Why Following Your Attendee’s Digital Breadcrumbs is a Good Idea

Your Attendees Leave a Trail Everywhere They Go – Don’t Let It Go To Waste Pretend that your attendees are Hansel and Gretel. Just like the brother and sister duo, your attendees drop breadcrumbs throughout the event life cycle that give valuable insight into their attendee journey. Once upon a time, this trail was invisible to the event planner, but these days it couldn’t be clearer. With the introduction of event technology, understanding what your attendees want doesn’t need to be left to conjecture. Now, it’s all about the data. Your attendees are creating a path and all you have to do is follow it. Below are six data sources that can give you critical attendee insights throughout their journey. With the right metrics, you can learn from your event and be assured that you won’t make the same mistakes twice.

From the Comfort of Their Desk

Getting future attendees to make the decision to go to an event is the first, and greatest, hurdle. Attending an event is proven to increase stress, due to the change in scenery, missing work, and proving its importance to superiors. Your initial information needs to grab interest and excite. Luckily, communication can be tracked.

Email Marketing

From that first email, your target audience is making the choice to pay attention or ignore you. Every email you send could lead them to make the decision to attend your event or to unsubscribe forever. Metrics can tell you what emails were opened, what links were clicked the most, and if someone unsubscribed. Email metrics tell you when you lose a potential attendees interest and when you gain it.

Registration

Registration is the next step of the long journey to get your attendees to your event. A cumbersome and buggy site might make them abandon their efforts altogether. Unclear fields or too many fields can lead to registration abandonment. The analytics from a registration site will help you to create a better form with less chance of abandons—creating a smoother, more enjoyable experience for your registrants.

To A Strange and Foreign Place

Your attendees are out of their comfort zone and ready for an unforgettable experience. From the moment they get their badge, printed onsite with an RFID tracker or QR code, you’ll know where they go.

Session Attendance

Track exactly who attends what sessions and for how long. Session attendance data is valuable when determining what content your attendees want. You may find out that a speaker’s session was well attended, but a majority of the attendees left the session early because the content wasn’t engaging. Improve the session content for the next year in order to attract even more attendees.

Instant Mobile Feedback

Don’t just look at who attends what – find out exactly what attendees think! Instant mobile feedback lets you know what’s working and what isn’t. Comments can tell you that the line at lunch was too long and lead you to create a different flow to accommodate attendees.

To A Place They Call Home

Your event is over, and you know what attendees showed up, where they went, and what they did. Now it’s time to gain a deeper understanding of their overall event experience.

Post Event Surveys

Surveys, when done correctly, can paint a picture of the event from the attendee perspective. Use the data you gathered onsite to find out what those numbers couldn’t tell you. Take out the guesswork and know for certain what attendees thought.

Analytics

All of your data can be in one place. With the right software, your event data will integrate seamlessly with your other marketing data. There’s no need to look across systems, event insights are consolidated to one platform. Data shouldn’t cause a headache. Live event data can be integrated with your other marketing data to get a holistic picture. Start tapping into your data goldmine. Follow those breadcrumbs and create an experience that you know your attendees will enjoy. How good are you at following breadcrumbs? Take our quiz and find out how you compare to your peers!