This article will describe three methods that help you register attendees for your event with a minimum marketing budget.
Saying that I will first lay some ground rules and tips that you need to follow, no matter what channel you are using to register your attendees:
- Start your event marketing 30-60 days before the event
- Don’t spam your audience
- Provide value first approach
- Define your ideal event audience
Channels I recommend using to register attendees:
- Drive registrations through your event speakers and other registered attendees using Gleanin – Community Marketing Platform
- E-Marketing Campaign & Marketing Automation
- LinkedIn Event Page & Paid LinkedIn Advertisement
1. Drive registrations through your event speakers and other registered attendees using Gleanin – Community Marketing Platform
Word-of-mouth is the most powerful marketing channel. Gleanin helps you utilize the trust of your event community so that you can cut through the noise and demand attention.
With Gleanin, you can help your speakers & registered attendees share the word on social networks that they are speaking/attending your event. Thus attracting more visibility and registration to your event. It is simple as that, and the best thing is that you can track the impact and the registrations of those post-drive, gaining insight about the influencer that brought the most value and registrations
Example of one of the speakers at the A2Z event and his post on Linkedin.
Gleanin is an affordable and cost-effective way to drive awareness and registrations.
2. E-Marketing Campaign & Marketing Automation
In our case, we used Mailchimp. It is easy to use the Marketing Automation platform at an affordable price (even has a freemium plan that includes up to 2,000 contacts, with 10,000 sends per month and a daily limit of 2,000). But you can use almost any other alternative like Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, and others.
To create an effective e-marketing campaign, you need to have:
- A pre-existing audience list (that belongs to you and is not acquired through some shady means)
- Planned communication plan & content that provides value first to the recipients. (the best practice is to send a communication email once or twice a month)
- Email template design – I don’t believe in fancy graphical email designs. I prefer to use simple plain one-column email templates that look very similar to an email you would send manually to your customers. But the decision depends on your brand strategy and fundamentally understanding your audience preferences.
In our case, we had a list of 2,129 members that attended our A2Z Virtual Event in 2021.
Through Mailchimp, we have created an automated campaign that offers our last year’s attendees to join with a one-click-on link through an email to the A2Z Hybrid 2022 Event.
If you already have the attendees’ information, there is no reason for you to ask them to fill out a registration form again. You can automatically repurpose those registrants to a new event, as long as they want and consent to it.
Our first email communication example:
- Provide the information you have already filled in during the registration to verify that nothing has changed and that the majority of data is up-to-date.
- You are allowing them to sing automatically to your upcoming event with one click, without a need to refill the registration form from scratch.
- To maximize results, create segmentation: audience tags and groups. Then create multiple variations of the same communication to match the email content to your intended audience segment.
3. LinkedIn Event Page & Paid LinkedIn Advertisement
I find an event LinkedIn page to be an effective and free tool to invite attendees to your event. It is an easy process, and you can follow this guide to create it.
Once you have set an event page, you, your team, and your attendees can weekly invite 1,000 guests to join your event.
You can also post in the group and start networking.
Check out A2Z Hybrid 2022 Event page.
Another cool thing is that if your hybrid events platform supports integration to LinkedIn APIs, you can transfer those registrations automatically to your event Database or Marketing Automation tool. It takes only one-click registration (without the need to fill out long forms, just consent to a privacy policy of your event). In our case, we use our own hybrid events platform – Vii Events. It provides such integration out of the box.
To even further enhance your event page visibility, you can use a LinkedIn Advertise module and create an Event registration Campaign. You can read on how to do it, in this guide.
As you can see, it is a cost-effective way to increase your event visibility and get some registration for your event.
This is what our LinkedIn ad looked like. You can play with creativity here, do A/B testing with different formats to get the best results, and furthermore increase conversion rates.
I hope you liked the tips that I shared in this article. Stay tuned for more best practices and tips.
I will share all the numbers and breakdowns of planning and executing the A2Z Hybrid London 2022 Event.
Feel free to write comments and share your thoughts!