How To Manage Your Event Leads and Increase ROI

Leads are the nucleus of any event. Event lead management involves a substantial financial investment. However, the true commitment to these events doesn’t involve just money. It’s in the people who attend. 

Managing Event Leads

For best results, event lead management works alongside hiring a professional to plan and host your in-person functions. This typically involves determining if a conference, discussion panel, educational course, or trade show would most represent your event. If none of these suits you, perhaps you might want to instead coordinate an entertainment act, art show, or musical performance.

In-person events will often connect to online technology, providing a link to virtual participants. In the process, you can incorporate a variety of lead-gathering tools. Keep in mind the primary goal of increasing ROI when you use these features.

Tools to Gather Leads

Tools used to gather leads often link to mobile apps and handheld devices. This might also involve collecting data through barcode scanning, online portal syncing, and customized surveys. Tools you might use for this purpose include the following:

Quick Data Collection

You can have your meeting participants scan QR codes or standard UPC codes with their smartphones. Otherwise, they might push a button when they see it on their device screen. Both methods work, depending on whether they attend in person or not.

Real-Time Registration

Your guests can register onsite or online on any device. Their applications remain stored online in your event account. This makes setting up an automated calendar or email reminders to your registered participants easier. As a bonus, this can involve quick data collection tools.

CTAs

You can add call-to-action links to your event email collection lists. These can even integrate into live streaming events. Whether in person or online, people can sign up using their handheld devices.

Online Lead Access

Sometimes, lead gathering tools help you collect the leads you need to make a profit. Technology enhances the communication required to build relationships with your potential buyers. This most likely would include information your potential customers provide using quick data collection tools. You also can automatically save your online leads.

Survey Customization

You don’t have to use random surveys with questions that aren’t relevant to your campaign. Customizations will help you gather data that applies to your lead-gathering campaign. Make it apply directly to your live event, or use it to introduce upcoming offerings.

Note Space

Your stored online leads from your events also could provide you room to add notes. This works well  when you have a lengthy conversation with a current or future customer. Keeping records of whom you talk to, can personalize future communication with them.

Real-Time Tracking

See your event results as soon as they post. This works excellent for counting participants who have signed up for offers. It also works well for picking contest winners if you decide to have prize drawings.

Immediate Follow-Up

Technology moves so fast that it’s possible to  follow up with your event participants instantly. This includes  online and in-person attendees who sign up for offers and information. This will enable you to keep in touch with them long after your event . You can also use this data to invite them to  ones in the future.

How to Use Lead Gathering Tools

You can use various lead gathering tools to improve ROI or return on investment. This typically applies to measuring how many leads you gather and how many of those leads convert to sales. However, it can just apply to the lead gathering or the sales conversion rates in separate instances.

Either way, event planning that increases ROI usually starts with deciding what type of event you will host. You can make it fun or educational, for instance. This might involve offering quizzes, surveys, games, or other interactive tools for  incentives or prizes.

These audience engagement tools  will also involve data gathering, which you can make anonymous if you want. However, you also can gather personal information with your participants’ consent.

Get as creative as possible while you attempt to attract your target audience. Giving  your targets motivation to participate in event interaction makes staying in touch with them easier. In turn, this increases your chance they will buy from you. In the process, you also need to consider  why you engage your audience.

You can use all the data you collected at your events – whether online, virtual, or hybrid – to extract important lead information. Knowing how to use this data is the next step after gathering it with the right tools.

Usage of Leads Collected From Event

You already have some idea of lead gathering tools that you use to engage directly with your audience. Now, you can measure the success rates of your online marketing campaigns using data collection tools. This works for all  events, including where people are present both in-person and online.

Measuring Event ROI Data

After collecting event ROI data, it can tell you quite a bit about your current and future customers. For instance, you learn what blog post or landing page titles they’d be most likely to visit. This will show you how much clickthrough success you have for those pages.

After measuring how many clicks you have to a certain page, you can decide where to place your sign-up forms. You could perhaps use your event ROI data to determine what position on mobile versus desktop computers attracts your customers to a registration form. Then, place those sign-up links in the most profitable places on your landing or blog pages.

Applying Event ROI Data

You will soon see what methods you use to attract leads at events actually increase ROI. It might take some trial and error, but experience also teaches you.

Data can be your best friend when planning your next important function. Ask a quality event management professional for more information.