eventYour campaign planning prior to an event has great impact on its success, and marketing automation systems can be the optimal campaign planning support and provide you with information about the conversion rates.

Workflow & processes

The basis of successful campaigns is the definition of the campaign components, such as emails and landing pages. In fact, a campaign can include the automated dispatch of invitations, reminders, confirmations and follow-up emails. Besides, for events with a limited number of participants or seats, the marketing automation platform can take on the automated waiting list management, too. You can conveniently set the timing and contents for all transmissions. Once this workflow is well defined, you can even continue to use it without much effort later for other event campaigns.

You should start to prepare the campaign planning early, so that you have enough time to work on the content, the landing pages, and proper testing before kick-starting the campaign. The automation of the dispatch and follow-ups will create time to focus on the trade event itself.

Contacts & Leads

The selection of the appropriate target groups is a crucial factor. If the data quality of the contacts is right, the audiences can be easily segmented for automated sending, by using defined selection criteria and personalized content. Unlike traditional campaign management (e.g. with Excel lists), you won’t forget any contact anymore, never write to them twice and always use the correct salutation.

The workflow also allows you to qualify your leads further. When registering online and at the show, you can request more information for better understanding of your leads. The marketing automation-platform aggregates the information from the online feedback and directs it to the system, same goes with visitor data that has been collected at the fair itself through mobile devices.

Then, interfaces to the CRM system allow data synchronization and enrichment in real time. Hence, your new leads and contacts can be contacted immediately during or right after the show and be introduced to a landing page where additional content, related to the show, can be found and downloaded.

Monitoring & Reporting

The marketing automation platform offers precise and very granular analysis of all standard KPIs as well, such as open and click rates, log-ins and feeds, returns, registrations and attendance in real time.

In addition, you can find out what opportunities have arisen from this event. Thus, with a marketing automation system, you can create a targeted ROI analysis, with which you can identify exactly what this event has brought to your company. The lessons learned from this campaign are definitely useful as well, since it helps you to adjust and improve your campaign planning next time.

But the main argument for choosing marketing automation is the time factor, as the time required from the beginning to the completion of an event can be reduced by up to 80%. A good reason why probably everyone will sooner or later fall back on marketing automation.

By Daniela La Marca