How the Net Promoter Score (NPS) Can Revolutionize Your Event

Event Management News

September 29, 2016

Are you in the loop with NPS?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a score that measures your customer’s loyalty. NPS was invented by business strategist, author and speaker, Fred Reichheld with research provided by Satmetrix in 2007, and has been developed into a renowned, cross-industry customer satisfaction evaluation tool. The NPS is utilized by hundreds of top companies in the healthcare, technology, telecom, financial, retail, manufacturing and travel industries, to name a few, including top brands such as Delta Airlines, General Motors, Citigroup, Lego and Paypal. But don’t be fooled because we’ve only provided large conglomerates as examples – the NPS is an ideal event management tool for helping corporate event planners and marketing managers to gauge their attendees’ feedback to their events.

Your NPS Score comes down to your customer answering one question – just one, that’s it! “How likely is it you would recommend us [product, service, event] to a friend?” Respondees are asked to rank their response on a scale from 0-10, with 10 indicating extremely likely, and 0 indicating not likely at all. The responses are then grouped into three categories:

(image courtesy of checkmarket.com)

Promoters (score of 9-10) – These are your loyal fans, who will sing your event’s praises to their friends and colleagues. They generally account for about 80% of your referrals.

Passives (score of 7-8) – While these folks are still considered to be satisfied, they might have qualified or not-quite-enthusiastic responses to your event and could easily be lured by a competing brand.

Detractors (score of 0-6) – These people are unhappy customers/attendees who account for more than 80% of your negative word-of-mouth. They have the power to discourage new customers and create low morale among your event team.

The NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Industry benchmarks are typically available for a fee via different research companies, but you may want to start simply by collecting your own data to establish an internal benchmark.

Before your event is over, you can share this question with your attendees via email or event app push notification, to gather their responses while the experience is fresh in their minds.

So What Does This Mean For Event Marketing?

Once you have your data in hand to help you track your customer journey, you can then learn who specifically among your event attendees are your Promoters, Passives and Detractors. This, coupled with dynamic event surveys, can lead to detailed engagement with those targeted audiences.

Promoters – Ask your promoters about their favorite aspects of your event. Once you understand what is really working, you can preserve and even refine those elements of your event to make it even better in the future. These influencers are perfect to include in your post event wrap-up videos and next year’s event collateral – they can even help close new sponsors or exhibitors with their passion.

Passives – Ask your passives what would make them more excited about your event – what would tip them over the edge to turn them into promoters. Ask them about the things they hated that might preclude future support. Although some of these things may seem like small details, they can make all the difference to your attendees, and you should pay careful attention to them.

Detractors – Give your detractors an opportunity to provide detailed information about the reason for their dissatisfaction, or to suggest ways they would like to see your event improved. You may even want to consider personal correspondence to soothe any particularly ruffled feathers.

With these kinds of actionable insights at your disposal, you are now in a position to execute a plan to create your best event yet! The NPS results can be used by all levels of your team, including front-line staff, management and executives, to refine your practices and objectives going forward. Many event planners also poll their staff for feedback on ways to make improvements as part of their post-event debrief. By sharing these insights with all of your team members, you can work together to constantly iterate your process and maintain a high standard of event excellence both with your attendees as well as within your industry.

To learn more about how Attendease can help you elevate your event management practice, click here.

Your Repeatable Event Portfolio Process

Event Management News

September 27, 2016

Running a successful event isn’t just about impressing your client or boss, it’s about adding to your event management portfolio so you can drive more business and boost your bottom line. Not only do you want your event to look good, you want to be seen as a leader in your industry. By using an effective process that can be duplicated, you can boost your event portfolio with fewer errors, increase your brand consistency, and avoid burning out. Here’s how:

Increase your event roster. Duplicating your processes could enable more events, allowing you to double your event roster. Using an efficient cross-platform event management solution will save you time, freeing up additional time and resources to take on multiple events. Taking on more events will show that you are capable of not only running quality events, but managing a higher quantity of events too.

Create a more diverse event portfolio. An event that is easier to execute opens up more opportunities to take on a variety of event types. This allows you to show your diversity as an event marketer, proving that you can manage events of different types and sizes, from webinars to product salons, to user conferences. Showing that you can work with a diverse clientele will not only demonstrate your ability to meet the needs of a range of clients, but it will increase profits for your business by tapping into new channels.

Customize events. Creating event-type templates allows for more customizable events, enabling you to create portfolios to match each unique event size and segment. Showing that you can customize elements of an event will not only impress your boss, it will impress your clients as well.

Generate new leads. When processes can be repeated and executed seamlessly, you will see more effective lead generation opportunities as a result. Event attendees will see that you’ve successfully managed your event without a hitch, and will want you to harness a successfully-run event for them as well.

Please the customer. Through creating repeatable processes, you can cater to various customer segments. This will allow you to grow and expand your reach, while ensuring a solid customer experience.

Show results. Aggregate event metrics for a portfolio view of your events. As part of your stream of repeatable processes, it is important to include a thorough, descriptive event report that summarizes all of the necessary metrics to make your event shine as a component of your overall portfolio. Strong metrics to back up the success of your event will draw in more business opportunities and prove your place as an event leader, while improving your overall event portfolio management process.

Using a repeatable process will not only cut down on your work time, but it will positively impact the event’s outcome. Your event team will be able to drive significantly better results through doing more events, generate more leads, and ultimately see a better ROI as a result.

About Attendease

Attendease is the event management platform trusted by teams running some of the world’s biggest, most exciting, design-forward and tech-advanced events. At Attendease, we believe that having the most effective events as part of an overall digital marketing strategy is all about giving organizations the right code, design and access to innovations. With ultimate flexibility in design and integrations, the Attendease powerful platform helps teams focus on developing amazing events that grow great companies. For more information, visit www.eventupplanner.com.

How To Take Your Corporate Event from Basic To Brilliant

Event Management News

September 15, 2016

The ideal outcome of a well-run event, would be for your attendees to leave buzzing about your event’s success. You would want them to spread the word, you would want to see a booming list of prospects lining up to work with you, an increased number of events on the horizon as a result, and an amazing ROI to show for all of your hard work.

These results would involve having an impressed and engaged group of guests at your event – guests who are potential prospects, customers, and partners. You would need an efficiently-managed event planning and marketing strategy, the integration of digital elements for better real-time management and trackability of attendees, and streamlined planning and management processes – all backed by a solid team. That ideal outcome is possible, but the only way to achieve those goals, would be to start with a strong core event management platform, and then embellish that basic framework with added bells and whistles to really make your event shine.

Most event managers know the basic elements that are required to make an event run smoothly – the planning, execution, and follow-up required to make an event succeed. But the truth is, success relies on more than just knowing which key elements to include in the process. Without having a scalable event tech platform in place, attendee experience could suffer, and your goals could fall by the wayside. Ensuring that you have cohesive, streamlined, and on-brand planning, execution, and tracking processes is vital to your event’s success, and it all relies on that strong core foundation to bring your event to the next level.

As an event leader, you need to ensure that you have a core foundation to manage your event portfolio, the micro-sites, registration process, the event venues, the speakers and sponsors, and the lead generation opportunities. Once you’ve built that solid core, then you can shift your focus to enhancing engagement through enticing add-ons such as mobile apps, gamification, beacons, and matchmaking and networking capabilities. The perfect package of building upon a proven core event management software system, will create that amazing attendee experience, and give you the results you desire.

Starting with a strong event management platform will enable productivity, efficiency, planning and execution, resulting in more events and an increased ROI, and building on that strong core with added bells and whistles will take your event from good to great.

About Attendease

How Using A Repeatable Event Process Will Boost Your Event Portfolio

Event Management News

September 13, 2016

Using a repeatable event process will not only cut down on your work time, but it will positively impact the event’s outcome. Your event team will be able to drive significantly better results through doing more events, generate more leads, and ultimately see a better ROI as a result.

About Attendease

How To Take The Upper Hand On Event Technology

Event Management News

September 8, 2016

As an event planner, you are so busy!. Juggling strategy with execution is a game of timing that requires focus and organization. Between defining a theme and keynote speakers, managing your budget, booking hotels, creating registration forms, crafting a schedule, and finalizing the mobile event app, you may be looking at a best case scenario of organized chaos. The reality is, you need help to stay organized and effectively execute all those assignments that have landed in your lap. You need an event management platform that is powerful yet easy to use, allowing you to build out and manage content and information as you bash through all the tasks on your plate.

First Things First

The first thing you need is an event management tool that will allow you to quickly publish your event landing page and initial registration information, beautifully designed, while you are nailing down all your sessions and confirming all your speakers. You should be able to add this information in bits and pieces as the details are solidified. As a bonus, every time you make an important addition to your schedule, it’s a great excuse for an email blast!

Sharing Information With Your Team in Real Time

These days, event marketing teams are spread far and wide, sometimes working from different parts of the world, let alone in the same office. You need an integrated event management platform that allows you to communicate and collaborate with chosen members of your team in real time, so you can finalize copy, confirm speaker lineup, make decisions on vendors, and update your ongoing marketing plans as you get closer to your event date. You’ll also want to be able to plan and coordinate all your pre-production and load-in plans.

Easy Check-In

Your online registration software should translate seamlessly into easy check-in on the day of your event. No more clumsy, hand-written lists or endless excel spreadsheets. No more attendees fumbling for print-outs of their ticket confirmation. Integration of ticket sales and check-in is the new gold standard in event registration. Most people know now to merely bring their smart phones and flash their confirmation email for quick entry at the door. This saves time for everyone, and prevents annoying delays for attendees.

Event Communications Insights

It’s important to understand the flow of your marketing outreach – how people respond to your mailings, your press releases and your social media postings. Your event marketing and communications can tell a powerful story and provide the secret sauce for your best attended event yet. Your event marketing plan should be fluid and responsive, allowing you the opportunity to pivot and iterate your process at any time prior to your event.

Pulling it All Together

At any point leading up to the final execution of your event, you need to be able to make last minute changes and communicate the necessary information to all team members and attendees. With the right event technology, your entire production operation should be well integrated into a mobile first, fluid, technology ecosystem.

And this type of system even integrates into the future… When you’re ready to start planning your next event, you can utilize an event tech platform to easily launch your new event website and registration page by cloning a previous one or firing up a new template. You’ll be able to customize as you go, maintaining brand continuity while saving time and money across a series of events.

If you’d like more information on how Attendease might be able to help you with your next event, get in touch with us here.

5 Tips To Power Boost Event Revenue & Attendance

Event Management News

September 6, 2016

Today’s event attendees are a busy crowd, often fielding multiple event invitations in one week. In order to help your event stand out in the sea of exciting options out there, you need to ensure that the registration process is quick and easy. Keeping in mind the needs of today’s on-the-go working professional, here are five ways to take advantage of the latest advances in event technology to bring in the right people, and lots of them.

1) Mobile First Approach

Ensuring your event technology is accessible on your attendee’s smart phone is not a “nice to have,” but a necessity. Your attendees are busy and on the go; they rely on their mobile devices as constant sources of news and connection during long days of hectic pursuit… The success of your event and the likelihood of a boost in ticket sales can be directly correlated to having a mobile friendly event website and registration form. A system like this can also help you harness very useful event analytics, event surveys and event check in data.

2) Smart Design

You’ll want to make sure that your event landing page design is simple and readable. Instructions need to be clear and to the point. Graphics should enhance your overall branding, not distract from it. All information needs to be accurate and readily available. People with limited time on their hands should be able to get in and get out with all the basic facts in hand, registration completed smoothly, in as few steps as possible.

3) Create Different Ticket Types and Milestones

Everyone likes a good deal, and event attendees are no different. If you create an incentive for early registration by offering a discount for signing up by a certain date, people who were already planning to attend will most likely take advantage of it. If the discount is significant enough, you can use the savings as an enticement to first time registrants who just need that little extra push to jump onboard. Building in a schedule like this also gives you an additional opportunity for target marketing with email campaigns to remind people of the early bird registration deadline.

4) Stay in Touch

Once you’ve identified the right target audience for your event, you’ll want to make sure you stay in touch with them during your entire registration period. Email blasts containing direct invitations are as much about building relationships as they are about selling tickets. For any event you produce, you’re creating a community of like-minded individuals who are a natural fit for your brand. Along the way, you have multiple opportunities to remind them about discount deadlines, encourage them to complete their registration if they halted midway through the process, and announce new additions to your speaker and session line up. They are part of your world now, so keep that relationship alive, before, during and even after the event!

5) Use Social Media

As you continue to utilize email as a tool of direct outreach to your people, you’ll want to also cut a wide swath in the broader community by making news about your event highly visible on all of your social media channels. These days, many people use Twitter and Facebook, even Instagram, as their primary way of communicating with others about upcoming events. Create an event page on Facebook to link people to your event landing page. Share pictures on Instagram of featured speakers, your venue, or other exciting event-related images. Tweet regularly about registration deadlines and your most exciting speakers. Beat the drum loudly, in as many places as possible, and your people will come running to you.

If you’d like more information on how Attendease might be able to help you your highest performing event, get in touch with us here.

Why An Integrated Approach Is Key for Corporate Events

Event Management News

September 1, 2016

It takes plenty of people and a slew of steps to plan, schedule, and execute a successful event. With a dizzying deck of documents, it can be tricky to track each stage of an event’s execution without slipping up. A collaborative team that is well integrated into the overall marketing strategy is key. However, so is using an integrated event management platform – it’s not only easier, it’s essential. Here are 5 reasons why it matters:

1) Collaborate. Through connecting the pieces – attendees, venues, websites, schedules, speakers, sponsors, and financials – you can work from one unified document as opposed to trying to fit together the puzzle pieces of the event’s varying details. This will not only keep things up-to-date and consistent but will make it easier for an event collaboration with your team members to happen effectively.

2) Create. An integrated platform will allow you to create conflict-free schedules, on-brand digital elements, real-time registration processes, and post-event wrap reports, without having to bounce between programs or duplicate documents.

3) Communicate. Event communication is key. Using an integrated platform will allow you to communicate instantly with your attendees, speakers and sponsors, before, during, and after the event, and will also keep the lines of communication open and current between you and your team members.

4) Customize. Using an integrated platform makes customized branding across all channels much easier. Instead of duplicating the look and feel of your event over various programs, you can manage it all from one central spot. A clean, consistent, cross-channel brand will give your event a professional edge.

5) Chronicle. A successful event carries no merit without a strong follow-up report to back up the event’s success. With all of the key details and communications stored in the same spot, creating a knock-it-out-of-the-park summary will be easy.

It’s time to ditch the spreadsheets and simplify your process with an integrated platform that connects your steps in a smooth and seamless way. Working from one unified platform that integrates all your event details not only saves time, it simplifies the event management process from start to finish, shining the spotlight on you and your successfully-run event.

About Attendease