As you’ve no doubt guessed, our business is the business of events. But as any regular event planners out there will know only too well, there’s a whole lot more to planning an event than what goes on during the day itself. So given our experience of working on hundreds of events, we wanted to share our typical blueprint for event lead engagement.
You can use this template to make sure you’re keeping any potential delegates engaged and in the loop with your event throughout the process. We’ve found it’s made a big difference to how well we’ve managed the communication flow around our own events, but feel free to personalise this for your specific needs - we’d love to hear your stories of how far you’ve pushed this so please do share below the line.
Part 1. Before your event
Top Tip: on average expect 1 acceptance for every 10 invites you send. So multiply your target audience size by 10 to get your target figure for the number of invites you should be sending out. Then design your invitation to grab people’s attention, use tools like Eventbrite to get people registering right away, and build in at least a 3 month lead time for sending out invitations. Then once you’ve done that:
A. 1 month to go: Hype Email/DM
Update your leads with more details about the event eg. speakers, times, content, agenda. This is the hype building phase, and when you’ll start to have more confirmed details that you can share with people.
B. 2 weeks to go: Reminder Email
This is when you need to remind people as much as you can about your event. Emphasise the details like date, time, maps & directions.
C. 1 week to go: Ticket Email
We’re getting close now so send out tickets and specific entry details. If there are any competitions you are running this is the time to get people involved. This is also a great time to push any Twitter handles and encourage some social activity e.g. attendees tweeting “looking forward to X event next week”.
D. 1 day before: Big Fat Reminder Email
Use any excuse, reason, or cause to email your attendees the day before. No matter how much they can’t wait and are looking forward to your event, people are busy, and there’s always going to be someone who’ll just forget. That’s why they need a big fat reminder.
Part 2. During your event
A. Update Email
Throughout the event it’s great practice to send out regular updates of what’s going on, any agenda changes, news round-ups, or anything else you think will add value to your delegates.
B. Social Media
You will have put in some pre-prep work in the last week, but this is the time to shout about your event. Make sure that you actively (and rapidly!) engage with anyone using your hashtag, or mentioning your event. This will encourage more use, interaction and wider reach out in the ‘Twitter-sphere”.
C. Interaction & Apps
If you’re using Glisser (which of course you should be!) or an event app, these are perfect channels for creating live attendee engagement and collecting data about what your audience is liking, doing, and downloading. If you’ve run any live polls throughout the day, start to tweet and share these exclusive insights as soon as you can.
Part 3. After your event
A. Within 48 hours: Call To Action
Send everyone a follow-up email thanking them, and teeing up next steps (if any) e.g. a meeting, join our facebook group, sign up now for next year, here’s an incentive coupon code.
B. Within 1 week: No Show Revival
Make sure you also send a further follow up to the no shows containing content from the day (eg. a white paper or the best press releases). This is a great way to keep in touch and make sure your leads don’t go cold. Don’t forget there are many reasons why they didn’t show, and there’s a big possibility that they’ll show up at your next event or stay in touch if you give them the opportunity to.
You may already be doing 90% of this of this of course, but let me know what you think, any experiences you have, or any ideas to engage all the better with leads.
