Attending to Attendance
Design an Effective Marketing Campaign
by Tim Bostwick | Published in December 2007 Focus on Event Marketing
If all the differences among events of varying levels of complexity, there’s one question that everyone — whether you’re throwing a party for friends on a Saturday night or executing a conference for 3,000 people — asks him- or herself: What if nobody shows up?
Of course, for the casual host, the problem can usually be solved in the time it takes to log on to Evite.com. But for the professional planner with tens of thousands of budget dollars on the line, things are a bit more complicated.
Here’s how to design a marketing campaign so that your chips and dip, figuratively speaking, don’t go to waste.
The Key to Response Rates
In evaluating the effectiveness of a marketing plan, it’s important to focus on two numbers — the initial response rate (or “hit” rate) for the offer and the show-up rate (aka, butts in seats).
Response rates are driven by loyalty. Customers have a relationship with your company such as a financial investment in your products, daily interaction with your support staff and a degree of loyalty that has grown over time. Prospects, by contrast, may not even know your company exists yet. Thus, you may get an 8 to 10 percent response from existing customers for a paid event and 0.01 percent when inviting prospects. This means that your customers are 800 to 1,000 times more likely to attend a paid seminar than a prospect!
This order-of-magnitude difference dictates that you invest resources to create in-house customer lists that are as comprehensive as possible. You will spend less building a quality customer list than by renting potentially gigantic prospects lists from outside sources.
Sidebar
The response rate is heavily influenced by whether the event requires a fee or is free of charge, and also whether the attendee is close to the event (local) or scattered (national). The lower the cost of the event and the closer it is to the attendee, obviously, the higher the response rate will be.
Conversely, as the fee and travel expenses increase — and the time out of the office grows — response rates decrease. These factors favor marketing primarily to the local audience for the free show floor and nationally for the paid conference. (It’s also a good idea to look at last year’s demographics to see what percentage of attendees came from the area local to the event.)
Additionally, the show-up rate is heavily influenced by whether the event is free or paid. Paid registrants always attend unless there’s an emergency, while the show-up rate for a free event may be 30 percent or lower.
This suggests that your marketing program should be conducted in two phases. First, determine who is interested in the event, using relatively inexpensive media such as postcard collateral; then convert this response rate to butts-in-seats by investing heavily in telemarketing.
Maximize Response Rates by Mixing Media
What’s the best medium? This is difficult to answer, because identifying the root event that drives people to register is hard to do accurately.
For example, you may put a question on the registration form that asks, “How did you hear about the conference?” But people misremember, so this data is inherently misleading. Did the mail pieces cause them to finally notice the print ads? And is that why they checked “Print Ad” instead of “Brochure,” when the correct answer should be “All of the Above”?
This is why we recommend that you employ every marketing medium at your disposal — telemarketing, e-mail, collateral, print advertising and, of course, the Web.
Our operating assumption is that people respond differently to different media. For example, some people actually read their printed mail. Others may get 200 e-mails a day, so a telephone call leaves a much stronger impression. In fact, we’re finding that telephone follow-up is increasingly effective because people receive fewer phone calls than ever.
Let’s consider each of these marketing media for a fictitious event with a paid attendance goal of 600.
Collateral
In the box below is a brief description of the types of marketing pieces that can be used to market a conference.
To reduce costs, consider moving the expensive advance program to the Web. With the production and mailing costs of, for example, a 10,000-piece advance program, going online can free up $50,000 for other media.
Sample Collateral Campaign
Brochure #1
Drop Date: 3.5 months prior to the conference. Print Quantity: 50,000 with 25,000 mailed now and 25,000 mailed later. Description: 6”x9”, four-panel, four-color brochure. Double-printed to reduce printing and design costs. Mailed third class to the entire prospect database.
Advance Program
Drop Date: 2.5 months prior to the conference. Print Quantity: 10,000. Description: 8.5”x11”, 32-page, four-color book. Mailed to subset of the larger prospect mailing list.
Brochure #2
Drop Date: One month prior to the conference. Already printed in first print run. This second run “snipes” the upper right corner with “Last Chance to Register.” Mailed third-class to the entire prospect database.
Telemarketing
Virtually every event we at AMI manage includes some telemarketing. The actual process might be better called “telereminding” because there’s no selling involved; we just make sure they’ve received the information that was mailed to them, direct them to the Web and answer any questions they might have. (You’re not going to close someone over the phone regarding an expensive purchase such as a conference registration anyway.)
This is an excellent method for reaching people who don’t read their printed mail or who are inundated with e-mail — or simply to reinforce the messages you’ve been conveying through direct mail and e-mail.
E-mail has come into its own as a marketing medium and has developed its own set of challenges. Its popularity soared because of its extremely low cost, the ability to deliver a marketing message directly to a prospect’s desktop and the perception that e-mail was the latest Internet marketing tool. Low cost, of course, led to its proliferation, which, in turn, has led to declining effectiveness.
While e-mail is still an important tool, it’s important not to overstate its value. Like all elements of the campaign, its value lies in reinforcing other elements.
Website
The key point here is to that the Web can help lower your marketing expenses by housing your large printed pieces, which frees up budget for other media. Use the cheaper postcards described above to drive people to the website. Your home page becomes a destination for your marketing — an always-evolving, always available online brochure. All media should plug the website.
Print Ads
As we discussed in the last article in the Sept. issue, publication sponsorships can be a valuable marketing tool if your event is market-wide. Given the expense, you may consider bartering sponsorships and mailing lists for ad pages.
The Guidelines
Remember that the first pass should use low-cost media. Subsequent passes cost more but should focus only on prospects who express an interest. (Aka, feed your eagles; starve your turkeys.)
You’ll get the best results when each medium reinforces the other by arriving in close proximity. For example, run your print ads the same week the direct mail drops and launch an e-mail blast at the same time.
A final point: Marketing is expensive — and a thorough, aggressive campaign is really expensive. If you’re like many planners, you may have unrealistic expectations about the “pull” from a particular medium. For example, most people think that a 2 percent hit rate for a conference is about right. When we point out that the response from a cold list is more like 0.02 percent (yes, that’s two one-hundredths of one percent), they’re flabbergasted. We explain that an integrated, reinforced campaign may boost the overall hit rate on the total campaign to half of one percent. But if the price of the event is sufficient, you can build a model that will make even this low percentage work.
Learn how to implement your marketing campaign in the third part of this series in the February 2008 issue!
About the author: Tim Bostwick
Tim Bostwick is an executive vice president with AMI, a conference management firm located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Contact: tim@amotive.com