The best way to leverage existing and new relationships from your events is to stay in touch. You should develop tailored messaging for every scenario a contact may fall into. If they were able to attend – great! – Make sure your email follow up includes a thank you as well as valuable takeaway information. You can also ask for feedback.
It’s likely that you had several no-shows, as we all know that emergencies, whether professional or personal, can crop up last minute. Follow up with these contacts as well to let them know they were missed, and include a valuable asset like a recording of a webinar or a summary of a live event. Do the same for those who let you know ahead of time that they had a conflict. Be sure to mention that you’ll be hosting more events like this in the future, and you hope to see them there.
Even those who never made a peep should be sent a follow up email explaining the value that the event provided, and extend an invitation to attend more similar events as you arrange them moving forward.
As during the planning stages, your sales team should be following up shortly after the conclusion of the event. Like any sales approach, they’ll want to employ the two touch method – Since your contacts will already be receiving your preplanned email templates, encourage your salespeople to reach out to connect with invitees and attendees on LinkedIn – that is, if they aren’t already connected. If they are, a brief message on the social platform is a good alternative second touch.
The key takeaway is simple if we look at the recurring trend in each stage – Engagement. Your goal is to make your invitees and attendees feel like they’re an integral part of your production. Of course, this is easy to do when you’re face to face (or screen to screen).
The strategic steps you need to take both before and after the event are simply a two touch approach of appropriate emails based on contact responses, or lack thereof, paired with phone calls from your sales team. Just be sure to personalize the approach for each outreach – Particularly, keep track of any meaningful conversations or comments during the event and ensure that they’re a focal point of follow up.
Megan Cramer is a Marketing and Sales Enablement Consultant at Mindmatrix, providing strategic consultation on marketing and sales best practices, assisting with technical needs, and interfacing with leaders in our organization to help develop new processes and program additions to best serve our clients.