Success Story: How CFE Media Used Marketing Automation to Create Post-Event Value

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Hello everyone and welcome to Omeda, a success story webinar series. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Bill Selig. I’m a client success manager at Omeda, and I’m joined today by Rick Ellis, director of Audience Management at CFE Media and Technology. A couple housekeeping items before we start. This webinar is being recorded and the archive will be viewable on demand. An email will be sent out to all registrants when the on-demand archive is available. And secondly, we’ll have a, a live q and a at the end of the webinar. So please put any questions you have into the question pane in the GoTo toolbar, and we’ll try to answer as many as possible any questions we’re not able to get to during the live stream. We will respond to via email. Today we’re gonna to take a look at how CFE media used marketing automation to create post-event value. Rick is gonna review the original idea and goals CFE was hoping to achieve, outline how the Omeda marketing automation tool was leveraged to meet those goals and provide some insight on results. Finally, we’re gonna take a look at lessons learned and plans moving forward. So Rick, why don’t you start off by telling us what you wanted to accomplish with your post-event campaigns?

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Sure, I’d be happy to. And a little quick take on CFE media. We are content for engineers. That’s what CFE stands for, and our audience is primarily engineers and they love webcasts as do our sponsors. So we probably do 50 to 70. I think this year’s gonna be more like 70 webcasts every year on a variety of topics. And there are big hits. As with some topics are better than others, on and on some, we were looking for a way to increase registrants was one of our biggest goals of this marketing automation plan. We wanted to increase the actual number of registrants for the web webinar webcast. The other thing we wanted to do was to drive on demand views for both the webcast we were promoting, as well as other web webcasts we have.

(03:29):
And then we wanted to collect something similar to a net promoter score survey for our sponsor at the end of the webinar as well get some data for them on how they’re perceived in the market, if you will. So the plan was very straightforward. We identified three different segments of the audience. We had the attendees, we had the people that registered but didn’t show up that day. And then we had people who we’ve been promoting it to that are profile matches of the people they, these people should have attended. They would’ve benefited from it. In this case, this particular webinar was on motors and drives. So in this case, it was people that are interested in motors and drives within our subscriber file. The messaging was fairly simple after the, the, the webcast took place that was on its own, on its own promotions but then after the webcast was over, immediately afterwards they received an email that said, thank you for attending, and would you please take our survey?

(04:26):
We’ll give you an opportunity to win a $50 Amazon gift card. Again, this survey was a net promoter score type survey. And I’ll talk a little bit, well, I’ll just tell you now. We basically asked, has your opinion changed of this customer? How has, you know, how has the sponsor your opinion of the sponsor changed? And then we asked, are you more likely to do business with the sponsor based on this webinar and this content? So, two very short questions. Easy one the, that was the, the attendees that received that, the registered, but didn’t attend and received a message that said, we’re sorry, we missed you. We wish you could have joined us, but you didn’t. Here’s the link for the on-demand view. And then the profile matches got exactly the same thing. We would the same messaging, but they you know, that that group was the group that didn’t register.

(05:15):
So again, we’re sorry, we missed you. Now, here’s what the actual voyage looked like in the Odyssey platform. So the, it started with the audience. We had the three groups registered and attended. Again, the, the, if you registered and attended, you got the survey gizmo email, right, that I just showed. If you registered but didn’t attend, we’d send you on the, sorry, you couldn’t attend. And then if you went, you waited a couple of days, and if you had registered for the webcast, we sent you to the survey. If you hadn’t, we sent you a second email that wasn’t actually shown here, where we said, here’s a bunch of other webcasts you might like on motors and drives. The not registered, got that same string, but we wanted to be able to track them separately and see, so the not registered, sorry, we missed you.

(06:03):
And then the same exact thing, if they ended up registering for the webcast, we were promoting, they got the survey. And if they didn’t, then they got, here’s five or six other, actually, I think it was five different webcasts you could attend on similar topics. So we had very good results with this. We saw a 16% lift. We got 155 more registrations for an already good topic. And all of those came from obviously the people that hadn’t registered. So out of that new, another reminder out of that new one, they got 155 registrations out of that. The on-demand views was also a good success. They increased by 54%. So those people that had registered a lot of those also went and viewed the webcast based on this little prompt. So and the, the recommended webcast that we had listed combined 50 different registrations on those.

(06:57):
Not bad there as well. So we were very pleased with that. And we had 75 respondents to our net promoter score survey. And it, it was overwhelmingly positive, which I always love to give to sponsors after a webcast. So, wow, this is going quick. I did drink coffee today, guys. So this is going quick, bill. We’ll, we, if we’ve got questions, but, so here were the lessons learned. One on the Odyssey platform, I’m gonna go back a bit on the Odyssey platform, these little naming conventions. Make sure you don’t name the same thing or name your emails the same thing. So for example, NPS survey Gizmo that we put in there, that was the name on all of those emails in the summary reports. So you had to kind of match up the quantities, name them all different, you guys, they’re using the tool probably already know that.

(07:48):
But this was what we, we learned that, looking at that. The, the other thing was we wanted to do this as kind of a test. So we wanted to see how this would work so we could sponsor it for other for, you know, we could sell it as a sponsorship and have our sales team out there, say, in upsell and, you know, the, the, the pitch would be, and afterwards, we’ll get you more respondents and more on-demand views, more registrants, and we’ll get you this net promoter score information for the low low price of X as an additional add-on. So the, the lessons learned was that naming convention for the emails so you don’t get confused in your reporting reporting. And then we learned and we were able to go out and talk to the, our sponsors about it.

(08:32):
And not only these sponsors, but potential upcoming sponsors. So we’re hopeful we’re gonna be selling more of these in this year. Moving forward. A couple other things that we’ve got we’ve started to adjust, number one, the selling as I mentioned, but we’ve started to adjust where sometimes, depending on the number of emails that are going out, I don’t know if you guys have all heard about this email fatigue thing, right? So what we’ve started doing is for that group of people that where the profile matches, if it’s a particularly heavy day or week, we’ll only send those to the people that actually opened the initial emails. Now I know Apple iOS and the Opens, but we would just send it. So we’ve been sending that on subsequent ones to a smaller group of people in some cases where it’s only the people that engaged with the content, even if it was just an open. So anyway, those are the things we learned from this program. The sponsors were very pleased. They loved that net promoter score information. And like I said, we’re rolling this thing out moving forward for sales to sell. So I’m gonna go to the thank you screen and then I guess toss it to Bill. Wow, that went quick, my friend.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
That was, yeah. Very nice. Yeah, you know, I had a couple questions. With these you know, mark multi-asset campaigns, do you struggle getting all of the materials from the sponsor, you know, prior to the campaign? And do you have any recommendations on how to you know, ensure you have all of the, the materials for, you know, I think you had a, a almost a dozen emails out there and, you know, you throw in a personalization or something like that, you know, how do, how do you get all that material before the, the campaign?

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question and, and I don’t have any magic bullet for that or silver bullet for that. But you know, just relentless reminding of the, the materials that you need. In this case, all of the materials saved for a logo were, you know, easy for us to acquire. And so in this particular case, but we work on other marketing automation programs for customer services programs or things along those lines. And it is a constant struggle to get all the materials in time. Sometimes we would prefer to do an odyssey, but because we’re waiting for a lag time for a customer or whatever, we’ll just send them manually if need be, instead of as a nice marketing automation campaign. The other option, of course, is to put in a placeholder. So you’ve got email one ready, but email two, you’re wait, still waiting on those materials. Then sometimes you can put in a placeholder for that, but you gotta make sure you don’t forget and send out that placeholder email. Yes. But yeah, it is a constant challenge for our services team and our services managers to get that materials and track ’em down. Some customers are better than others, probably the same with most of the people on this line as well.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
Right, right. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So some questions from our listeners.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
Rick, did you use an Omeda form for the webcast registration or an outside platform?

Speaker 2 (11:30):
We use global Meet. So it is an outside platform, but we are a ping that data into Omeda. So if you register for our webinar it goes into Omeda we know you are a registrant, and the, the queries that were built, you might have seen that one back here on this Odyssey. See if I can quickly go back to it. Those queries for the registered on demand and those filters, that was, those are on queue audience builder queries.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
Okay, nice, nice. So real time integration. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very nice. And how many promo emails are you sending per webinar? Is it a set cadence?

Speaker 2 (12:10):
It varies. Oh, how many per webinar? Okay. Yeah. So at the beginning of an email or the beginning of a webinar, we typically send out three promotional emails, including the day of. So the third one is the day of email, and we find we get a lot of registrants on that day of, in this particular campaign, obviously it was kind of a one or two email series, depending on the, which group you were in for the post email. I think that answered your question.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yeah, I think so too. And let’s see, what’s the best practice for number of emails and how long between emails for a journey? So I guess specifically on, on this voyage, you know, what, how did you determine the the, the wait times, for example?

Speaker 2 (12:54):
Yeah, I, it, it’s a great question. We, we really, this was a test. This was our first test, and we thought we wanted to give them just a couple of days. We didn’t wanna give them, you know, the, the first one, the, the, the survey for the registrants, that went out immediately. But the others, we, we wanted to send ’em the, the first email initially, but then give ’em a couple of days to actually go and attend the webinar. So we decided on two days. We thought about going longer, but I said, no, let’s just do two days and, and give them you know, if, if once that timeframe is up, you could easily make it longer. But I think you’ve got their attention. They’re either gonna do it then or they’re just not going to do it. So that was the, the i, the reasons and the logic behind the two day wait.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
Nice. Okay. And are your webcast tied of continuing ed continuing education credits?

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Love this question. ’cause It gives me a chance to, to puff out my chest a little bit. Yeah, we are accredited. Most of our webinars, not all, but most of our webinars are accredited. And because we’re an engineering audience, that means a lot because a lot of these guys need PDs and CEUs to keep their certifications. So it’s, it’s, it’s something we are very proud of. Took some effort to get accredited at first, and we gotta maintain some standards, but it’s well worth it.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
Very nice. Okay. And what is the criteria behind the the lookalike group? So that third group we talked about,

Speaker 2 (14:23):
So it varies based on the content of the webinar, but in this case it was people that like motors and drives. So what I typically do is I’ll use, you know, you got the little checkbox that you would buy or specify motors and drives, but we also track a lot of data on the backend as far as taxonomies that people are interested in. So if you’ve ever downloaded a ebook or attended another webinar on motors and drives, or the topic in question is what I’ll say, then you were part of the lookalike group as well as if you visited our website and have been looking at data that matches our taxonomies that match this topic. Again, in this case, motors and drives, which is one of our most powerful and largest audiences in most cases.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
Okay. Yeah. So the a a lot of work on the, on the back end, making sure you’re, you’re tagging your content and your download assets and things like that just to help you identify those lookalike audiences.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, when I moved over to Omeda, I wanted to make sure we were having as much data as possible on our subscribers. We laid a lot of the groundwork for it. So yeah, we, we feel pretty good about the data we’re collecting and we really leverage it with all of our promotions as far as bringing all of that data in instead of, you know, just the checkbox. We’ve got those other layers of data that we can bring in. And I think it, I think it benefits certainly benefits us, but hopefully it benefits the subscribers as well because we’re targeted, you know, to things they like and things they’ve shown interest in in the past. As you and I have discussed, bill, it’s always interesting, you know, once, once you find out somebody likes something, you’re gonna send them that stuff forever. But at the same time, you wanna keep track of other things they’re interested in as well. So, you know, we absolutely, laying that groundwork, as you said, and having all that data available to use in promotions is key. And, and we use it, I think, pretty effectively.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. and is this a follow-up campaign? Is it regular practice now for, for all your webinars?

Speaker 2 (16:24):
We wanted, I wanna get money for this because it is another email. We’ve done several other tests and we do it on for some of our favorite sponsors, if you will. But we, we wanna sell it. We wanna get money out of this, so we’re gonna end up doing it only on cases where it is where we’ve had people pay us for it. ’cause Again, as much as I love it and it worked well, it’s another email. Right. And again, when we’re also promoting our 70 webcasts a year, so we, I mean, there are weeks when it is the same audience is being hit a couple of times. Maybe you guys are in the same boat. And, and we’re always looking for ways to combine promotions or things along those lines as well.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
Right, right. Okay. And you know, as you’re you know, selling these campaigns do you intend to have different pricing structures and, and say, Hey, this is a template one at this cost, this is template two might have a diff you know, a couple additional features, a, a, a personalization or maybe a another follow up email or something like that where you have very templatized price pricing structure?

Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah, right now it’s fairly limited. We are starting to include the personalization in there as well to drive, you know, even more, you know anonymous traffic if you will. So we are working on that right now. This is the template we wanna sell. We’ve got a pre-package that we we’re also trying to sell as well. And so there’s the standards that we sell all the time. It’s three emails, lots of branding. You know, this stuff goes out in our newsletters as well, that these, these webinars are promoted there as well. But really this is the, we’ve got this template and one other that involves the personalization, but as we go on and as we respond to customer requests, we’ll probably tweak it as we go a little bit. I wouldn’t personally, unless we had something really cool like an asset that our sponsor could provide, I, I wouldn’t see this changing too much, but I would think it would be you know, one of the things I’ve talked about is it would be great if the sponsor had another PDF or something that we could, you know, send, send the folks as well and say, here’s a bonus for attending, or maybe even gate or what have you.

(18:36):
So there’s options there, but that was a long answer to your question person out there. But right now it’s basically two set templates.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Okay. Very nice. And are your sponsored webinars also accredited?

Speaker 2 (18:54):
It depends. I’m gonna say most of the time they gotta meet specific, again, there’s specific accreditation criteria. Like you can’t sell too much, you can’t, there’s, there’s stuff that I’m not gonna remember, but our our webcast manager, Emily, is always on top of is, you know, you you can’t have too much cell speak and there can be, the logo can only be used so much and you gotta, part of it is you, the the attendees have to take a test afterwards and pass the test. That’s a big part of it. I guess I should have mentioned that. Yeah. Accreditation, so,

Speaker 1 (19:25):
Okay. But

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Engineers love to take tests, so it’s good.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, absolutely. Give ’em what they want, right.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
Exactly. in the pre-promotion of the webinars do you send the emails to all of your subscribers that are opted into your webinars or only the target audience of the sponsor? So do you, do you target by that interest, or do you target initially anyone who, who could get a, a webinar?

Speaker 2 (19:54):
So it’s a great question. Here. Here’s, we, we’ve done it both ways. On the targeting side, I don’t, I would never send it out to just everybody. I wouldn’t just shotgun blast my whole audience. It’s always targeted, but there have been times where I have used if you like webcasts rather than if you like this topic and they both work well. So in other words, from, I mentioned the kind of the three groups we use of people that checked the box that said they liked this topic. And that usually works. Sometimes there’s a peripheral topic, but there’s the people that have checked the box, the people that have interacted with that taxonomy either in an ebook or a webinar. And then there’s the people that have visited our website. And of course there’s a lot of overlap in those three groups, right? There’s a lot of people that meet all three of that criteria.

(20:42):
But there have definitely been times in the past where I have done anybody, you like webcasts on control engineering, I’m gonna send you this. And my rationale was always that maybe it’s not your favorite topic, motors and drives, but you like the one you attended on, on whatever topic you attended, and you’re gonna forward it over to your buddy next door that does like motors and drives. So I’ve used both, they both work pretty well. More and more I’m trying to send less emails whenever possible, right? So I do keep that in mind. Now the, the good news is, you know, we’ve got a group, a core group of people that attend all of our webinars, but we’re not talking adding another 30,000 people by including the full group of webinars webinar. So I hope that answer made sense and answered your question.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
Absolutely. Okay. Let’s see. Meta reports are pointing to virtual event webinar fatigue, but it sounds like you’re seeing the opposite. Is it, do you think that’s tied to the credits you’re able to offer?

Speaker 2 (21:43):
I think it’s part of it but I also think for engineers in particular, we’ve got a, it’s a unique audience, guys, and, and I know there’s you know, we, we’ve got a lot of smart companies that reach this audience, but for engineers in particular, they need to stay up on things. And you sit at your desk, the convenience of it. I think we’ve seen good attendees, you know, attendance is starting to come back to in-person events, but we have not seen a huge drop off. We started to get concerned maybe for a heartbeat, but then we’ve had some webinars that have just crushed it on some of these things recently as well in terms of number of registrants. So I think that the accreditation helps us tremendously, but we have not seen any giant significant and sustained reduction in registrants over what, you know, for the virtual event fatigue.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Nice. Okay. Okay. This yeah, and this next question I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask two different ways. I’m gonna answer one, and then Rick, if, if you could answer the, the second one are you able to ab split test the content along the voyage and the, the functionality and the capability Yes. Is available within the Odyssey marketing automation tool. So that’s, that was my question. And Rick, to you do you foresee adding any sort of AB testing for content or subject lines or anything like that?

Speaker 2 (23:11):
I am not opposed to it at all. I’d want to think about it a little bit. I think that, sorry, we missed you. The not registered group could probably use some AB testing Right. To see if we can do something there. But we have not done it as of yet. But Bill, you’re absolutely right, the capability is within the Odyssey tool, and we’re starting to look at it for some of our other audience promotions, some of our renewals and the reengagement and, and some other strings that we’ve got going our welcome series and things like that. So yeah, I, I, I personally, we didn’t use it on this. If I look at it and say, where would I wanna do it I’d be focused on that not registered group, and I’d do some AB testing in that message there.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
Nice. Okay. And do you guarantee sponsors a minimum number of registrants or leads from your we do not webcast. Okay.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
No, we do not. We tell ’em an expected range and we usually, we do fairly well.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
Okay. good

Speaker 2 (24:10):
Question. Do you have any, whoever asked that question, I wonder if they do ? Right.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
And do you have any voyages like this using personalizations as a messaging channel?

Speaker 2 (24:24):
No. It’s, it’s one of the things we’ve added. Okay. So lemme see if I can answer that. We’re going to do it. We’ve got the template built for it. We have a test plan for it. We have not done it on the post side, post webinar side.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Okay. Okay. But it’s

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Absolutely sorry. It is absolutely in the plans. It’s one of our templates. Sorry.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
Nice. Okay. Okay. And do you use Omeda’s sent to a friend or another affiliated marketing tool to extend reach? And if so, is this effective?

Speaker 2 (24:58):
You know, I, I don’t have a great feel for the number. I know it’s small. We do use that forward to a friend and then the numbers are small, you gotta have it in there, right, to extend your reach. So I know the numbers are small probably like about the same number of people clicking on your privacy policy, is what you maybe, maybe a little less. But but yeah, we definitely include it wherever we can.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
Okay. And what is your average email list size based on based on your criteria and what do you charge for something like, like this post event campaign?

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah, I don’t know if I wanna say the prices of what we charge because it is, you know, dependent on some things there. But I, and I, I’m also gonna give a fuzzy answer on the audience sizes because it varies so much based on topic. We I would say, you know, between this one was 17,000 on the, on the outside. And this was one segment of it that went, we had two brands that participated in this. This was one of the two brands, control engineering. So there was also a plant engineering component of the same odyssey that helped contribute to all those numbers you saw. But the numbers vary widely. There are some topics that are so broad. We do send it to large, vast chunks of our audience where the list size might be 60,000 plus. And then there are others where it’s, it’s much lower. One of our best performing brands typically has audiences. It’s one of our smaller audiences, and it typically has ranges in the twenties 20,000 plus. So, and that’s very typical, even across multiple topics. So I know that was kind of a fuzzy answer on both. But that’s what I’m gonna give you.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Alright, fair enough. Okay. Looks like we’ve worked through all the questions that have come in and we’re, we’re getting down to the the bottom of the hour. So Rick, thank you for sharing your insight and experiences. If any of our listeners are interested in developing a program similar to CFE’s post event campaign or leveraging marketing automation in general, please reach out to your client success manager and we will be happy to help you get your programs in place. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Keep your eyes open for the next webinar in our success story webinar series coming up in coming up on August 17th. The topic will be how to increase successful Auto Renewal Charges with Nikki Smith from BNP Media and Marcus Spearman from Omeda. Thank you Rick, really appreciate all of your time and, and answering all of this questions. Certainly appreciate it and thank you for everyone for joining us and have a great rest of your day. Bye everyone, everybody have a great day. Thanks for coming. More cowboy.