4 activities to help you deliver successful events

The majority of people do not run or attend an event without having a good idea about what they want to achieve or what they want to take away from it.

The process of engagement and achieving mutual objectives starts with the very first piece of event communication; save the date or invitation emails for example.

We think there are four key activities to consider:

1. Give information

2. Get information

3. Use information

4. Stay on brand

1. Giving the right information

Clean, accurate data is the key. We've said it before and we'll say it again, Information is Gold Dust! Make sure the data you are using is up to date, it shows attention to detail and that you’ve taken the time to think about it.

Good data enables you to tailor your communications, even if you only know my name and company name then use it, I’ll appreciate it (I’m easily pleased!).

The event registration process gives you the perfect opportunity to gain valuable information about the individual attendee. Once you have information, such as their specific topics of interest, where they travel from, dietary requirements etc then it’s really important to include this in your ongoing communications before, during and after the event.

The more information you collect the more tailored your communications can be. If they are regular attendees of other events you run, that information should also be used. Mitingu enables tailored communications which evolve with every piece of data you collect, helping you enhance your attendee’s experience as well as building and strengthening engagement and relationships. Not using the data you collect is such a missed opportunity, knowledge is power after all and showing you know your attendees will leave a lasting impression, no one wants to feel like a number.

2. Getting the right information

I don’t think I’m on my own here when I say that I really dislike filling out long registration forms that are asking me questions that have no relevance to me; I’ve told you I’m driving to the event, so there is no need to ask me my flight number and so on.

Intelligent registration is the way forward! Only show me questions that are relevant to me, either based on what you already know or how I have answered previous questions upon registration. This means some questions will only appear based on how I have answered a previous question ('Show me you know me'). Make sure the form does not look daunting and time-consuming when I first land on it.  My point here is that registration forms are not ‘one size fits all’ and should be the right length for each individual attendee whilst only collecting information that is relevant to them.

Tailoring registration forms makes completing them quicker, easier and continues to build on the good feeling they have about attending the event.

3. Using the information

A few years ago I attended a Xerox event, the event registration process has always stuck in my mind, amongst other questions like my dietary preferences, they asked the following:

     i.        Which breakout seminar topic I was most interested in

    ii.        They had a prize draw at the event and asked me which prize I would like most

All the follow up emails I received from that point on used that information in both text and imagery, it kept me engaged and reminded me of why I wanted to attend. On a lighter note, it meant that any prize I may have been lucky enough to win (I didn’t!) was something that I would like and more importantly associate with the good event experience that Xerox had provided.

So, if you use information taken before (via a registration process), during and after (via feedback surveys) and tailor it to the attendee, that will build attendee engagement and give event organisers meaningful statistics and reports that will enable them to measure the true return on investment, success of the event and give them valuable insight on where future events could be even better.

4. Staying on brand

Staying on brand, whether that is the specific event brand, your business brand or a combination of both is another key factor. The attendee should immediately associate all communications and registration site with your event and your business.

As we say at Mitingu, it’s your event not ours!

It will not come as a major shock to hear that Mitingu can help you with all of the above, so if you would like to know more we’d love to hear from you.

‘Show me you know me’ why personalisation is a great idea for your event

A big driver for us when we created Mitingu was to make personalisation a key feature in the platform. Having worked in print and digital marketing for over 20 years, I have seen the positive impact that personalised communications have on response rates and ultimately a client’s bottom line.

These two quotes highlight our reasons for making this such an important feature of Mitingu’s offering to users...

“74% of online consumers get frustrated when content (e.g. offers, ads, promotions) appears that has nothing to do with their interests.” Janrain & Harris Interactive

“Personalized emails improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversion rates by 10%.” Aberdeen

Personalisation has to be a whole lot more than just “Hi Firstname”! Of course that’s important, but so is the content. For example; if you are running a conference on marketing communications with slots featuring on digital, print and multi-channel and you already know that I have a particular interest in print, then my invitation and event site content should be tailored to focus on that. It’s far more likely to get my attention and encourage me to register for the event. 

Once registered, I’ve given the organiser a whole lot more information about me, so subsequent communications should be tailored to what they know. For example. They know my address, so could include personalised travel instructions to the venue. They may also know my dietary requirements, so it could be tailored to and include a food menu specific to them. It engages with me and shows that the organiser is taking an interest in me as an individual and will cater specifically for me. It makes me feel special and the event experience has kicked off on a really positive note weeks ahead of the actual event.

We are passionate about promoting the correct use of personalisation across event sites and email communications. We’d love to show you how.

If you’re already a Mitingu user or would love to find out more, then contact me direct greg@mitingu.com and I’ll gladly walk you through how easy to set up it is and how it can make your events even better.

The importance of collecting and using the right data from event registrations

By inference, every event, no matter how large or small, is designed to deliver a positive and rewarding experience for those who attend it.

The motives behind why a brand creates an event and what their desired outcomes are from delivering a great experience vary from event to event. The balance that needs to be drawn is between the effort required in time and cost to create an event versus the benefit of creating a great experience.

The event registration is the organiser’s first opportunity to gather really accurate information about their attendees. It can help them tailor the event to deliver a great event experience for the attendees and also be used for ongoing marketing activities. In addition to that, it can make life easier for the event organiser, giving them valuable information to help them plan for catering, fine tuning event content and accommodation requirements.

Pulling the attendee data into a marketing automation platform is a really great way of getting added value from it. These platforms are designed to get the most out of accurate data, using personalisation across multiple communications channels to deliver the marketing message. Integrating your the registration platform with a marketing automation and/or CRM platform is a seamless way of pushing event attendee data and making use of it for other business and marketing activities immediately.

Planning what information is needed to deliver a great event experience and for ongoing marketing activities is essential. It's also really important to make sure the registration form is tailored to the attendee, so it's not asking them to complete fields which are not relevant to them. The Mitingu registration form builder can help with this as it gives the organiser the ability to filter questions based on registration types, known attendee preferences and how they have responded to a previous question.

As they say, "Data is the new gold".

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ― Confucius

We’ve already discussed the importance and relevance of personalisation in previous posts. We’ll now tell you why we chose our preferred method of driving the data for personalisation, tagging.

Q. Why did we choose tagging?

A. For it’s simplicity

Tagging is a well established and arguably underused categorisation system that has seen prominence in blog use and more recently, social networks. It is all about assigning words or short keyword phrases to items to group them together. For example, items tagged as “event” would be grouped together if you searched on that tag.

Tagging is an effective and very simple categorisation system and by including it as one of the core features of mitingu we have leveraged this grouping to allow our users to create business intelligence based on the data they have.

One of the historical issues with tagging is that it places emphasis on the content creator to assign tags to their content and often laziness prevails and content is incorrectly tagged or not tagged at all. We’ve overcome this issue in mitingu as tags are automatically assigned to customers not events based on the information they give, not what is assumed.

Tags in mitingu can be used as filters for personalised content within web and email templates, ticket types and registration form questions. Email notifications can also be automatically sent based on an individual’s tag or tags.

Rather than having to write rules around different activities we use tags to simplify the process.

Here’s a simple example of tags used to create a personalised event site in mitingu.

Event name: The Good Wine Conference

Tags used: “red”, “white”, “rose”

Personalised elements: Main banner, intro text, agenda, registration type

Site 1 - John's personalised site

Site 2 - Jane's personalised site

Site 3 - Charles' personalised site

Right people, right event

Getting the right people to the right event might seem a pretty obvious objective for an event organiser however making sure it happens can be tricky….

It's all down to the data, (Information...it's gold dust), getting hold of strong data is the first challenge. Assuming you’ve been successful in that, the second challenge is using that data to tailor the content towards your audience.  Last, but not least, getting the subject line right for your emails provides challenge number three.

The good news is that you can do something about all of the above.

1. You can buy your basic data and build on it. There’s loads of places online where you can buy data lists, some better than others. The basic rule of you get what you pay for generally applies here. Research thoroughly and try and get some test data first to validate. If you’ve got some time and resource available then a combination of LinkedIn and web search makes it possible to build a fantastic database of prospects.

2. Once you’ve got the right information, it’s all about using it and making sure the recipient of your invite reads something that is relevant to them.

Having recently received an email from a health club where I have held a membership for 8 years, the opening gambit was “Dear Valued Member”! They know my name, I gave it to them all those years ago so have no problem with them using it!  This email then went on to ask me to vote for their Spa in a “Salon/Spa of the Year” competition. Although I’m a man who takes care of himself ( I moisturize, that counts right? ) I’ve never stepped foot into the Spa. However my wife, who is also a member, has several times yet they didn’t email her.  My point here wasn’t that they shouldn’t have emailed me as a member (I expect such emails), but if they’d used their data smartly they could have addressed the email to me and asked if my wife would vote for them and that would have engaged with me.

If you’re sending invitations to clients or prospects about an upcoming event, make sure you target those that may have an interest in what the event is about and don’t forget to use their name!

3. The good people at Campaign Monitor published a post last summer called The 15 most powerful words in subject lines. The subject line is all about making the right first impression and it was interesting to see that when “Invitation” is used as the first word, there is a 9.45% uplift in open rates and when used as the last word, a 7.69% uplift.

There’s no such thing as an exact science when it comes to subject lines, so it’s always worth creating a few and comparing the results to see which one is getting the best open rates.

Getting these three things right isn’t easy, but when you do, the benefits are well worth all the groundwork beforehand.

4 Ways Event Managers Can Use Personalisation to Impact ROI

Are you collecting data on attendees that register for events? Have you thought about and planned out how you might go about utilising this data? During the event registration and signup process, as an event manager or coordinator you have the opportunity to request information that you can then intelligently use to impact the ROI of an event.

These are just 4 ways that personalisation can be used to impact the return on investment for an event;

1. Dynamic, personalised event webpages

Once your attendee has registered for your event, the next time they visit the event webpage, information and elements of the site can be personalised specifically to their interests or motivations for attending the event. For example, the imagery could reflect the industry the attendee works in. You could include a call out box requesting responses to any additional non-mandatory questions they didn’t answer at signup in order to collect even more data. If they selected that they needed accommodation over the course of the event, you could include local restaurant ideas or things to do in the evening during the course of their stay.

2. Valuable meeting suggestions

Based on the attendees’ interests, role, industry and even where they are in their purchasing cycle, you could match-make them with your exhibitors, event partners or sponsors, inviting them to private meetings that will take place onsite during the event. By carefully profiling the data, you offer your attendees meetings highly personalised to their needs or motivations for attending. You will also solidify relationships with your exhibitors by connecting them with pre-qualified leads.

3. Personalised email marketing

It’s annoying to receive multiple and very apparent, generic email blasts in the lead up or during an event. Using the data you have collected, tailor emails based on the individual. Segment your attendees into defined profiles, sending them content or information related to their needs. For example, you wouldn’t send a sponsor email whose product and services pricing starts at £100,000 to an attendee who has indicated that they work at a company with a turnover of less than £100,000 per year.

4. Real-time interaction

During the event there are a number of opportunities to engage with your attendees. When attendees check in at the event you could automate emails containing the attendee’s personalised event programme, if you gave them the option to select and choose from different tracks or talks happening at the event. Even simpler still, but just as personal, you could pre-schedule emails following a speaker or sponsor’s presentation with further information including the slides from their talk to attendees who checked in to that specific talk. If you do not have the real-time checking in capabilities you can pre-schedule these emails to be sent to attendees who fit the profile for attending talks of this nature, perhaps basing your theory on previous event data.

These 4 applications and ideas for personalisation are just the tip of the iceberg with regards to what is possible. Uses for attendee data can be as simple or creative as you are willing to go. But no matter which end of the scale you choose, personalisation can be key to driving the impact on the ROI of an event, as well as creating lasting relationships with all event stakeholders; attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, speakers, etc. Personalisation enhances the experience for all those involved and can help in building loyalty and repeat business.

If you want to enhance personalisation to improve your event ROI, Mitingu is a user-friendly cloud-based platform that makes it simple to intelligently utilise attendee data and create a heightened event experience. We’d love to chat about more ways you could use personalisation for your next event. Or if you’re not much of a talker, you can sign up for a free account in minutes.

Image Credit

Personalisation and Event Marketing: What’s the True Value?

We’re all in agreement that information is the gold dust of the business world. Yes? But how can you use this gold dust as an event marketer, coordinator or manager to see tangible value and results? And just how valuable can this information prove to be?

Targeted marketing, as a strategy, as you know isn’t ground-breaking. It’s been with us for a number of years and many marketers within various industries have adapted their tools, skills and knowledge in order to market to customers in this way. However, a recent article and survey demonstrated that, whilst marketers fully believe in the importance of personalisation, the number of those who feel that they are executing personalised marketing tactics and communication well, is astonishingly low.

Why? If your current event communications rely only on basic personalisation, you may be finding that your open rates, click through and engagement is steady and acceptable when compared against the industry standard. The saying, “If its not broken, why fix it?” may be true for your situation, especially if you manage a number of areas and elements for your events. You likely don’t have the time to become, what feels like, a data analyst in order to deliver highly personalised event communications or content to your audience. And don’t worry at all if this is you, two thirds of your marketing peers think this way too.

But what if we told you that a highly personalised event email results in six times higher transaction rates? Or a personalised website experience for your event attendee could improve sales by 19%? Pretty compelling stuff. But we know that there are challenges for event marketers to be able to create highly tailored event communications based on the information that an attendee submits when registering for an event. Challenges such as data quality, data saved across disparate files and systems, inability to link different tools or expertise.

With this in mind, especially those compelling stats we shared, our final question is; what if we said we could help you overcome these challenges and unlock the value that personalisation offers? As we said in our last blog, these are just some of the challenges that our platform is able to overcome in order to help you get the gold - the value - from your event marketing or communication activities in a simple way without a huge price-tag attached.

A personalised event webpage based on an individual registrant’s job title, conference programme choices and industry, could sound like a huge and almost impossible task to create without the right platform and tools in place. This is just one example of how Mitingu can take the personalisation of your event communication and marketing to the next level, seeing your registrant engagement rates, ticket sales and repeat/loyal event attendees increase.

Image Credit: ©Death to the Stock Photo CC

Get Intelligent...with Mitingu's newest features

When building event registration forms in the past, have you ever thought it would be clever if the form questions could change based on an attendee’s selection or preferences? We did. We wondered why most online event registration platforms don’t offer this or if they do, why is the solution often very basic and rigid. We couldn’t find a good enough reason for why this is normally the case and set out in an attempt to recreate the standard for event registrations. In doing so we’ve developed a few new features.

If you’re a Mitingu user, you’ll be familiar with our tagging feature. If you’re new to Mitingu (welcome!), tagging enables you to literally tag attendees so that you can communicate with them in a more individual way or to help plan your events. Our new intelligence feature means you can now tag attendees based on their registration type in order to display or hide particular questions at the registration stage. For example, if your attendee registers as a VIP you can set questions to appear for only this type of registrant. You might want VIP attendees to only be offered a deluxe room booking option or choose from different menu options. You might want to find out their reason for attending as a VIP in order to use this information when marketing VIP tickets in the future.

How you decide to use it and the options for this feature are endless depending on how intelligent you want to get. What it means for attendees is a targeted, unique experience right from the registration stage. For you, this gives your brand and event a great first impression! It also means you can save time and money by getting all the important answers you need at this point rather than sending an email or subsequent questionnaire following an attendee’s registration.

If you build a brilliant form for an event, when you come back to organize your next event using Mitingu, you can now copy across forms from your previous events. This is great if you organise a recurring event where your questions will always be the same.

Our new features are designed to add a level of intelligence to event registration in order to benefit you and your attendees. Sign in now to start building your intelligent form for your next event or create a free account (we don’t ask for payment information) to take a snoop around and try it out.