How Questex Leverages Omeda to Turn Marketing Automation Into a $2M Revenue Engine
To deliver more leads and measurable value for their clients, Questex partnered with Omeda to unify its first-party audience data, automate engagement, and orchestrate full-funnel lead generation at scale.
Today, Questex’s Audience Engagement team runs more than 150 automated campaigns across its brands, powered by Omeda. These campaigns result in personalized experiences, thousands of qualified leads, and more than $2 million in revenue: proof that marketing automation can drive both efficiency and growth.
“This program has changed the conversation. It’s not just about delivering a lead list to a client. It’s about showing our clients how those leads engaged, what content they consumed, and where they are in their buying journey.”
– Rhonda Wunderlin
The Challenge
As Questex expanded its portfolio, the marketing team faced a dual challenge: scaling their operations while maintaining a personal touch. With dozens of brands to support, they needed a way to deliver timely, relevant content to each unique audience segment without relying on manual, one-off campaigns. At the same time, they sought to evolve from isolated campaign execution to a continuously learning, automated ecosystem capable of adapting in real time. Perhaps most importantly, Questex wanted to connect engagement data directly to revenue outcomes to demonstrate clear value to both internal stakeholders and external clients.
Key Pain Points
- Campaign builds were manual, time-intensive, and inconsistent.
- Audience segmentation required heavy operational overhead.
- Visibility into funnel performance was fragmented.
- Lead follow-up after delivery was often opaque or delayed.
Questex needed a unified system to automate audience journeys, provide real-time reporting, and deliver qualified leads that demonstrated clear purchase intent.
“We all know how it goes: You hand off leads to marketing and then they disappear into the ether of the sales team. We wanted to create a holistic journey that truly moves prospects from awareness to conversion—and prove ROI all the way through.”
– Rhonda Wunderlin
The Turning Point
The shift came when Questex decided to build what Wunderlin calls an “Account Activation Center,” which is a data-driven, full-funnel marketing framework designed to activate audiences and continuously optimize performance.
“This isn’t just marketing automation or another lead-gen program. It’s an integrated, multi-channel engine that leverages our first-party data, client assets, and behavioral insights to nurture audiences all the way through the buyer’s journey. It’s about creating meaningful connections that drive measurable business outcomes for our clients and for Questex.”
– Rhonda Wunderlin
With the Omeda marketing automation platform, Questex could finally operationalize that vision, combining automation, personalization, and measurement in one connected ecosystem.
The Solution
Questex’s “Account Activation Center” leverages the Omeda platform to automate and personalize campaigns across every funnel stage, from top-of-funnel awareness through mid-funnel education to bottom-of-funnel conversion. By combining automation with deep audience intelligence, Questex turned its marketing engine into a living system—one that continuously learns from audience behavior, adapts in real time, and scales seamlessly across industries and clients.
At the heart of this approach is data discipline and orchestration: every campaign is powered by first-party data, guided by behavioral signals, and optimized through continuous testing. This framework allows Questex to meet each audience member where they are in their journey and move them toward meaningful engagement and conversion.
“We’ve done a ton of work on our first-party data. Clean, structured, and behavioral data is the key to getting the right content in front of the right person at the right time.”
– Rhonda Wunderlin
Key Components
- Content-first strategy: Educational, thought-leadership content drives awareness, followed by solution-oriented and sales content for mid- and bottom-funnel progression.
- Dynamic journeys: 15–18-step automated workflows respond to real user behavior such as clicks, downloads, or inactivity to automatically adjust cadence and messaging
- Multi-channel execution: Email, website personalization, social promotion, AdRoll retargeting, and native advertising
- Personalization: Page-visit data informs automated journeys in Omeda, ensuring each known visitor receives targeted messaging
- Data enrichment: Adding in Bombora and FiveByFive data extends reach to unknown visitors and intent-based segments
- Collaboration: Fostered cross-department collaboration between audience, marketing, and client success teams by setting shared goals and communicating more regularly and openly
“If you click through but don’t take the call to action, we’ll wait a week and try again with a new subject line. If you still don’t engage, we’ll send a high-value content offer to re-engage. About 50% of our leads engage with two or more assets, and one in three make it into the middle of the funnel.”
– Rhonda Wunderlin
The Results
Questex transformed its marketing model from isolated campaign execution to an intelligent, automated growth engine, turning engagement into measurable business outcomes.
| Outcomes | How They Got There |
|---|---|
| $2M+ in revenue generated for Questex clients, directly attributed to Omeda-powered personalized marketing automation |
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| Thousands of qualified leads across 150+ automated campaigns |
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| Average of 600–1,200 leads per client program |
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| Renewals and upsells following measurable ROI in 2024 campaigns |
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| 15–18 step dynamic journeys mapped across the funnel | Built discrete TOFU / MOFU / BOFU programs that hand off based on triggers (opens, clicks, downloads, page visits)
Logic examples:
Journeys are cloned and tailored per market, keeping complexity manageable while preserving depth |
| Integration of PathFactory, Bombora, and Omeda for unified insights |
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Questex’s success came from a blend of strategic planning, team alignment, and cross-functional collaboration.
- Client Success Specialists managed relationships and content collection.
- Audience Development partnered on targeting and promotions.
- Marketing Operations and Data Teams handled automation, segmentation, and reporting.
“I can’t take full credit. My team, the ‘Blue Angels,’ make it happen every day. They’re the ones turning strategy into execution.”
– Rhonda Wunderlin
Organizational Benefits
Questex’s partnership with Omeda didn’t just improve campaign performance. It transformed how the organization operates day to day, delivering tangible gains in efficiency, insight, and collaboration that continue to fuel growth.
- Operational efficiency: Automated workflows replaced manual campaign builds.
- Data-driven insights: Omeda dashboards and PathFactory data revealed funnel progression, engagement depth, and ROI per asset.
- Collaboration: Client success, audience, and operations teams worked seamlessly through shared data and unified tools.
- Revenue and renewals: Measurable success drove repeat business and long-term client partnerships.
“One of our clients renewed and expanded for 2025 after seeing the results. That’s the best proof there is that automation works.”
– Rhonda Wunderlin
Show and Tell
Wondering what this looks like in action? Here are a few examples of Questex digital journeys built and executed in Omeda, with commentary from Nicole Backaus, Director of Client Success at Omeda.
“We really do take a step back and look at what the buyer’s journey looks like. As we build it, we think about reach. What are the different channels with which we can get reach? What content at each stage can help drive that progression through the top of the funnel down to conversion? And then how do we show the ROI to the client? What kind of insights can we provide back to the client so that they can see the value of the effort of the program?”
– Rhonda Wunderlin
From Nicole Backaus, Omeda Director of Client Success:
Questex is generating leads from their audience customer base for an advertiser by daisy-chaining three audience journeys together so they can identify where those leads are in a purchase funnel.
Setup of the Questex campaigns in Omeda’s marketing automation platform
Journey 1 presents customers with top-of-funnel (TOFU), general awareness content. Customers who engage with TOFU content are pushed into Journey 2 (see Figure 1 below), where they are presented with middle-funnel (MOFU), more specific content. Customers who engage with MOFU content are pushed into Journey 3 (see Figure 2 below), where customers are presented with bottom of funnel (BOFU), more detailed and purchase-related content.
Customers who engage with BOFU content are considered the highest value, Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Leads who engaged with only TOFU content are considered Market Qualified Leads (MQLs). MOFU leads would be considered ‘warmer’ MQLs. With Omeda, Questex is also able to identify which content each customer engages with, which can be passed on to the advertiser to provide the advertiser with some marketing intelligence about each lead.
Figure 1: Questex’s MOFU automation journey in the Omeda platform
Figure 2: Questex’s BOFU marketing automation journey in the Omeda platform
Why the Questex approach is different
From Nicole Backaus: Competitors might send promotional content from advertisers to their audience customer base; and if a customer engages with that piece of content, the company returns the customer to the advertiser as a lead. But there is usually no effort to determine where the lead might be in the sales funnel. So, cool and hot leads are mixed together and returned as one big file to the advertiser, who generally treats them all as hot leads and burns through the list trying to make quick sales without nurturing those non- or not-quite SQLs to see where they might be in the funnel.
In contrast, Questex is presenting advertisers with SQLs, as well as some marketing intelligence regarding those non- and not-quite-SQLs. So, the advertiser can make those quick conversions with the SQLs, but also know they need to nurture those MQLs. Plus, they have a little information about the MQLs that might make it easier to nurture them.
In addition, Questex has developed “second chance” customer journeys, adding to the effectiveness of campaigns for their advertisers.
Figure 3: Questex’s second chance customer journey funnel
And here is a more streamlined and simplified middle- and bottom-funnel program template, offering dynamic content for targeting.
Figure 4: Questex’s simplified MOFU and BOFU marketing automation funnel
The complexity of the Questex journeys stems from a desire to both target content and ensure customers do not see the same content twice. Targeting can be by vertical if, for example, an advertiser serves multiple verticals. Content can be tailored to customers based on customer profile (finance messaging to customers in finance and medical messaging for customers in the medical field). Or, content can be tailored based on customer actions (which indicate their interests). So if a customer engages with a specific product offering or shows interest in a specific feature, they can be targeted with additional content relevant to that product or feature with content further down the funnel.
First-party audience data from these journeys is also used to identify which customers engaged with specific content to make those customers easier to identify when classifying and scoring the leads. This also helps determine whether a customer should be pushed to the next stage in the funnel.
So, in addition to providing advertisers with access to their audience customer base, Questex is leveraging their marketing expertise and access to the Omeda platform to provide a much more robust campaign and provide the advertiser with a lot more insight into their leads.
Key Takeaways
Questex’s partnership with Omeda has redefined what’s possible in digital media and event marketing. By combining first-party data, automation, and intelligent orchestration, the company turned fragmented campaigns into a scalable, repeatable, data-driven engine for growth—one that continually learns, optimizes, and delivers measurable ROI for clients.
What began as a quest to streamline operations has evolved into a competitive advantage: a repeatable, high-performing model that converts audience engagement into tangible business outcomes. With each new campaign, Questex continues to refine its Account Activation Center, proving that when data, content, and automation work in harmony, marketing doesn’t just perform—it transforms.
“This program changed how we think about marketing. It’s no longer about individual campaigns. It’s about building a system that continuously drives value. With Omeda, we’re not just keeping up with client expectations. We’re setting the standard for what modern audience engagement can achieve.”
– Rhonda Wunderlin
Ready to automate your customer journeys for high-speed growth? Omeda can help you streamline your tech stack, unify your data, and turn audiences into revenue. Book a demo to learn more.
