Creating an Integrated Campaign for an Offline Event

By Jeff Herrity
May 23, 2007

Your ministry or organization will be holding an event in the coming months. You want the event to be widely attended, with a maximum number of pre-registrations in order to approximate attendance. This article will share best practices on running an integrated campaign for an event, identify potential problem areas and provide solutions to fix them.

There are several key components that must work together seamlessly in order to have an effective campaign to promote an event. The communication streams used must have integrated messaging and design for the best possible user experience and for setting expectations of the event. With many conferences or events, the PR and communication elements are limitless, but for smaller organizations there are a few elements that are necessary.

The key elements of a successful event are:

• Email campaign communications
• Event website/landing page
• Event registration system/site

Many organizations follow this simple recipe for an event, but find that at some point the communication stream fails, and initial expected results are not satisfactory.

It’s time to go into ‘audit’ mode and identify and fix any problems you can find in the overall user flow. In this article’s scenario, we will assume that the email campaign has been successful, but registrations are low for the event, which has a history of being very popular.

The Email Campaign Communications

One aspect of integrated communications is that all communication elements must have the same look and feel. The emails that you create should include:

• Clear branding and visual connection to offline materials
• Basic information about the event
• Event dates, times, location, and exhibitor information (if included)
• Speakers in attendance with prominent coverage of the keynote speakers
• What the attendee will gain from attending the event - ‘why’ they need to come
• Link to the event mini-site or registration page (this is based on your event budget, but it is recommended to have a mini-site created)

For most events where the audience is familiar with the organization, open rates should be in the 30-40% range - which is pretty good for the industry. For some organizations it will be even higher due to past event success or word of mouth.

Measure how effective the email is at delivering visitors to your site. Click throughs should be at 10% - at a minimum - higher if it is a popular or very focused event. If the traffic is not being delivered to pertinent information, then registrations will not follow. Make sure the email has only one call to action - “LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EVENT.” Additional calls to action will only deter your audience from reaching the desired end goal - registration.

You may need to run tests on the email creative and copy in order to find out what will deliver the highest number of click-throughs. Do this in the early phase of the communication plan for the event.

The Landing Page/Micro Site

Try to track site traffic on a daily basis to make sure that your potential registrants are finding the information they require prior to signing up for the event. The landing page or mini-site should not be more than five pages or include so much information that the user gets lost learning about the event. Make sure that the user has a strong ‘marketing funnel’ that walks them page-by-page through the site that leads them - contextually - on the registration page.

In some cases, a landing page may be the only online component of the communications stream if registrations are processed ‘offline.’ If the event site includes online registration, the visual look and feel should be the same. In many cases an event email/landing page or mini-site will reside on one system, but the registration process is hosted or controlled by another system.

If registrations reside on a different web platform, tracking conversions or results may require the use of traffic reporting software, such as Google Analytics, that can accommodate passing system variables, though some manual site reporting may still be necessary to get the data desired. When reviewing your traffic reporting, compare page views to registrations to determine your ‘conversion’ or registration rate.

The Registration Site

At this point, your mini site should be delivering a good number of views to the registration page. If registration resides on a different server or system, make sure that the visual look and feel as well as messaging is consistent- or is branded well enough so that the user is not confused. In many cases a registration process can take several steps and it is important to track each of these steps individually to identify page abandonment rates. It’s ok to have a series of short forms that clearly state ‘Step One of Four’ to set the user expectation - many organizations try to capture all the information on one page in order to make the process easier, but in fact it makes the process for the user more daunting.

It is possible to see great results in your email campaign, click throughs, landing page/site activity, and then a huge drop off on registrations. This is where having separate steps in registration will allow you to identify the problem page or area.

Careful review of registration page stats will help you to identify any barriers that users are hitting that may cause problems. Examples of barriers include copy that slightly differs from the email or landing page, or a ‘register’ button that is hard to find. Making sure that all the page elements visually and contextually connect will help to drive registrations and create a successful event campaign.

It will be very clear where a drop off point is in a registration process, and so you can quickly fix it. One of the biggest mistakes often made is asking for payment information before asking for the user name.

The best-best practice to take away from this article, is that you MUST review your stats on a daily basis and tweak accordingly. We hope that your next event promotion is a success and please let us know if you need assistance.

Learn more about how creating an integrated strategy is key to the success of your mission.