Let's talk about you

You wouldn’t drive around in a Mercedes with a Ford badge would you?

There’s a number of legitimate (and legal) reasons for not doing so, one of them being it’s really confusing to the outside world.

Ok, it’s a bit of a far fetched example, but hopefully you get my drift that the branding is important and keeping on brand makes a difference. We then get to the next question…

Why would you run an event registration page/site diluting your brand with someone else’s?

There are of course some valid reasons for doing so, such as if you’re running a joint event with a partner business. However, if it’s your company’s event then why wouldn’t you want the first event touch point be all about your branding? Not the software provider’s logo, URL or one of those nasty “powered by” tag lines. They are all about the software provider and not you.

Here’s the bit about why you should use white label event software to manage all of your company’s events! Like many event software start ups, we set out on a path to be the “go to” provider for event registration and comms. Reality and common sense prevailed and we decided to focus our efforts on providing a white label solution specifically for the business events sector.

It gives a great impression about your business both internally and externally if you are using your “own” events software. That’s what white label gives you, your own software, minus the cost and resource to develop, maintain and support it (that’s where we come in).

Your brand is at the centre of everything we do. Not a Mitingu logo or “powered by” in sight… your domain and branding aligned with your brand guidelines.

How much does it cost? At the risk of sounding like a politician unable to give a straight answer, we’d like to think it’s more a case of what it could generate in terms of increased brand awareness, event attendees aligned to your brand and ultimately more business for you as a result. But a more direct answer is the cost is aligned to your requirements, making it cost effective whatever the weather!

Find out more about our white label here and let’s start talking about you.

Welcome to the new Mitingu

It’s been over eighteen months since we launched the Mitingu platform and we’re really enjoying the ride (albeit with a few bumps along the way)!

Photo: Priscilla Westra

Test and measure

It was always our intention to focus on the business events market and, on the whole, we’ve been pretty successful keeping to that. From the beginning we decided to offer two options to potential users:

1. Pay as you go - Sign up via the website and start creating events immediately

2. Private/white label - A customised version with no mention of Mitingu

Like any good business coach will tell you to do, we have tested and measured the success of each over the last eighteen months. What we have seen is over 80% of our business (and growing) is coming from our private/white label offering. With that in mind, from August 2016 we stopped offering the pay as you go service to new users (existing clients are not affected by this) and have decided to purely focus on what we now call Mitingu Enterprise.

Say hello to Mitingu Enterprise

We’ve been busy developing this behind the scenes and it’s ready for release! It’s still simple to use as we like to keep things that way, but has a few more bells and whistles to help make your events even better. We also realised when it comes to pricing, it has to be simple too, so we have three pricing options, all flexible and designed to accommodate specific needs.

Here’s a brief introduction to some of the features we’ve added so far:

1. Improved analytics, giving you a better oversight of your events

2. Event accommodation

• Manage capacity and allocation

• Help your attendees choose the right hotel by providing information as part of the registration process

3. See which breakout sessions and workshops are the most popular and manage allocation and capacity accordingly

4. Pre-registrations: Gauge interest and manage invitations for limited space events

5. Incomplete registrations: View and contact attendees with incomplete registrations to encourage them to complete their registration

6. Reduce form abandonment with intelligent single or multi-page registration forms and surveys

7. Enhanced tagging and filters, personalise and segment your communications

8. Multi-lingual event sites and communications

Events and attendees from all over the world? No problem, with Mitingu you can quickly and easily upload translations for one or as many languages as you need at the same time, This allows the delegate  to decide which language they would prefer to register and receive the subsequent event communications in.

At Mitingu, we are all about providing our clients with “their” event management platform. A place where they can create and manage great looking, branded and multi lingual event sites as well as  communications, whilst collecting information about their clients and prospects that they can use to improve event experience and build long lasting business relationships.

If you would like to take a look at the all new Mitingu then we’d love to show you. No commitment necessary, but good honest feedback essential! Get in touch with us here or email hello@mitingu.com and we’ll set something set up. Our standard demo takes no longer than 20 minutes unless you want it to.

Event communications...make them personal

It’s widely accepted that creating a personalised event experience that is relevant to the attendee helps build engagement and strengthens business relationships. However, despite these obvious benefits, there are still a large number of events that continue to use a generic, one size fits all approach.

We realise that a personalised experience covers many different aspects of the event and for that reason we are focusing on personalised communications.

At first glance, it might seem pretty obvious what we mean by personalised.

To us, personalised means a lot more than just using someone’s first name, company name or job title. They are important, but if a message is personalised and dynamic based on an individual attendee’s interests, preferences, choice of breakout session etc, it adds far more value and makes them feel special (Because everyone needs to be loved). 

Q: How do you achieve the personalisation?

A: By using a platform that is built to understand the need for usable and intelligent data. It should provide a simple admin and attendee pathway to capture and present the data in context and be relevant at every communication point. That is what Mitingu gives to both the event organiser and attendee.

Here’s a couple of examples of how adding a simple personalised element to an event reminder email can work.

Why it’s important to get it right

Before we continue, it’s important to emphasise that if you are planning to use personalised communications for your event, it’s important to get them right. Here’s an example that didn’t work well...

I recently registered to attend an event and it gave me two registration options:

1. Attend in person

2. Attend via a live web stream

I chose the second option. All good so far, but when I was taken to the "thank you for registering page", it gave me details on the event as if I was attending in person. The automated "thanks for registering email" also suggested that I was attending in person. I have to say I was questioning myself, so I double checked to make sure my registration was for the live web stream only, it was!

So, my first piece of engagement with that event wasn’t fantastic and you know what they say about making first impressions count!

Planning your communications

Depending on the size and nature of your event there are opportunities to engage with your attendees before, during and after. Planning and scheduling your event communications means that the whole process can be automated from the first touch point (perhaps a Save the date email), to the final post event message, or even ongoing marketing communications.

The beauty of planning and scheduling is that once it’s done then it will look after itself. The right messages will go to the right people at the right time.

Just some of the personalised messages you could send

Below are just some of the messages that you could include in your event communications strategy. They should all be personalised, using a combination of what you already know and the data collected during the journey to create relevant and engaging messages. Where applicable, you could also include attendee specific agendas, menus, accommodation details and more.

Before the event:

• Save the date
• Invitation
• Invitation reminder
• Booking confirmation
• Event updates and news
• Event reminders with attachments

During the event:

• News on the day
• Workshop/breakout session reminders
• Quick survey feedback requests
• Local places to eat and visit (if the event is across a number of days)

After the event:

• Event summary with presentation slides
• Event statistics
• Invitation to attend next event
• Ongoing marketing communications

Mitingu makes it easy for you to build and schedule all your personalised event communications from one platform. If you would like to see how then please contact us hello@mitingu.com and we'll happily schedule a demo to show you how they could work for your events.

‘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.

Zero to hero #2

Last month we promised you a bare all monthly post about our journey as a start up and how we've targeted £20k a month by March 2016. I'll be honest, right now that seems a big number, but we've always aimed big.

October 2015 saw us invoice circa £1500 so you can see that we have some real hard work ahead of us! The good news is that we picked up a new white label account and had six new pay as you go accounts. I know Eventbrite won't be quaking in their boots just yet, but give us a chance!

As I previously mentioned, all three partners of Mitingu have day jobs to pay for everyday life and to invest in Mitingu so our talented development team are well looked after and get rewarded for their amazing work. That does present a bit of a challenge because it means the hours we put into our business comes after a full days graft at someone else's. The only thing I have to say about that is that it's a whole lot easier when you're as passionate about Mitingu as we are and have great belief in it as a product. Also having an understanding family and friends helps enormously. They put up with seeing less of us during this time, their support,  encouragement and faith in Mitingu is invaluable. 

 

What we tried last month and what the results were like

Networking

Last month, we went to our first ever networking event. I have to say that it was surprisingly good! We made some really useful contacts and it was an education listening to how different people adopt different angles on promoting their business. The upshot of it was that we are now talking to an event management agency who are interested in the white label platform for a number of their corporate clients. We'll definitely be doing that again! 

Emails

We haven't got out as many as we'd like. The results we get from emails are generally really good, so we know it's a channel that's worth pursuing. To make us stick to it I will set a minimum target of 100 (we prefer to research and target rather than buy lists) personalised emails sent out by the middle of December 2015.

We have a number of active prospects from previous email sends, so we know it is worth doing.

Face to face meetings

These are my personal favourite, but right now we are limited to early morning/evenings. The good news nowadays, with dynamic and flexible working becoming more and more accepted as business are seeing the benefits of allowing staff flexibility in structuring their working week, is that we are still managing to get out and meet people.

Face to face meetings give us the chance to properly engage and build rapport with prospective or existing clients. I've always enjoyed business development so that's probably why it's my favourite method of engaging with clients. It's always much easier to gauge the level of interest and when a decision will be made from meeting them in person.

Online demos

We've had some interest from the US and Canada this month, so the only tenable way of demoing Mitingu is via the web. It's a great way of showcasing our product, but does have limitations as it's a bit tricky sometimes to gauge interest if you're not sitting in the same room.

That said, we'll persevere with them as we have won business from online demos in the past and I'm sure if we fine tune our approach, we'll win lots more.

Social media and blog posts

We go for the quality and not quantity approach mainly as we've not had as much time as we'd like to devote to Twitter and LinkedIn in particular.  The posts and tweets we have put out there have been well received and it's definitely something we will continue as it obviously helps to get our name out there and shows we have real passion for the events industry, marketing and start ups.

The most important thing is for us to stay passionate, enthusiastic and together as a team. We meet and talk regularly which helps us stay connected and keep on track. We are ready to take Mitingu to the events industry and know that we can make a positive impact.

Our message to any other start ups or in fact anyone at all reading this is to keep the faith and never give up!