Turn Event Sign Ups to Show Ups

Oct 10, 2018

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Lift your event attendance by 54% using multi-media through a combination of pre, during & post event marketing tactics. Sound too good to be true? Not, when you partner with January Spring.

Proven, Scalable Marketing to Reach Event Attendees

Our partner, National Business Media, has perfected their pre-event outreach marketing efforts, anchored by direct print and email to past event attendees, publication subscribers and e-Newsletter subscribers. In 2018, NBM will host 8 shows between March and November. For any given event, NBM sends 13 segmented registration emails. The week of the event, and additional six emails are sent reminding people of the event, sharing highlights from the previous day’s activities, and helping attendees plan their schedule to get the most out of the event.

Those emails are supported with direct mail drops and social media advertising.

New for 2018, NBM and January Spring partnered together to layer programmatic display advertising to complement the email and direct mail marketing. Just as the email messaging is segmented, so are the display ad messages. The ads are targeting the same specific set of attendees and subscribers, with call to action messages: registration, plan your schedule, see you next week, show opens tomorrow, and opening day.

The power of programmatic targeting is the marketing tactics January Spring brings to the program:
• Site retargeting
• Search keyword targeting
• Geographic targeting
• Geo-Fencing
• On-Site conversion tracking for event days
• Competitor conquesting

Taking it one step further, the combined teams refined our marketing strategy to include:
• Address-level geo-fencing against direct mail list: both print and email.
• Event alumni were targeted with unique messages, that drove up return rates.
• Site retargeting to anyone that visited the publication or event sites.
• Search keyword retargeting, of the top terms used to find the show

Track Everything

NBM and January Spring built tracking into every detail of the marketing plan. Every tactic is tied to Google Analytics site metrics, with UTM tracking codes.

Programmatic display is delivering these results:
• .21% CTR for Geo-targeted campaigns
• .24% CTR for Site retargeting
• .56% CTR for Search keyword retargeting
• CTR averaged 100%-200% higher than National average

We tracked the percentage of registered attendees and attributed their registration to the source.

Results Speak for Themselves

“NBM has built a proven, scalable marketing approach to turn event sign-ups to show ups. We deploy multiple marketing tactics: email, social, text messaging — and new this season, we’ve also layered programmatic display targeting.

In partnership with January Spring, we’ve built a comprehensive KPI dashboard that tracks the full attendee journey and provides us with attribution tracking tied back to each marketing tactic.

Or most recent show saw a 54% lift in attendees during the week of the event, thanks to our marketing efforts. That is just shy of 33% of the total registration count for that event.”

— John A. Bennett, Vice President, Integrated Media, NBM Inc.

Goals for the Program

From the beginning, NBM has held January Spring accountable for delivering results. The program is measured against specific, measurable goals:
1. Multiple Events, in multiple markets.
2. Proven, scalable marketing plan to reach event attendees.
3. Educate them on the benefits of the event.
4. Promote the event advertisers and industry suppliers and vendors.
5. Convert attendees to subscriber members.
6. Create value for exhibitors by delivering on attendance numbers.
7. Track Everything.
8. Use KPIs to measure results.
9. Optimize each event based on learnings from the previous event.

Download our Case Study Summary to share with your Leadership Team.