience economy, found themselves in this position in 2023. Their disjointed post-event survey process kept them from collecting feedback from their audience and making the improvements their audiences were asking for. But by combining Omeda’s integrated audience data platform with CredSpark’s interactive content offerings, they created a more targeted, successful survey that gave them the insights they needed to create better audience experiences.

See how they did it below:

About Questex

Questex is an information services company and buyer engagement platform with 80+ topic-curated newsletters, 12 trade shows, events, and a 100,000+ branding programs focusing on the hospitality, wellness, healthcare and life sciences and technology verticals.

Problem: Losing insights to a suboptimal survey workflow

Questex’s events are a cornerstone of its revenue and content strategy. In addition to 12 tradeshows, they also host expos, conferences, buyer events, and digital events in their preferred verticals for an audience of more than 10 million people.

In other words, Questex lives and dies by its event experience. But until recently, they didn’t have a streamlined, cohesive way to collect feedback from their event attendees. Some of their biggest challenges included:

Due to vendor limitations, the Questex team needed to split their survey into two separate forms — one form with a standard NPS survey and an additional survey with custom, event-specific questions. “Our previous survey tool only allowed 10 questions, where the first question was our net promoter score question, and our last card was a confirmation type message,” Josee Archer, Director of Digital Audience Development and Marketing at Questex, says.

“So we really were limited to eight questions in between that and for the event marketers that didn’t leave a lot of space, once you included our standard questions that were asked company-wide. So what they had to do was make their final card a continued survey, and then that brought them to a different survey tool and just the redirect.”When’s the last time you willingly clicked out a survey to finish it? Never? That’s what we thought. Besides hurting their response rates, the split form also created a data silo and created a clunky user experience, keeping the Questex team from getting and using the information they needed to improve their program.

Because their survey providers didn’t have reporting tools, the team needed to export, reconfigure and report their response data on Google Looker Studio, adding unnecessary time and effort to an already tedious process. “There weren’t a lot of reporting capabilities in the tool,” Archer says. “So we would export that data into Google Looker Studio. We created templates, but there was a lot of formatting and formulas that we had to create. So just not a great experience overall.”It took more than an hour for their event team to pull reports for their NPS surveys — all that after planning and executing an event. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Since they weren’t distributing surveys via their own email platform, Questex’s ability to survey their audience depended on their vendor’s sending reputation. If one of their vendors was having deliverability issues, Questex’s recipients wouldn’t receive their surveys at all. And since their vendor didn’t have deliverability monitoring, Questex couldn’t tell whether their surveys were hitting primary inboxes or being sent to spam.

Event registrants weren’t recognized as known users on Omeda, the tool Questex uses to build audience segments and send campaigns. So the Questex team would need to convert every registrant to known before they even started to market event offerings to them.

This didn’t just create busy work. This also kept them from getting the tangible, specific feedback they needed to improve their events, personalize content to attendees, and drive event revenue.

Keep it simple, stupid: Questex’s new and improved NPS survey process

Archer realized it was time to simplify. She and her team had several goals in mind for their new event follow-up process — saving time, improving the user experience, and learning more about their audience, to name a few.

“We wanted to save the team time,” Archer says. “The import process was also a problem, so anything we could do to make this more efficient was ideal. We also wanted to give them a seamless end user experience. We wanted to make it look and feel more like our brands and really help everyone get the questions answered that they wanted through the survey.”

Questex wanted to make it easier for attendees to provide meaningful feedback about their experiences — and for their own team to identify and action those items.

Beyond that, they wanted to ensure that every event registrant became a known audience member on Omeda, so they could continue engaging them with content, additional events and offers.

Another big priority: converting anonymous survey respondents to known audience members. Questex had an huge untapped opportunity to convert thousands of unknown survey respondents into known audience members and leads. From there, Questex would be able to serve each of those individuals more relevant content, drive better offers and create a new audience.

“We had 72,000 survey respondents to date,” Archer says. “We have a million data points and we got 19,000 of them last year alone. So it’s very important to us that we capture this data. Who doesn’t want 19,000 new known visitors on their sites?

How Questex combined Omeda + CredSpark to improve its NPS survey process

Questex had already been using Omeda’s customer data platform and marketing automation solution to create a single view of their audience members and analyze their website activity, then reach them with relevant emails and offers.

To simplify their survey workflow, they combined Omeda with CredSpark, a leading audience engagement platform that creates interactive surveys, polls and quizzes (learn how to engage your audience and grow your first-party data with the Omeda/CredSpark integration here).

This proved to be a gamechanger. “One of my favorite parts about this revamp was working with CredSpark,” Archer says.

This way, they could distribute interactive surveys in one email, and all responses would automatically flow back to their Omeda database — no manual work necessary. There, they could action the survey data for additional analysis and outreach.

Here’s how it worked:

1. Questex used CredSpark to create an post-event NPS survey template, which included company-wide questions to be used for each event.

With CredSpark, event marketers could also add custom questions to individual surveys directly within the tool. This way, they could ask their audience more customized, event-specific questions without linking to an additional survey. With CredSpark’s custom tags, they could serve different questions to attendees, speakers, sponsors, etc., allowing them to evaluate their event production process more holistically.

2. Questex embedded the survey onto their website. Besides creating a more cohesive, on-brand experience, they could also stop relying on outside providers to ensure their recipients were actually receiving their emails.

“We were able to match the colors and themes to that website to give the customer a really clean on-brand experience because CredSpark and Omeda are integrated together,” Archer says. “This also allowed us to take advantage of some other features as well.”

3. Questex also created a series of emails promoting the survey. To maximize responses, they embedded the first question directly into the email, then used Omeda’s drag and drop designer to customize the rest of the message.

From there, it was easy as hitting some buttons. “We built templates in Omeda’s marketing automation tool that allow our team to simply just grab that embed first question code and put it into the email template to allow us to easily send and execute those emails,” Archer says.

4. Using Omeda’s email and marketing automation solution, Questex created a campaign to promote their survey to event attendees.

Since Omeda’s email connects to its CDP, the Questex team could easily pull lists of event attendees, registrants, and other event behaviors directly from their database without needing to upload and clean lists from other sources. So they could target those event attendees more quickly and accurately than they could through piecemeal solutions.

The campaign consisted of two emails, with recipients getting a resend if they hadn’t responded to the first email in four days.

And when attendees click the email, they redirect to a website page with an Omeda script, making them a known audience member in the Questex database.

“There’s also, because of the Omeda and CredSpark integration, more known users,” Archer says. “The moment the person clicks on that email sent through Odyssey, they not only answer the question, but they also become a known user in our database because the website they land on, as I mentioned before, is one of Questex’s websites that have Lytic script already placed on the site. So they become a known user unless they have private browsing turned on.”

“Even better, once they answer an additional question, that data is also available in CredSpark. So now I not only have the data in there, but I also know who completed that survey, which is also really great.”

5. With Omeda’s deliverability monitoring and advanced reporting features, the Questex team can ensure that audiences are actually receiving their emails and determine which links, offers, and CTAs get the best responses. They can also download survey reports directly from CredSpark, so they can turn feedback into improvements right away.

“The reporting for CredSpark has everything we need in it in graphs and charts,” Archer says. “So we simply just have to click to download all charts button. And they have a PDF readily available to share with the market, so we can get event feedback much faster than the hour we were spending before for each event.”

The results: creating events to remember

This streamlined NPS process hasn’t just given Questex more survey responses. It’s also given them higher-quality feedback and audience data, which they can use to tailor their event programs, create more precise audience segments, and create experiences that everyone in their audience will love.

Highlights include:

Websites linked to Questex’s March events experienced a 175% increase in unknown-to-known website visitors compared to the previous month. (This made up 20% of all anonymous conversions for those site throughout 2023.)
In March 2024, Questex websites successfully converted 27,720 unknown users into known users — a 143% increase year over year.
805 respondents of a beauty event completed additional custom questions, a significant increase from the 387 collected through their multi-tool approach in 2023. Furthermore, this event witnessed a 25% rise in testimonials year over year.
One of Questex’s wellness events had 166% more respondents completing additional custom questions and 100% more testimonials year over year.