There is one overarching objective when organising corporate events like seminars, tradeshows and conferences – capturing as many leads as possible. All your efforts, time and resources invested in promotional activities will be laid to waste unless you gain valuable lead information from your event. With long, arduous manual processes like spreadsheets becoming a thing of the past, organisers have adopted modern event planning technology to drive registrations, generate leads, and boost ROI.
In recent years, mobile event apps have emerged as an important tool to create engaging and memorable attendee experiences. They help drive conversations before, during, and after an event. But did you know these apps can also be leveraged effectively to prepare a detailed attendee profile, thus improving event lead capture? As an event organiser, here is all you should know about using mobile event apps to generate hot leads for your business!
Building the ideal event app for lead capture
First and foremost, you need to ensure your event app has the necessary features to track attendee data right from their very first interaction. Whether the attendees are browsing different speaker sessions, looking to connect with an exhibitor or fellow attendees, or reviewing slides bookmarked during the event, they should be able to achieve it all through the event app. The attendees’ behavioural patterns provide valuable insights into the efficacy of your event. In general, an ideal mobile event app should include:
- Event details: Overview of the entire event with details of the venue, parking, accommodation, transport, F&B etc.
- Speakers section: The speaking sessions, speaker bios, and information on session tracks should be available here.
- Personalised agenda builder: Demand for personalised experiences is increasing steadily; a personal agenda builder provides important insights into what the attendee is looking to gain from your event. In fact, you can use this section to ask them about their expectations and offer a customised schedule tailored based on their inputs.
- Live interactions (Q&A, polls): Real-time interactions at the venue offer critical feedback about different aspects of the event. While this is important to implement improvements for future events, it also provides a solid idea of the attendees’ preferences.
Seek approval for opt-ins – respect privacy!
Collecting an enormous amount of attendee data and building a huge database of leads might sound gratifying. However, you need to be extremely careful about any privacy breach concerns – this could land you in serious trouble. When collecting information about leads, make sure to ask them to confirm their opt-in option. Collecting data is a sensitive issue across the globe and we recommend you to double-check with attendees before putting their info in a data sheet.
Use quick surveys and contact forms
Contact forms, live polling, and post-event feedback surveys form an important part of event lead capture for mobile apps. Make sure these are as brief as possible (especially the contact forms) so that the attendee does not feel hassled filling them out.
Leveraging in-app profiling
Using lead scoring algorithms has become quite popular with event organisers. This works by identifying marketing qualified leads – the same can be used in mobile event apps. You can track attendee activity and assign scores to their profiles,
based on their actions. For instance, if an attendee views a particular session or views a video about event management software, the ‘total lead score’ of this attendee can be calculated. Once a certain threshold is reached, let’s say 30 points, in this case, that attendee can be classified as a potential sales lead.
Mobile event apps are being used widely to boost attendee engagement and improve lead capture for live events like tradeshows, conferences and exhibitions. However, a yawning gap still remains between capturing leads and following them up to actual conversions. Download Cvent’s report ‘The Value of the Events you Attend’ to understand the thought process of attendees before, during and after the event, the opportunities available, and how you can maximise ROI using these insights.
