Automate Your Event Lead Nurturing… to a Point

Among all the details involved with hosting or attending a business or trade conference, the lines between planning, coordination and marketing can get blurred.

To alleviate the details associated with in-person event lead capture and lead nurturing, you can automate it.

Well, you can automate most of it. Within your automated sequencing, you need to trigger follow-up communications by a designated leader. That timing depends on your CRM lead scoring set-up for the event. If you don’t have a CRM, there’s an alternative way to do this. You can schedule emails through your email planning tool, and track queries from the web landing page analytics.

Once you get in the rhythm of setting up automated email sequences and landing pages for your events, it is an ingenious way to track leads of the event and tee them up for further business development.

So, how can you do it well?

First, your campaign should be discussed and planned at least three months ahead of an event. In the initial planning meeting, you can walk through the following:

• Who is the target audience?
• What are their challenges/pains that we can aim to solve?
• Which services/team are we promoting to them?
• Is there a theme, tag or central idea to anchor our marketing messaging?
• Who will “own” the lead follow-up?

With those answers in hand, you can begin crafting your email sequence and landing page content.

Crafting the Emails

The best number of emails for pre-marketing and post-marketing is an odd number. If you are only allowed to send one email to a registered attendee list prior to the event, it’s workable but not ideal. You will want to make the content count.

However, a series of three pre-marketing emails will improve your chances of reaching a busy attendee. Post-event, also send at least one and up to three emails.

For pre-marketing emails, use this order of messaging for email crafting: Pain | Consequence | Solution | Invitation. You can use the pain or the consequence in your email subject line to grab attention. Make sure that the first two sentences in your email reference the event, which helps provide context clues to the attendee.

If you can send more than one email, build upon your story in each successive email. The second email can reference the first one (“in my last email to you…”), and it can tell a story or provide an example of why your solution is helpful. Additional tips are as follows:

• Entice the reader to visit your booth (include booth number)
• If you don’t have a booth, but someone is speaking, make sure to mention the date and time of the presentation
• If you are simply attending, offer the attendees a downloadable resource to enhance their event experience

For post-marketing emails, use this order of messaging for email crafting: Fun Fact | Top Solutions Referenced | Invitation. Reference details or highlights from the event that either your firm or others presented, and then align it with challenges that your firm solves. Remind them of your solution and invite them to learn more.

How can you schedule these post-marketing emails ahead of the event if you didn’t attend it yet? Easy. Walk through the agenda and identify which issues are hot button that also align with your services. You can always edit them before they go out after the event, but at least you have a structure to quickly execute upon. Additional follow-up tips include:

• Share testimonials from your firm’s presentation (if someone spoke)
• List three event takeaways that align with your services
• Identify what you didn’t hear/cover at the event and how they can learn more (“although time was limited to dive into X, you can learn more here by…”)

Writing sequence emails takes practice to stay concise and targeted on the goals of your campaign. The email writing assignment needs to be crystal clear and based on the strategy meeting. This will help you avoid multiple edits. Finally, do a test run of your emails to maximize them for clarity, email filters and working links.

Finessing the Landing Page

Why do you need a landing page? The landing page is your ticket to opt-in emails if you are not hosting the event. It also introduces them to your thought leadership or any planning resources you have.

Even if you are hosting and have an opt-in list, you may want to segment for target attendees who you want to cross-service for additional needs.

Based on experimentation and trends on user attention spans, you will find that the ideal landing page experience is to the point and quick for clicking/downloading. Consider these aspects of user experience:

• Will they access the landing page on their phones through a QR code, on a desktop or both?
• Do you need a landing page for pre-event marketing and a second one for post-event marketing?
• How will you track leads? Web analytics with utm code? Through the email tool? CRM?
• Upon conversion, how do leads get to the leader for follow-up?

Landing pages should be simple for the user, but planning for them requires more thought. Build your plan into the initial event marketing strategy session. Once built, the landing page look and feel should be tested on mobile as well as desktop. You should be looking for clarity, accessibility and easy navigation; the copy should be brief, and any forms should be quick to fill out; and lastly, the download buttons should be self-evident to someone who didn’t build the page.

 Common Do’s and Don’ts in Email Sequencing

• Do update your database and segment for the event
• Do use first names and personalize through the CRM/email tool
• Do automate emails prior to event and after event
• Do create a landing page with intriguing resource to capture/cross-serve leads
• Do assign/confirm lead follow-up process

Don’ts

• Don’t miss an opportunity to push to the landing page at your booth
• Don’t schedule sequence emails too close together
• Don’t make email paragraphs too long; leave space in the email for scanning
• Don’t wait too long for lead follow-up after the event; get buy-in ahead of time from niche leaders
• Don’t be shy about a 3-mos, 6-mos and 9-mos follow-up after event

Final Word on Lead Follow-Up

You can create an award-winning email sequencing campaign, but if your leaders are not on board to follow up personally with leads at some point, you’re sunk. Confirm the niche leader(s) willing to put in extra work for event lead follow-up. You can automate those emails, too, but in the end, marketing is only as good as its alignment with goals that everyone has agreed on ahead of time. With leader buy-in, go forth and automate!

Dawn Wagenaar is a brand strategist and principal of Ingenuity Marketing Group, LLC; her specialized team consults with accounting and advisory firm growth professionals and their advisors to implement multi-channel brand strategies for visibility and growth.