You can have the best event in the world with the most engaging speakers in the industry but it’s hard to relax until the day arrives and your venue fills up. This is why the direct approach to increasing your event registration can be very effective.
There are numerous ways you can promote your event using mediums such as social media, email marketing, specially designed website landing pages, online adverts as well as using traditional media. There are also lots of strategies you can adopt to increase event registration including:
- Making sure your registration process is mobile-friendly
- Ensuring that the registration form is as short as possible
- Checking that the registration form works in all major browsers
- Reminding people about the event through SMS text messaging
However, nothing works quite as well as picking up the phone and speaking to somebody about your event. Making direct contact is a much underestimated method of increasing your event registration and by doing this; you are likely to yield more tangible results. Relying on people to sign up themselves is all well and good but it’s very easy for people to forget or simply not bother. This is especially true for senior level attendees and VIPs.
Now, we’re not talking about contacting people out of the blue to do this. A little warming up would be prudent to do initially for example starting off with an email and then following up with a call. Whether you’re targeting existing clients, prospects or delegates who attended the event last year, it makes sense to tailor your message depending on the audience and then make sure you have an effective follow-up strategy.
Refining your approach
The more sophisticated your approach, the better the response will be. And by sophisticated we mean tracking the initial email you send, see who opens it, check who clicks on the information and then follow-up with further emails and phone calls. The more insight you can gain about the email response the better your delegate recruitment will be. This is often best done with the help of an automation platform.
If your database of contacts is a bit on the sparse side then don’t worry, there are plenty of suppliers out there who can identify a B2B data list of suitable contacts for your event and if you refine your approach to this list, the response rate can be amazing.
Benefits of Direct Contact
Making direct contact with potential event delegates can be beneficial in several ways:
- It enables you to add that personal touch which is harder to say no to
- You can answer any questions about the event or venue
- You can ask if there is anyone else who would benefit from attending
- You may be able to up-sell value added services such as VIP tickets
It's not just event organisers that benefit from this approach. If you have spent tens of thousands on a shiny new exhibition stand and have your top team attending a big industry event why not let your key and target accounts know where you will be? The direct approach is a perfect way of targeting these valuable organisations.
Maximising on Registration
To maximise on registration you need a whole host of event support mechanisms working in the background such as appropriate promotion strategies, easy sign up process, a good contact plan and a way of capturing all the important information you are going to need if you plan to make a success of it again next year!
If you want to master the art of event registration then you need to think about the long game…
