One marketer. Two industries. A 31% jump in paid submissions — by trading manual email for intent-based journeys in Omeda.
The challenge
The Fierce Healthcare and Life Sciences Innovation Awards spotlight the companies pushing their industries forward — new technologies, new therapies, new models of care. But the program only works if the right companies actually complete a paid submission before a hard deadline. That makes marketing performance and revenue one and the same.
For years, promotion leaned on a handful of emails and manual reminders. It generated steady participation but the team was feeling some pain around the program:
- Conversions bunched up at the end, with most submissions landing in the final weeks.
- There was no way to follow up with people actively researching the awards, or with companies who’d started a submission and stalled.
- Manual suppression and reminder sends demanded constant oversight.
The opportunity was clear: turn a batch-email campaign into a behavior-driven lifecycle program that reacts to what people actually do.
The goal
Questex set two objectives: grow paid submission revenue and expand participation across the healthcare and life-sciences innovation ecosystem. Hitting both meant reaching three high-intent audiences far better than a general email campaign ever could — past entrants likely to return, professionals researching the awards online, and companies who’d begun a submission but hadn’t finished.
What Questex did
Working in the Omeda platform, Abigail Thomas, Associate Marketing Manager at Questex, rebuilt the campaign around segmentation, automation, and lifecycle timing.
Built audiences that update themselves
Using Audience Builder, Abigail created dynamic segments off real engagement signals — past entrants, newsletter subscribers across Fierce Healthcare, Fierce Pharma, and Fierce Biotech, visitors researching the awards, and users mid-submission. The segments refreshed automatically, which retired manual list management entirely.
Let intent trigger the message
The big change in 2025 was introducing triggered journeys. When someone showed intent, like visiting an awards page or starting a submission, a journey fired with a relevant follow-up at the exact moment they were weighing it. The behavior-based sends performed: Life Sciences trigger emails hit a 59.2% open rate and 1.3% CTR; Healthcare trigger emails hit 49.2% open and 1.2% CTR.
Suppressed the noise automatically
Questex used Journey goal criteria to remove anyone from promotional journeys the moment they paid through their submission platform. Entrants stopped hearing “submit now” after they’d already submitted, messaging stayed matched to status, and the whole thing ran with minimal hands-on work.
Expanded the lifecycle without just adding volume
The campaign grew from 7 sends to 9, structured across launch, education, reminders, deadline countdowns, and extensions. More touches, yes — but the lift came from automation and behavioral targeting, not volume.
The results
Moving from email to behavior-driven marketing moved the numbers that mattered.
- +31.4% year-over-year submissions
- Submissions grew – Healthcare +46.5%; Life Sciences +12.4%.
- Revenue followed: Healthcare +47.3%, Life Sciences +12.3%.
- The entire program was executed by a single marketer, with Omeda handling segmentation, trigger automation, and submission-based suppression.
The takeaway isn’t “send more email.” It’s that a smarter, behavior-driven system grew submissions 31% while reducing the manual workload — turning an awards program into a repeatable revenue engine. Ready to help your media marketing team do more with less? Request a demo.
