How CFE Media Increased CTR by 20% With Dynamic Content

Recorded on: June 22, 2023

Your audience expects you to personalize content, offers and communications to their individual needs. But it’s difficult to achieve personalization at scale — especially if your audience data is spread across different solutions or you have multiple brands to manage.

To personalize their outreach without excess time and resources, CFE Media used CDP data from Omeda to identify what topics their audience was most interested in. Then it used dynamic content in its emails so that each viewer would see articles related to their individual topics of interest.

In this webinar, we’ll walk through CFE Media’s use of dynamic content and show you how to implement in your own communications.

Some key takeaways include:

✅ how to harness your website data to improve targeting and create more precise segments
✅ how to hyper-personalize your email marketing to each individual with dynamic content
✅ how to identify the topics that drive repeat visits — and emphasize them in your content strategy

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See full transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to today’s webinar, how CFE Media Increased Click-through rates by 20% with dynamic content. We’re gonna wait a few minutes for the rest of our attendees to join. Give everyone a moment.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I’ll use my cowbell to get a little
Speaker 1 (00:21):
To round up the troops. . There you go. We, we must have the Rick Ellis cowbell, right? Absolutely. Apparently
Speaker 2 (00:29):
It’s a thing now, Alicia.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Yeah, it is. It’s your, your, your what’s the word? Not bookmark,
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Affectation. Yeah, there’s something like that. It’s your
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Absolutely .
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah. I didn’t, I couldn’t do the pencil mustache this time, so, oh,
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Well. Some people will be disappointed. . Okay. I think we’re, we’re ready to begin. Before we do, so, I’d like to just start with a few housekeeping items. First I just wanna let you know that this webinar will be recorded and we will send out the recording in a few days. Any questions that you have can be dropped in the chat, and we’ll do our best to answer during today’s webinar. But if we don’t have time, your client success manager will follow up and we’ll get that answer back to you. And finally please visit our website, omeda.com, to see all of Omeda’s upcoming client success story, webinars, and to register. And we’ll be offering two to three webinars each month for the remainder of the summer. So, without further ado, it is my pleasure to now introduce Rick Ellis, the Director of Audience Management at CFE Media and Technology. Rick,
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Thank you, Alicia. It is good to be here and nice to reprise this presentation from OX6. I’m happy to be talking with you today. I work at CFE Media. We co we have four brands that all cover the niche of engineering and manufacturing, so we deal with a lot of engineers and high tech stuff. So let’s proceed and talk about how we used Lytic data to identify and utilize topics of interest for new subscribers to increase engagement with the messaging we were sending them. We assigned topic affinity data and used it to deploy follow up messaging, and that’s what I’ll be talking about. So we, to begin with, we had to get all of the information that we had on our subscribers and append it to their record. So I’ll go through this process. It’s not as intimidating as it looks, but what we first started with was by analyzing our audience.
(02:50):
And our advertiser needs to come up with 31 core topics that are most important to our audience or our customers. Once we had identified those core topics, and there’s basically roughly 10 for each of our big three brands, if you will. We built queries. I personally actually built queries for each taking into account form fills behavioral data from things like form fills and lytics, as well as information that they gave us on their subscription forms. So for example, buy Specify is big for us. Which of these products do you buy specify, as well as lytics, taxonomies and taxonomies associated with things like webcasts or things like that, that we have. We put all of this data into Omeda So once we had built these 31 separate queries, we then with Omeda’s help, we built a campaign slash lead gen slash data loader process, and I definitely needed their help to do this to do, to assign data to a field we created in the database called Topic Assignment.
(03:59):
And what we did is what we, we ran these records through roughly 250,000 records in our database that had information that could be assigned, that took about four days, almost four full days in chunks to process the data through. Went in, looked at the query, and then it went through and assigned the record to assign the data to the record so that we had it on each record, roughly four days to get that done. And then once that was done and level set our database, we then built a job that does the same thing on a nightly basis. So every night our database is swept to see what information we have on what people are engaging with for these 31 core topics and assigns it into a field on their record that we can then use to target them with. We then built an Odyssey, specifically targeted to this specific group we wanted to test this process on.
(04:54):
Alright, and it, the welcome Odyssey, and I’ll show it to you here in a minute. It was a seven email series dynamic emails. We wanted to create emails that would conditionally display content that would, that person, they, they were interested in this one, in, you know, this one particular topic we wanted to show them. In the next email, we sent them information on that topic to get them to engage and click. And so of the seven emails in the series that we’ve got as a welcome setup five of them are conditional and have dynamic content in them. And I’ll, I’ll show you that. We launched this in two brands of March of 2023, and we’re in the process now of iterating upon it and looking for other areas to use it on. Next slide is going to talk about the details and examples.
(05:47):
So I’m going to show you those. Here is the Odyssey. I promised, I apologize if it’s an eye chart on your computer. But there are seven emails in here. The fifth, the, the, we have one on webcasts, one on eBooks, one on content. It’s called articles. We’ve got a analytics emails. We have a products database. So products. And then we have a content of email. All of those, those five emails, five emails we’re all conditional. And they and dynamically created content based on what the activity that this person had taken on our website. So if somebody came in, they subscribed, and then they looked at three different things, we’ll be able to identify those three topics and send them content for each of those three. Or maybe just one of those three. If they only picked one, two of the emails were generic.
(06:37):
We had one that was, Hey, go update your profile. And another one at the end of the welcome series that says, it’s a survey and it says, Hey, how are we doing? So that’s the, the welcome series, if you will. The way the contact emails look is just to give you an idea of how they look. So the generic or default version, we’ll have one item in there. And then as, as you might imagine the next one, digital transformation was a topic that, this version that people were interested in that particular version. So you see there’s one with two topics, and then the next one has three topics. You’re probably getting the idea now. Each one of those five different product emails I mentioned to you, webcast, eBooks, all of those things, each of them had a version of this, so they could have, I think it was up to 10 topics possible. So some of these emails could be very long. The average of our subscribers is more like three or four, but the, you get a general idea of how these emails look.
(07:38):
We did this in conjunction with a new data point we wanted to ask our subscribers, which is, which topics do you like? We are actually starting to ask them that and where it, you know, imagine that, right? We typically get our content and, and our, we do our demographic targeting based on the information on the subscription form, which usually has to do with BIS specified data or industry. Here. We actually said on their new profile form, what are your topics of interest? Well, this topics of interest form, this is a very important little data point because the process we built highlights and chooses these topics on our database, right? With that internal based on the lytics and all of that. But it’s very important that this is a customer-centric process. So if we assign some topic based on what that person visited, lytics, let’s say a taxonomy of motors and drives, just to pick something interesting.
(08:32):
If we set motors and drives and they come into this form and they say, I don’t really like motors and drives, and they uncheck the box that’s going into the whole process, their data, anything the subscriber says is handled in the nightly process that we run. And again, it’s done topic by topic in there. So it’s a a fairly complex process that works very well. Customer-Centric is the important part of it, right? I’m gonna assign you topics based on what I think, based on your activity, but if you come in and override it and tell us you don’t like it, then clearly that’s the most important information we can capture.
(09:09):
So, results and next steps. The results have been pretty encouraging so far. I looked these, I’ve said some emails have a 20% higher click-through rate than our standard welcome series, which was much more generic. And actually I saw a, and that’s, that’s very true, but I saw a 26.9% click through rate on one of these emails series on plant on my brand plant engineering, which is one, which is a tough brand to engage with ’cause they’re plant engineers and they’re running around the plants and stuff. So I was particularly excited by that. But overall, several emails have 20% or more higher clickthrough rate than our standard welcome series. And then, as you know, as, as we collect more and more data on these folks and more and more people fall into this info, provide us the information, we can send this odyssey to them and we’ll be working, you know, more and more subscribers are gonna get this messaging is what I’m trying to say.
(10:00):
So our next idea is we’re working, as a matter of fact, it’s probably gonna launch next week on one of our other brands. And then we’re looking at, I think this would, I think it’s a good idea for a welcome series, but I think for re-engagement, this would be another really good way to use it. And to use this capability is through re-engagement or for re-engagement efforts. I also want to consider devising a program for some key segments of highly engaged subscribers. Perhaps people that, you know, meet a certain profile that we’re really trying to get more information out of, or to ask a you know, some kind of survey or maybe lesser engaged people, right? Work on them to see if there’s ways we, you know, what little we know about them. What can we do to try to engage with them more?
(10:45):
So I think especially the re-engagement is an area where I plan to use this in the future. And then, of course, always looking for something that we can sell. We’re B two B, so if we can sell some access to our audience with really smart and clever marketing, we’ve got several customers that would be interested in something like that. So probably later this year we’ll look at packaging up something along these lines to offer for sale as well. So Alicia, that’s what we did here in this particular creative use of, of CDP data.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Excellent. Thank you Rick, so much. Okay. Well, let’s see. What questions have come in while you were speaking? Let’s see. One, one question. Could you go a little more into the, how you determined the number and or the importance of the topics?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Sure. it’s easy to say, but it did take some effort and some checking with other folks in the company. We did the most important topics to our subscribers and the most important topics to our advertisers. In many cases, they are the same, but in a few cases they’re not. So we said, give us the top 15 topics for our audience on this brand. And then what are our top buying categories for our customers, our advertisers, and merge? Any that made sense to combine, like digital transformation is one that is very popular. We put that in there. It’s also popular with our audience. So between those types of metrics of using the two, I think the, the vast majority were one-to-one matches, they’re important to both. We did have a few, well, it’s important to our audience, so eventually it’s going to be important to our advertisers. So there was that as well. So that’s how we did it. There’s roughly 10, I think it’s one of our brand. One of our brands has 11, but it’s 10 basically for the big three brands that we’ve got. 10 each for each of those brands.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Okay, great. Here’s another one. Is the process scalable? What happens as you add more programs and apply the same method to your re-engagement campaigns?
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Yeah, I’m gonna have to look at it. I believe it is scalable, but it’s gonna take some effort to look at. And you know, we were just talking about this the other day about if we need to add another category, what does that look like? And it, it is scalable. We would need to, you know, build out that effort, change up the data loader, you know, run through the entire process again. So I wouldn’t take it lightly, but it could definitely be done. I think for the re-engagement part of it though, Alicia, or sorry, the person that asked this question for the re-engagement portion of it though, I think what we’ve got should work pretty well ex in its existing spot. But again, yes, it would take some effort to make it scalable, pick a new topic, build a new queries, run through the data load process, and then we’re golden. So that, that, that’s how I would scale it. Honestly, I think we’re probably good for the year with the topics we’ve chosen on those brands, but we’ll see. But right now I’m thinking knock on wood or bang on cowbell.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
. Yeah. Okay. how often do you change the content or do you provide evergreen content?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
This is a great one, and this was one when I was at OX6 people were talking about, and I’m very curious about how folks do this. We change the topics or change the content, we refresh the content quarterly, so, so the eBooks right now that are in there will get refreshed in oh June. They’ll get refreshed in July . So each of those content points a webcast, same things quarterly. In a perfect world, it’d be every other month probably, right? But we don’t live in a perfect world. We’re a small little marketing audience, marketing group within the company as well. So that’s, that’s what I would say. Down the road, we’re working on tactics. Maybe we could use have dynamic content and scrape some stuff via HT m l, but we’re probably a year away from doing that. So right now my long, my long answer to your short question is quarterly.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Okay, great. And what improvements do you foresee making to the program?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah, I think it is, I think the one I’m most excited about probably is the, the re-engagement. And then, you know, we’re still examining it. It’s basically just been going on since March and it was a seven week program, so people are still falling through it. We’re still looking through, you know, we’re still looking at the data. So I would imagine that we would swap and, and change up maybe the sequence of the emails depending on how they go. Mm-Hmm. . And also the amount of content for a particular topic. Maybe instead of two articles on each topic, perhaps it’s four, you know, something like that. Again, get more kind of more options in front of them on what we hope is a topic they’re interested in. So and for re-engagement, you think about it and how that might work. That’s gonna be a whole other thing. In terms of, all right, well they have an open email in X amount of time, what data do we have on them? And then setting those things up. So that’ll be an interesting experiment to go through. I anticipate doing that. We’re gonna be starting in on it here in the mid-summer and working on that. And so by fall we’ll probably have something that we’re gonna be developed for that, that we will have developed by.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Okay. Do we have any more questions from the group? Let’s see. Do do some engagement points have more value than others? Do you see a higher proclivity engage in someone who did one thing versus another?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Sure. So our best for us personally, a webcast attendee is our most engaged person. They have probably just spent an hour with us on a specific topic. They’re our most engaged person. We go all the way back down to an open and we all know about opens, right? Mm-Hmm. . So I would say for me, a register, a form fill is the most engaged and the, the kind of the, that’s the win. That’s the, the, the through the goalposts kick if we get ’em to sign up for something, right? Mm-Hmm. . So those people tend to be the most highly engaged and they will stay the most highly engaged. One of the things we are looking at, and it’s one of those things that I don’t know if it’s a riddle we’ll ever solve, but when people in, in engineering, when they move on to their next topic, so you like a topic, we know you like that topic, we’re gonna send you stuff about that topic, but what happens?
(17:37):
What signal can you give us that you’re done with that project and now you don’t like that topic anymore? So, so working on something that we’ve got to, and we may, again, you, you can only do so much with the signals that your subscribers are giving you. So that’s, that’s what I would say to to that one. And, and, and, and just in general form fills are always gonna be most engaged. Of course, clicks on emails is what’s driving a lot of this, right? So that’s when we know what they’re doing. So those are the things I would say are most important. And we find that once somebody has filled out a form, they’re gonna be our most engaged people moving forward.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Right, right. Okay. alright. Well it looks like we are just about at time. I just want to remind everyone that if you do have any questions, please do reach out to your client success manager. And Rick, thank you so much for taking the time today to share your success story. And please do join us again for one of our webinars forthcoming this summer. Thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Thanks everybody.