When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the leadership team at LeadDev realized they needed to act fast to protect their revenue streams, after their sold-out in-person events were suddenly canceled for the foreseeable future. By increasing their library of high-quality content online and developing new delegate-pays virtual events, LeadDev uncovered an unexpected opportunity to diversify their monetization mix.

One of the biggest challenges LeadDev had to overcome was time pressure. They needed to launch a fully online presence in under 3 months, starting from scratch. Dave Fletcher, co-founder of LeadDev, said: “We had to very rapidly transform our business into a digital business from being a fully face to-face one, and that’s where Zephr came in.”

They required a solution that could be implemented quickly to facilitate identity and access management for the visitors of their virtual events, with their LeadDev Together 2020 series being hosted just a few weeks after the site went live. Dave admits: “What we were trying to do was pretty ambitious…but we really wanted to have the whole experience on the LeadDev website, so that we could control everything.”

Since launching, LeadDev’s catalog of articles, guides and webinars grew to the point at which they were keen to introduce a dynamic datawall that would convert their repeat visitors to registered users, without putting off first-time visitors with an untimely paywall. They wanted to capture valuable 1st-party data to help understand their audience, drive readership, and ultimately improve their content and event offering.

Dave and his team set up Zephr’s platform to control the sign-up and access procedures for their digital events, in a matter of days. They were able to manage the data collected at registration from the thousands of ticket purchases for LeadDev Together 2020 and other virtual events. The whole process was contained on the LeadDev main site, with the commercial team able to execute creative decisions in real-time using Zephr’s drag-and-drop Feature Builder, making the customer experience seamless for the registered users.

Once the site was established, LeadDev used Zephr’s Rules Builder and custom registration form templates to deploy a metered datawall on their previously ungated content, without the involvement of their development partner. They experimented with allowing readers a set number of free articles each month before asking them to sign up with an email address, with the goal of converting loyal readers into registered users.

Dave and the LeadDev team successfully hosted over a thousand paid visitors to their LeadDev Together 2020 series, completely securely, with ease. “We launched on the first of September, and it was a phenomenal success…I just cannot see how this would have been possible without Zephr.” Since then they have run a series of webinars and a large virtual event via Zephr, each helping to grow out their registration list. And they’re not stopping there. Building on this initial success, Dave is looking to experiment with A/B testing for their conversion strategies. Dave concluded: “The business is going to transform again in the next 12 months. We know that with Zephr we can quickly implement new journeys for people with different products, and different ideas that we’ve got, whilst driving the fundamentals for the business.’’