Most email campaigns are built around one question: What do we do when someone doesn’t engage?
It’s a fair question. Re-engagement is real work, and the instinct to chase lapsed subscribers makes sense. But there’s a problem with building your entire strategy around the people who aren’t showing up: you end up ignoring the ones who are.
That’s the insight Matt Downing, VP of Audience at EndeavorB2B, brought to the stage at OX9 — Omeda’s annual conference for media and publishing professionals. His argument is simple but it cuts: when someone does what you wanted them to do, what happens next?
For most publishers, the honest answer is: not much. They become a good metric and you move on.
Matt’s team decided to do something about that.
The South Park Storytelling Method
The idea started with a South Park clip — specifically, one where creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker explain how they connect scenes. Most storytellers use and to link moments: this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Stone and Parker use but and therefore instead. Something happens, but then something unexpected interrupts, therefore the story goes somewhere new.
That structure keeps audiences leaning forward because they can’t predict what’s coming. And it turns out, it’s a better model for email marketing than most of what’s in your automation builder right now.
Translated to audience development, the logic looks like this:
- An audience member engages with our salary and career tool — therefore we send them an ebook.
- They don’t open the ebook — therefore we show them highlights from it instead.
- They engaged with the tool but skipped the ebook — therefore we send them related survey articles.
- They did download the ebook — therefore we ask them about their career goals, because they’ve told us they care.
Each step is a response to what the audience actually did, not what you hoped they’d do. The campaign becomes a conversation rather than a broadcast.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Matt’s team built out a fully automated “but/therefore” campaign in Omeda’s audience journey tool, anchored around EndeavorB2B’s salary and career content. The audience was seeded by demographics and prior engagement with the career tool. From there, campaign filters branched the experience based on real behavior: who opened, who clicked, who downloaded, who skipped.
The result is what Matt calls a choose-your-own-adventure campaign — except the audience doesn’t know they’re choosing. They just receive the next thing that makes sense for them, while the Omeda platform quietly builds a richer behavioral profile in the background.
Every branch of the campaign fed engagement data, topic preferences, and site browsing behavior back into Omeda. No separate data collection step required. The intelligence built itself as people moved through the experience.
The results:
- 12% engaged with the career tool after the first email — compared to 7% for a standard campaign
- By the end of the full series, that number climbed to 23%
- The average engagement depth was more than three emails — people weren’t opening once and bouncing
- 8% of the audience made it through all five levels of the campaign
That last number is meaningful. Five levels deep means five separate decisions to keep engaging. Those aren’t passive subscribers. Those are people actively telling you what they want — and you’re capturing it.
The Re-engagement Application: Bringing Back Lapsed Subscribers
One of Matt’s colleagues, Anna Hicks, took the same framework and pointed it at a very different problem: a large population of magazine subscribers who hadn’t engaged digitally in 24 months or more.
These were people still receiving the digital edition — still technically on the list — but not opening, clicking, or doing anything. They weren’t part of the engaged audience that powers newsletters, promotions, or monetization. They were names.
The campaign led with content recommendations to test for any sign of life. From there, Omeda’s automated journey conditional logic took over, branching based on what each person actually did. The full menu was on offer: newsletters, website content, podcasts, social channels. If something sparked interest, the campaign followed it. Subject lines were A/B tested throughout to keep optimizing delivery, and the series closed with either a renewal prompt or a clean sunset — no ambiguity about what to do with whoever was left.
The results:
- 30% of the 24-month inactive segment for the Automation World brand re-engaged
- 27% re-engaged in the processing brands
- 9% of the Automation World audience completed the full campaign, averaging two emails deep
- The campaign saved over $30,000 in new audience acquisition costs
That last number is the executive-level punchline. Reactivating someone who’s already in your database is dramatically cheaper than acquiring someone new. A strategy that treats your dormant list as an asset — rather than a liability to be written off — has a direct impact on the cost structure of your audience development operation.
Why This Matters Beyond the Campaigns
Both campaigns worked because they did something most email programs don’t: they treated engagement as a signal worth responding to, not just a metric worth counting.
Every time someone opened an email, downloaded a resource, or clicked through to a podcast, the campaign asked: what does that tell us about this person? And the answer fed directly into what they received next.
This is what Matt calls a data-positive campaign — not just a campaign that generates engagement, but one that generates understanding. Each branch of the choose-your-own-adventure path builds a more complete picture of who that audience member is and what they actually care about. Over time, that data improves segmentation, informs content strategy, and makes every subsequent campaign smarter.
For teams using Omeda, this kind of passive data collection is native to the platform via forms, pop-up, interactive quizzes and polls (via native CredSpark integration). Audience responses feed back into Omeda audience profiles automatically. The behavioral data builds in the background while the audience thinks they’re just reading something interesting.
What You Need to Build This
Matt was transparent about the tradeoffs. These campaigns aren’t the most scalable thing you’ll ever build — especially on the digital content side. They require real content depth: articles, ebooks, reports, interactive tools, podcasts. If you don’t have ancillary content to power multiple branches, the but/therefore structure has nowhere to go.
On the magazine and subscription side, scaling is more straightforward because the product line is more consistent across brands. The framework travels better when the offers are more universal.
However, the strategic value scales regardless of execution complexity:
- Map the story before you build it. The but/therefore method only works if you think through the branching paths before you start setting up flows. What does someone tell you by engaging? What does their skip tell you? What’s the logical next step in each case? Get that map on paper — or a whiteboard — before you open the campaign builder.
- Serve both sides of the journey equally. Most teams spend 80% of their attention on the “what if they don’t” scenario. Matt’s point is that the “what if they do” scenario is at least as valuable and usually more neglected. Build explicitly for both.
- Let engagement be the input, not just the output. Clicks and opens aren’t just numbers to report. They’re signals about what your audience cares about. A campaign designed to capture those signals — and act on them in real time — generates compounding returns. Each campaign run makes the next one smarter.
- Think in terms of data accumulation, not one-time events. The campaigns Matt described weren’t one-and-done sends. They were systems for passively accumulating behavioral intelligence while delivering value at every step. The audience got useful content. The team got a richer understanding of who their audience is and what they want.
The Bigger Picture for Leadership
For audience development leaders and executives evaluating where to invest in automation and personalization, Matt’s results point to something worth internalizing: the ROI of engagement strategy isn’t just in the engagement metrics.
It’s in the data you’re building. It’s in the acquisition costs you’re avoiding. It’s in the fact that the subscribers you re-engage through a well-designed content journey are more likely to become loyal, monetizable audience members than cold acquisitions who’ve never encountered your brand at its best.
The choose-your-own-adventure approach isn’t a workaround for a broken email program. It’s a more honest model of how audiences actually work — incrementally, based on interest, on their schedule — and a smarter framework for meeting them there.
You’ve been asking what to do when they don’t engage. It’s time to spend equal energy on what to do when they do.
Matt Downing shared this session as part of OX9, Omeda’s annual conference for media and publishing professionals. Watch the full talk below.
EndeavorB2B is a Nashville-based B2B media company with 90+ brands serving 16 markets, from aviation and digital infrastructure to energy and healthcare.
