It’s not over yet…but the hardest part of your event is over. Let’s take a deep breath. You made it! Still, one more task is just waiting in a queue. What’s up?
It’s actually a “Post Event Engagement”. When it comes to post-event engagement, you have much more to do to nurture your potential guests to ensure they take desirable action that converts to higher ROI.
So, after your virtual event, you can jump right into executing all those post-event engagement strategies. Before getting into the ideas, let’s have a quick glimpse of why it is so important to have post-event engagement.
- Paves ways to turn your guests into customers
- Measure the success of your event and value your business
- Build brand loyalty and eventually gain new leads
- Making sense to network with new people
Table of Contents
Post Event Engagement Ideas – Ways to Follow up with your Guests
Send a thank-you email
Your guests took time out of their busy schedules to come to your event, so the least you can do is take the time to say thank you (it’s also a great excuse to connect with them again). Send a simple follow-up email right after the event — you’ll be surprised how far this small gesture goes. Follow this best audience engagement ideas to follow.
Send a “sorry we missed you” email to no-shows
Don’t limit your follow-ups to just the people who attended your event. Reach out to the people who planned to be there but didn’t end up making it, let them know you missed them, and then show them everything they missed. Send them the post-event page, and any other relevant content from the event.
Create Post Event Page
Let your guests relive the entire experience (or see what they missed) with a post-event engagement page — simply edit and add to the event landing page you already created. Showcase every part of your events like a sneak peek of entire events, speakers’ gestures, social wall display, award winners (if any), fun stats about the event, photos of your event booth and more.
Promote it on your social channels, and share it with anyone who attended or anyone who didn’t.
Ask them to fill out a post-event survey
Send a post-event engagement survey to your guests and ask for feedback on the event: what worked, what didn’t, what their favourite part was, etc. That way, you can make your next event even better.
Some of the post-event engagement survey questions are,
- How much did you enjoy the venue?
- How courteous and friendly did you find the staff?
- How would you rate the relevance of the speaker?
- How much did they enjoy the workshops?
- Would you recommend this event to others?
Have your sales or customer teams personally follow-up
If your event’s goal was to drive sales or customer engagement, get your Sales or Customer teams to reach out (over the phone or via email) personally to guests after the event — whether it’s with a relevant piece of content or a “what did you think of the event?”
If your events run in the long run, then you can’t be able to contact hundreds and thousands of contacts. At the same time not, all people will be ready to attend your phone call yet. For these people, you’ll want to first engage them through emails and newsletters, eventually building their trust and brand loyalty before contacting them directly.
Use HexaFair platform post-event engagement analytics reports and lead source your attendees based on the early registrations, time spent on the app, number of engagements, email-open rates, etc.
An effective way to engage with your guests is to send any content that aligns with the event. Even if you don’t have anything on hand, you should plan to create content (before or after the event), that you can eventually use as a nice touch point down the road.
Additionally, if there was any content presented or mentioned during the event (decks, videos, etc.), your guests might appreciate having that in their inbox, too.
Follow-Up Event to Encourage Networking
Many attendees often don’t feel like they connected with enough people during the event. If you can give people another opportunity to connect with one another, do it and you’ll find that many people will be receptive to the idea.
Your event will now be the common connection between several future business relationships, which strengthens your brand and will become a future talking point for years to come.
Use a HexaFair event app that can remain live after your event has wrapped. This way you can send notifications and updates to remind attendees of your upcoming networking event.
Leverage your audience’s competitive spirit to keep them talking about your event online.
Offer fun prizes and incentives to encourage your attendees to participate in a social media contest – the best post-event engagement ideas to attract an audience.
Popular suggestions include photo sharing contests, by getting guests to post their pictures taken during the event, but can also include caption contests, raffles, tagging friends, sharing the page or post with friends, or posting the most popular comment.
Wrap Up
It’s important to understand what works and what doesn’t, especially when you’re blasting your audience with a lot of emails. Make sure to look into your historical email data to see what has worked in the past and what hasn’t.
Try HexaFair for post-event engagement and look for the platform demo and utilize tons and tons of new features to host virtual or hybrid events.