If you’re an event planner, you probably want to adjust your time so that you can focus on executing your event properly. Sending out invites, getting people to register, and interacting with registered participants takes a lot of time. You have probably spent so many hours in doing this that you hardly had time to focus on your event itself.
So how do you organize and balance your efforts?
Automate.
A marketing automation tool can help you get participants for your event, interact with them throughout the course of time, and get them to attend the event real-time. And all this fully automated.
How does a marketing automation tool event planners?
An event requires rigorous marketing, tracking, monitoring, and organizing. If you are not using an automation tool, you will surely fall short of breath even before the event commences.
Using a marketing automation tool definitely offers you more grounds to create awareness about your event, get people to take notice of your landing page, register, and show up on the final day. Here are few ways how a marketing automation tool aids event planners.
- You can automate reminders and inquiries. As you get closer to your event, it is evident that you will get a lot of inquiries from your participants. You can either opt for a chat bot or create a drip series with all the requisite information about the event. (You can also opt for both).
- A marketing automation tool comes with a host of integrations and plugins. This means you can automate your payment process, create properly segmented pipeline for new participants, build forms/templates, and also trigger onboarding series to guide your registered participants for next steps.
- Your job will not end with the event closure. Rather, your next set of task begins here. You can automate emails that are date-based. For instance, based on information collected during registration you can send a simple offer on their birthday or anniversary to get things rolling for your next event.
You will get many such registrations who will ultimately not show up on the D-Day. If you have created an event page where you enable RSVP option, you will then have multiple sources to get registration. It can either be from your email campaigns, or your event page or maybe from your social media campaigns. A marketing automation tool helps with dynamic segmentation based on source as well as behavioral pattern. This helps you have a clear idea of how many will really turn up on the final day.
Using an automation tool for your event
Let me show you how an event planner can tap into a marketing automation tool to invite, interact, and ensure that registered participants show up.
PS: You have an upcoming event. I will assume that you have placed a subscription form somewhere on your website; usually a landing page separately created for this event only.
Step 1: How to get registrations for your event
Create a proper email workflow and divide your process into various steps. For instance, you can have two email campaigns explaining why they should attend your event. Based on lead behavior and engagement, you segment your subscribers into two groups – interested and not interested. You send another email to the “not interested” group after a short span of time (As we call it re-engagement email).
You have to pre-decide the kind of email workflow you want and accordingly create your email campaign.
Tip: Create unique labels for each step so that when you see the marketing report you know exactly at what step your target leads registered for your event.
You have registrations for your event. Great news. Your next milestone will be to get them to show up at your event on the D-day.
Step 2: Tracking and monitoring for personalized nurturing
This workflow begins right when a lead registers for your event by ‘submitting’ the form (and maybe making a payment if it is a paid event).
Your marketing automation tool puts all your registered participants in one group. If you are hosting a paid event, you might have this group branched out into “completed payment” and “payment pending”. If you are not placing behavioral triggers to group leads that went half-way through your subscription form, these leads will automatically get bucketed under the ‘not interested’ group.
‘Payment pending’ group usually comprises of those leads that have shown interest in your event, started filling out your form, but dropped just before making the payment. Not all get convinced at one-go. Some leads take time to make up their minds. These leads are not part of your “not interested” group.
So in this case, you need two separate email workflows:
- Interactive workflow for those who have finished the entire registration process.
- Urging completion of registration and also explaining the benefits of the event once again. Here, you can use statistics like “100 people have registered” or highlight any keynote speaker attending the event.
Nurturing your participants to ensure they show up
Let’s assume that your event is scheduled to happen on February 17, 2018. You might want to wait till February 16 to get as many registrations as possible.
When someone registers and completes the entire process (including payment), you schedule a ‘Thank You email’. Like this email I received after I had registered for a Webinar.
Now let’s consider some of the situations that you might be familiar with. You now create an automated workflow that is date-based. According to the date of registration, your contacts gets split automatically (which we call dynamic segmentation) and the email campaign continues as scheduled.
Scenario 1:
You keep early bird discounts for the first 50 registrations. These registrations are supposed to happen by January 20th. After 20th, the offer code expires. For instance, check this email from Web Summit with exclusive offer.
Once they have received the ‘Thank You’ email after registering, you automate your workflow to send informational emails about the event after a specific time span. Let’s say, after a span of two days, you send your first email mentioning all that is going to happen in the event. The following emails can be about reminding to mark the date, mention about any keynote speaker coming to the event, to help with directions to reach the venue, and such details that would keep them hooked to your event.
If you have been to Microsoft Build that happened in May 2017, you might know about the event-specific app that they had created before the event.
You can urge your registered users to download the app and stay connected with all the latest updates and also connect with other peers real-time.
If they download your app, you can schedule a drip push notification series to keep the flow going. If they don’t, you can run a drip SMS campaign as well to urge them to download your app.
Based on how your participants are engaging and also by tracking their in-app behavior, you can also schedule cross drip campaigns. For instance, a certain lead behavior can trigger an email and SMS or just an email, followed by a push notification and then a SMS.
Key takeaway: Set behavioral triggers. Track and monitor participant behavior to know what message will work in keeping them glued to your event updates and ensuring that they show up.
You can make use of dynamic content for your push campaigns to make your messages targeted and personalized.
This scenario is applicable also on those leads who registers between 20th to February 9th. On the 9th day, you can design an email mentioning that your event is just few days away and why they need to act fast. Just like Launch Scale did eight days prior to their event.
Scenario 2:
People who register anytime between February 10 to February 16 will receive only one email mentioning that “It’s almost time” and summarizing all the information that they for the event. In this case, you can send just one email with all the details because they have registered very close to your event date. Of course, mentioning about your app is mandatory here. You can include the download link within the email itself.
Those who register for your event on the 16th will receive email with subject “Event is tomorrow”.
Check this email from Web Summit where they clearly mention that their prices will go up from midnight and that this will be their last communication email. This email hit the inbox just two days prior to the event.
What else you can automate?
You can schedule a SMS campaign for this group to remind them about the event timing and also a quick link to your app. If they have downloaded your app, then you can set up a quick push campaign reminding about the event timing and by when they should reach the venue.
Scenario 3:
There will always be people who will register exactly on the D-Day. This means, you have no time to send any email or SMS to these people, except a confirmation that their registration is successful and an event manager will get in touch with them.
Final Takeaway
As you might now agree, marketing an event and getting people to show up includes a lot of marketing campaigns. Opting for a marketing automation tool that offer multi-channel marketing and omni-channel marketing is the best idea. Before we wrap up, here is a quick overview to the entire guide of using a marketing automation tool for event planning.
- Create an event-specific landing page with a short registration form embedded in it
- Decide the email workflow before sending out invites
- A/B test your email to see which one triggers better engagement and registration
- Segment users according to their behaviour and engagement
- Set conditions to trigger marketing campaigns
- Use multiple channels to keep your participants engaged
- Have an event manager to get in touch with participants in-person as and when needed
Automate your event registration and participant nurturing so that you can spend equal time in organizing and executing your event seamlessly.
Few heads-up:
- Many event planners create social media pages and include RSVP there itself. If you are doing this, you might want to also track social media behavior and be available on direct messages on these platforms.
- Automation doesn’t end on your D-Day. After your event, you would want your participants to remember you. You can schedule a ‘Thank You’ email and also announce details about your next event or any other launch that you might want them to know. After a certain time-gap, you can then schedule a behaviour-based drip email campaign.
If you have a recurring event, you can change your event homepage after the event, like Microsoft did.
Want to know more about nurturing leads (participants) with drip campaigns? Read this blog for detailed help.