You spent endless hours pre-planning, preparing, and hosting your event to draw in the ideal audience. Your event may have wrapped up, but has your event really ended? In fact, it has just begun its phase 2. Like pre-event engagement, post-event engagement holds great power. If we were to compare, post-event engagement is far more difficult. Why?
Look at it this way. Because you have already set an impression in front of your audience via the event. Now, you have to maintain it. When it comes to post-event engagement activities, you have much more to do.
Now’s the time to devise one of the most crucial elements of the event management cycle: the post-event engagement activities. Keep reading to discover several ways to utilize post-event engagement ideas to drive value and maintain relationships with attendees.
Post-Event Communications
Every set of post-event activities varies from the next, mainly depending on the goal of your event. However, there are some post-event engagement ideas that every winning post-event strategy should include. These can be complemented with anything else your company does after your events.
Here are some post-event engagement activities you can do to follow up with your attendees:
1. Send a follow-up email
An extremely well-written email is a powerful tool. A follow-up email helps maintain good relations with participants and improves attendance at future events. Hence, it gives you the chance to build rapport with attendees, share beneficial insights, and highlight success data.
You can send a thank you email to the attendees. For the no-shows, you can write “we missed you” mail. Towards the end, direct them towards the event highlights page where you have shared clippings and pictures from the event. Remember to keep your subject line catchy and make use of appealing graphics! If you’re looking for ideas, there are tons of follow-up email templates you can use.
Following is a sample thank you email:
2. Create a post-event survey
Attendee feedback is one of the most significant parts of analyzing your event success. Even if your event sold out, you must follow up with attendees to ensure they absolutely enjoyed their experience.
While sending out emails, mention the number of questions in the survey or the time it will take to complete it (for example, “A three-minute survey). You can also incentive the survey questionnaire by offering respondents the chance to win an event-branded promotional gift, a gift card, a discount, or a free pass to a future event.
Also, there are some event platforms that send automated feedback mailers to all attendees for Free. Here is an example of a template.
Send automated feedback mails using AllEvents →
3. Leverage social media platforms
Social media platforms as post-event activities are a great way of staying in touch with your attendees. Furthermore, ensure that the social media platforms you use are where you can locate your event’s target audiences. You can invite your attendees to follow your social media platforms through your follow-up email. You can also engage them with your social media content.
AllEvent’s social media event promotion guide can help you create an effective post-event social media strategy. One good example these days is to hold a Twitter space. You can organize a weekly Twitter space session throughout the year, even if the event is a once-in-a-year thing.
Here are some different things you can do:
- Post a montage of photos, reviews, and event highlights.
- Make a highlight reel of attendees enjoying your event.
- Plan a workshop/webinar and later post important clippings from webinars and workshops for your audience to revisit.
- Host a social media contest with an appealing consolation gift.
- Get imaginative with on-brand memes and GIFs that echo your event.
- Ask your audiences to share photos and tag you or mention your hashtag.
One of the crucial things to keep in mind when using your social media platform is consistency. Posting once or twice a week can grow the sense of belongingness amongst your audience to the next level.
4. Mail attendees an event-branded gratitude gift box
Unexpected gifts are more exciting! An event-branded gift box is an excellent way to catch attendees off-guard. Surprise them with goodies and treats they’ll adore. You can include virtually anything — a gift coupon, a discount voucher, a free subscription, and whatnot. If you want to give them something materialistic as a token for attending your event, ink it with your brand name so that it serves as a sweet reminder.
If you have another similar event arriving, you can send them a personal invitation or an exclusive early bird special discount as a gratitude gift. This is a great chance to make sure your previous attendees feel valued, as well as excited for the next event.
5. Notify them of future events
How do you put your event registration data to optimum use? Besides using this data for analyzing and coming up with trends, you can use this data for retargeting. Attendees who have attended your event once are likely to attend it again, given that they had a wonderful experience.
Maintain a record of your past attendees and ensure that they are aware of your new events. Allevents can help you do this for free by sending your attendees a sweet notification informing them of your next event. This will help you stay in touch with your attendees after you have sent them a thank you email for attending. Post-event activities like sending reminders can effectively help you retain your audience.
To Conclude
Once your event has ended, it’s your and your team’s responsibility to find post-event engagement ideas to maintain meaningful relationships with attendees. By keeping them entertained with your brand, you’ll be more likely to arouse involvement, create conversations and create your customer base.
You’ll also gain more helpful insights from their responses, including ways to make your future events even better and more engaging. Remember to target your audience where they are active the most. Get as creative as you can with email subject lines and graphics. Gift something that reminds them of you. Data is powerful and hence use it to your advantage. Leverage these post-event engagement ideas for bringing post-event activities to life, and watch your events reach new heights!
Abhishek is a content marketer who specializes in ticketing and event trends happening throughout the globe. He feels that event marketers should easily find the information they need.
Hence, he is responsible enough to gather information and deliver the relevant guidelines to planners throughout the event industry.