New Database for EE Times Group Clears Path for Major Strategic Changes

Fulfillment vendor will assist brand in further integration of database, launch of paid Web sites.

By Chandra Johnson-Greene
Monday, February 22, 2010

United Business Media’s EE Times Group, which offers a portfolio of products serving marketers in the electronic industry, recently announced that it has partnered with fulfillment vendor Omeda to provide the brand’s database management services. Omeda will also assist EE Times with further integrating its existing products and launching paid Web products.

“In our opinion, our integrated database is our most important asset,” Paul Miller, CEO, EE Times Group, told AD. “We’re in the midst of doing a big relaunch of all of our Web properties, and we want to be able to look at the lifetime values of each member so that we can drive engagement. We need a robust back-end that allows us to gather behavioral intelligence, which will tell us how our members are interacting with our print and Web products and as well with our events and other properties.”

Existing Product Improvements

The partnership between EE Times Group and Omeda involves improving on what the brand has already built, as well as helping it execute new products. According to Miller, EE Times has a decade-old integrated database that was partly managed in-house, but some of the products that were acquired by the brand over the past five years, such as TechOnline, were never integrated. As part of its agreement with Omeda, those names will be brought into the database.

Once the database has been fully integrated, Omeda will assist in making online registration both easier for customers and more comprehensive for EE Times. “I think it’s important to support the openID standard, which means integrating social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook into our registration process,” Miller said. “In other words, if someone wanted to register to one of our sites, we could allow them to just enter their LinkedIn username and password to do that without having to fill out a completely new form.”

Features like this are important, he added, because younger engineers are more engaged in Web 2.0 products. Therefore, the brand has “to satisfy customers’ needs across the board.”

The next step, Miller said, is to gather more information about each customer as a way to evaluate if what the EE Times Group is offering is actually working. “If an engineer is looking at a new semiconductor product from Intel, they may go to our site and read information about it, and then comment about it on our message boards,” he said. “Once they’ve registered, we offer more resources for that customer, such as online training and technical papers. We want to know what they’re doing so that we can see if they’re really behaving how they say they’re going to behave.”

Once the customer becomes further engaged, Miller added, the brand will benefit from seeing the lifetime value of that reader, which will help it to market additional products. “This gives us the chance to offer more valuable products to the reader,” he said. “It’s great having one million visitors a month, but not knowing who they are makes it difficult to monetize.”

Paid Version of EE Times on the Way

While the existing sites and the database are being tweaked, Omeda will assist EE Times Group with its new paid content sites. According to Miller, however, these will be different from the paid content sites that other b-to-b companies have been implementing. “We’re not going to take our existing sites and slap a pay wall on them,” he said. “These are going to be new educational products that will have Webinars, data sheets and technical papers surrounding them so that the customer gets more value out of them.”

The first product in line is a paid version of EE Times, which will be a completely separate site from EETimes.com and will be targeted towards those in management positions. The ultimate goal of these new products, as well as improving the existing ones, is to increased the number of registered customers in the database to over one million. According to Miller, the database currently has about 450,000 “live” names. “My internal goal is make $100 on average per unique visitor per year,” he said.

Miller acknowledges that the brand’s goals mirror what a lot of b-to-b companies have been talking about for the last couple of years, but haven’t actually acted on. “Our thought was ‘Let’s stop talking about it and do it,’” he said. “We know we’ll make mistakes along the way, but it’s the right thing to do. It’s either we find out the hard way or the easy way, but I’m not willing to wait for perfection.”