#announcements
Important info for Customer Marketers & Community members
Thread
Hi All - We are hosting a customer conference with the goal to get 100 customer attendees, its almost a month away and we are not hitting our registration goals. We would like to use paying for hotel and flights for attendees as a last resort. We are announcing the agenda/session names and keynote this week. Looking for any ideas or incentives, perks, swag, out of the box ideas to get registrants.
Couple thoughts from experience throwing events in the past:
1. How recognized is your company? Is it a big enough name that people will sign up without knowing the programming because the company's reputation precedes itself? If it's not, it may be hard for people to decide without knowing the programming details.
2. In general, a majority of people sign up last minute for events. It's terribly annoying as an event planner and why so many events offer steep discounts and incentives to register early.
3. Is cost truly the issue? By suggesting paying for planes/hotels, I imagine you're hypothesizing that people can't afford the entire trip. Most conferences are business expenses not paid for by the attendees, so if the event is truly valuable, I imagine people will be able to convince their manager to go.
Follow up on #2: A month is still a looooong way away in event planning. I'd bet most of your 100 people will register in the 2 weeks just before the event.
Thank you - also curious if anyone has provided a pitch paragraph to help someone that wants to attend make the case to their manager for budget?
We used to offer justification letters for folks, but found they weren't being used. We did sales incentive campaigns to help push the Sales team to do personal outreach to their customers to encourage registration. We also did "Know Before You Go" webinars aimed at people on the fence about registering that 1) highlighted what was exciting about our event and 2) what value the event offers them that they can't get elsewhere.
If you haven't already, it's also great to work with your customer success team to have success managers do personal outreach to the customers they know would benefit from the conference
Seconding Laurent’s and Tim’s suggestion to get get Sales and CSMs involved! I’ve also had a lot of success from getting our exec teams to reach out directly to our VIP customers to send a personal invite. We’ve positioned this as a “Exclusive dinner/happy hour” event with the CEO/Head of CS/whoever is most appropriate, and get the exec to reach out from their email.
We usually got answers from this with a definite yes/no.