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):
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Existing customers (9)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?