How to Let Attendees Know They’re an Important Part of Events

Letting event participants know they’re an important part of your event is a great way to engage with them. When done right, it can enhance their event-going experience and improve their chances of attending future events you host.

What’s more is that it gives you an opportunity to encourage them to:

• Attend your next event.
• Recommend your event to their friends and peers.
• Share your event’s details with their social media following.
• Give testimonials that you can add to your event website or email newsletter.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can let your attendees know you value them throughout your event. Along the way, we’ll also share some actionable tips to help you get started.  Let’s begin.

Address Questions and Concerns Before the Event

Once you have your event website set up, you’re likely to get some questions from prospective attendees. Your goal should be to address their questions and concerns as quickly (and as thoroughly) as possible.

The first thing you need to do is make sure prospective attendees are able to reach out to you. Consider adding a contact form or a live chat option to your event website.

As an event organizer, you’ll be able to share your event site with colleagues and friends and ask them for feedback. For instance, you could ask them if any important information about the event is missing or if something is unclear. Getting a few extra pairs of eyes on your site before prospective attendees see it ensure that you’re able to answer most questions preemptively.

In addition to this, prospective attendees will be able to use the contact form to ask any questions they may have. You might even open up a forum or allow attendees to send in their questions through social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter using a hashtag or direct message, and by leaving comments on the event page.

It’s also a good idea to have an FAQs section on your event website that’s easy to access. This way, if a prospective attendee runs a search query on your website or in Google, they’ll get an answer to their question right away. (Plus, it adds SEO value to your event website!)

Once that’s done, make sure that you’re answering each and every question that comes your way. If you notice that many prospective attendees have asked the same question, add it to your event site’s FAQs section.

With Event Smart, prospective attendees are able to start discussions and engage with you and other attendees directly through your event website. This gives them an easy-to-access platform to ask questions and raise concerns. In addition to this, you also have the option to share news and updates with prospective attendees through your event blog.

Seek to Understand Your Audience

The more understand about your attendees the better you’ll be able to serve them. We recommend offering multiple ticket pricing options to give attendees the experience they are looking for. You should also collect as much information about the attendees themselves to give your audience the best experience.

Multiple Ticket Pricing Options

If you offer multiple ticket and pricing options, you can learn what your audience prefers. For example, if you offer a General Admission and VIP tickets, you’ll learn if they want higher or lower priced tickets, or if they want a premium experience–all from just offering at least two ticket options. Too many ticket options can cause more trouble than it’s worth, so don’t go overboard.

Complete Registration Forms

We always recommend a relational event registration strategy to establish trust with your audience and deliver the best experience you can. Make sure you’re collecting the appropriate amount of information about the attendees on your event registration forms. Too little information will leave you without the ability to answer the questions you have about the attendees, how to organize the event, etc. Too much information can deter attendees from registering because they don’t want to provide too much information or it takes too long to register. There must be a good balance that will be different for each event. But the information you do collect about the attendees should strongly influence your event.

Appreciate Returning Attendees

Acknowledging returning attendees is a great way to let your event participants know that they’re an important part of your event. Send them a thank you email or offer them a special discount for your next event. By doing so, you’re letting them know that you value their participation and look forward to having them attend upcoming events.

If you’ve been keeping track of who’s attended previous events, compile a list of attendees who’ve attended multiple events. Event Smart allows event organizers to easily collect registration data from attendees and use it to build email lists in MailChimp. In addition to this, it also gives users the option to export that data into an Excel or CSV file.

And if you’d like to take things to the next level, you can leverage Event Smart’s Advanced Contact Profiles feature that lets you keep track of your attendees’ event registration history. This allows you to customize your thank you emails or discount offerings. For example, if an attendee registered for a specific type of event (such as a product launch) twice in the past, you could offer them a discount to a similar event in the future.

Engage With Participants After the Event

Engaging with your event’s participants after the event ends enables you to build better relationships with them and gives you many opportunities to let them know they’re important to you.

Here are some quick ideas to help you get started:

• Send event participants thank you emails with links to photo galleries and video highlights taken at the event.
• Follow up on the conversations you had with leads and customers and explore the next steps.
• Create a content hub of resources of the keynote speeches delivered at your event. This could include audio or video recordings, lecture notes, and blog posts.
• Offer attendees limited time discounts to your next event.

Engaging with event participants after your event also opens up a communication channel. Both you and your attendees can benefit from it in a number of different ways. For example, you can create a members-only content hub. Your attendees can use it to share their experience with co-workers and peers.

Event Smart lets you send event participants and attendees emails through it’s MailChimp integration. You can even create a new ticket type for your next event and offer it to your attendees along with a discount offer.

Encourage Feedback

Ask attendees to fill out a quick survey or leave feedback after your event takes place. This lets them know that you value their opinion and are looking for ways to improve their event experience. For example, you can ask them if the event met their objectives or what you could do to improve next year’s event.

Encouraging event participants to give feedback an effective way to gauge whether your event was able to meet their expectations. In addition to this, it gives you information about how you can improve future events.

Event Smart’s MailChimp integration makes it easy for event organizers to build email lists from registration forms and send surveys to participants.

Conclusion

Engaging with attendees at different stages of your event and encouraging them to share their thoughts and opinions is a great way to let them know they’re an important part of your event. When attendees have a great experience, they’re more likely to attend your next event and recommend it to their peers.

Let’s quickly recap some of the ways you can let event participants know they’re an important part of your event:

• Open up communication channels to address any questions and concerns that come your way before the event.
• Appreciate returning attendees by sending them thank you emails or special discounts to your next event.
• Send attendees thank you emails with links to resources, image galleries, and video highlights to engage with them after the event.
• Encourage participants to leave feedback and share their opinion about your event by sending them a quick survey using Event Smart.

What are some of the ways you’ve let attendees know they’re an important part of your event? Let us know in the comments section below!