According to the Content Marketing Institute, face-to-face marketing events were in the top three most successful marketing channels according to UK B2B marketers. So, our question is, are sending event follow-up emails worth the effort?
For us, yes.
Both our marketing teams – new business and customer – have their own follow-up strategies post event, but we now religiously send a series of follow-up campaigns after our events.
Why do you believe post-event follow-ups work?
With the majority of prospects and customers not ready to buy or upsell until they reach the 5-9th touch point in the sales cycle (depending on your business), the success of event marketing doesn’t guarantee you will close any sales. Follow-up email campaigns, however, will certainly improve your chances as they allow you to continue the conversation with your prospect/customer long after the event has passed.
Event follow-ups don’t just have to be to secure sales meetings either. They can also be used to; check double opt-in status, send a survey requesting feedback or give the participants the slides from the day – building your brand with them even further.
Both our teams have found follow-up email campaigns to garner more effective results whatever their objective than simply doing nothing. It’s not hard to understand why when we look at the reasoning.
How do event follow-ups work?
Despite our different marketing teams approaches, a workflow that we send after an event will look something similar to the below.
Within one workflow, we will target all event bookers. The top section of the above workflow goes to attendees of the event while the bottom section is sent to no-shows and cancellations.
How we’ll create our post-event workflow
FOR ATTENDEES
First, we check attendees confirmed opt-in status. Have they agreed to our marketing communications?
If the answer is yes, we’ll send them a survey. An hour later, a condition in the workflow will check if they’ve clicked the survey. If they have, those members are automatically sent the slides from the event they attended.
Those who are opted-in but don’t complete the survey within 1 hour go into a 3-day wait period, receiving the slides once they complete it. If they still don’t the campaign will be resent. If they don’t complete the survey, they don’t get the slides!
For those who are not double opted-in to our communications, they’ll get an email asking them to do this first. There is a 5 day wait period for them to complete this before they either exit the opt-in workflow or they enter the above workflow.
NON-ATTENDEES
Like attendees, their confirmation opt-in status will be checked. If they aren’t, they’ll be sent into a campaign asking them to do so. The process is the same as for attendees.
For those who are double opted-in, they will receive the slides and exit the workflow.
So there you have it! An easy way to set up an event follow up that engages your attendees and non-attendees with hardly any effort on your part. Why wouldn’t you set something like this up to see what results you can get from it?
If you’re interested in more marketing automation workflows that will help you attract, engage and convert email recipients and event attendees, take a look at our whitepaper here.
If you’re looking for further advice on how you can market your event properly with email, then this guide was written with you in mind!