Peter Westerman

Senior VP of Audience Marketing, Ziff Davis Enterprise

By AD Staff
Friday, April 30, 2010

2010 AD ALL-STAR: DATA ANALYTICS & RESEARCH

Westerman uses a combination of behavioral and transactional data to target ZDE’s customers with highly-specialized content and events. 

Westerman and his team are responsible for audience recruiting and retention for ZDE’s three publications, a monthly average of 30 e-seminars, 75-80 lead-gen programs, and 15-20 face-to-face events.

Over the past 18 months, the team has been building a customer relationship management and marketing system that spans across all of ZDE’s businesses. It currently holds between 2.8 and 3.2 million actively engaged customers and five million previous customers and prospects. “The system gives us a single view of the end-user customer,” Westerman says. “In a single record, I can see what they’re subscribed, eSeminars they’ve attended ,and which whitepapers they’ve downloaded. It also allows inclusion of behavioral data, which not only tracks past transactions, but also allows us to view in real-time what customers are doing on our sites.”

The Ziff Davis Enterprise team, successfully integrated a system purpose-built for lead-generation purposes, and combined it with a custom-built customer relationship marketing system and behavioral data gathered by Omniture -- as well as the behavioral data that the team collects by monitoring the company’s Web sites, and transactions.

Westerman has been able to take on seminars and lead-gen programs that are much more targeted than ever before. He’s able to get a peek into the kinds of technology that customers are using and then take that knowledge to recruit them for specialized events, which  that can range in size from a dozen people to several hundred depending on the product and the audience target . “A year and a half ago, we weren’t able to accommodate the most narrowly targeted events we successfully produce today,” he says. “But now we can and we’re able to capture that revenue. These campaigns have gone from being 15 percent of our business to more than 50 percent of our lead generation business.”

Westerman notes the importance of customer preferences. “It’s all about understanding the information preferences of your customers, and realizing who wants what -- when. Some customers, for example, will never attend an e-seminar—it’s important to know things like that.”

Vital Stats: ZDE’s CRM/marketing system has allowed the company to grow the targeted portion of its lead generation business from 15 percent to more than 50 percent of revenue in less than a year.

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