How Can You Use Marketing Automation for Event Follow Ups? See Our Real Use Case Example!

   —   
Your sponsored event is over and it’s time to make sure no generated lead is missed - each being followed up with personalized messages at the right time. This blog post shows not only our approach to this, but also our results leveraging marketing automation for event FUPs.
You just got back from a successful event feeling quite tired, both physically and socially. Your inbox shows a frightening pile of emails and you are aware of the importance of making the most of out of the leads generated at the show. When should you start on those? Now! As soon as you get back is the right time to put marketing automation into action.

3 simple steps you need to take:

1) Build your list of leads and clean it

Usually, the hottest leads from an event are those that you and your team personally talked to; either at your stand or at lectures or social events. You probably had a contact scanner device to hand and now have these contacts in one excel spreadsheet. And those whose details are on business cards, corners of leaflets, and napkins can be quickly added to this list. A quick clean of  invalid data and duplicates will probably be needed.

2) Shape the marketing automation process

You will model the process that you used to follow before having marketing automation in place. Marketing automation should help you build processes that are automated-NOT robotic. For this reason, you should consider conditional steps for segmenting your audience for more targeted messaging, as well as personalizing each message using macros.

In our real life example, we had 137 leads collected at our stand at TFM&A 2013 London. We have taken the simplest approach of segmentation, splitting them into two groups (number of leads within brackets):
  • Existing customers (9)
  • Prospective customers (128)
Just two days after the show, each group received a slightly different email. While for existing customers this email was also the end point of the marketing automation process, prospective customers got a further three emails, sent at 9-day intervals.

Click on the image for original size.
Marketing automation process for event follow ups

As the TFM&A event is focused mainly on marketing professionals, we decided to offer them content on trending marketing topics that would be helpful to them in achieving their online marketing goals. After the initial email, thanking the prospect for visiting us at the show, the second, third, and fourth emails offered one of the following downloadable marketing assets:
The initial step of the workflow ensured that every single person had been followed up. The remaining 3 steps were for lead nurturing purposes—increasing lead engagement with our company and our offer.

Each action the recipient of the emails took was scored in our lead scoring system, helping us identify those leads with high engagement that call for action from sales.

The great thing is that we can reuse this process and workflow with a single click for any future events by duplicating it within the system.

3) Import your leads, trigger the marketing automation process and monitor

Once your marketing automation process is set up, you just trigger it for your leads and monitor the progress and results. The following picture shows the number emails opened for each of the four emails sent.

Click on the image for original size.
marketing automation open rates of the newsletter issue

The following picture shows the link tracking information for the first email. First link within the email goes to Webinar section of our website, the second to Hosted Trial.

Click on the image for original size.
marketing automation link tracking for first email


 
How do you process event-generated leads in your company? Do you use marketing automation for this task? Let us know in the comments below!

To learn more about marketing automation, including videos and more business cases, go to: What is Marketing Automation and How Can it Benefit My Business?
Share this article on   LinkedIn

Petr Passinger

Petr is the Senior Business Analyst, responsible for the mapping and optimization of the sales funnel and revenue cycle leveraging the Kentico Customer Experience Management solution for online marketing activities.

Comments