9 Guest Lists You Should Have for Your Next Event
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9 Guest Lists You Should Have for Your Next Event

November 29, 2017

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9 Guest Lists You Should Have for Your Next Event
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Written by Ben Hindman

@bennydotevents

[VIDEO] Segment Your Audience: The 9 Guest Lists that Should Fill Your Event

November 29, 2017

The world we live in is becoming increasingly visual. We need something that's engaging and will connect with us on an emotional level.

Building the most relevant attendee list is important — not just because you want to make sure you reach the right people, but also because event success is directly tied to whoever is in the room. Segmenting your attendee list can improve your marketing efforts and the ROI around the event itself. 

 

So where do you start? What criteria do you use? And how do you make sure your lists always stay relevant?


In this Run of Show Weekly video, Splash's CEO Ben Hindman, shares his tactics on how audience lists are leveraged throughout the event lifecycle, how the top event planners are segmenting their audiences, and what to do to ensure your lists are always up-to-date. 


Check it out below: 


Check it out below:

Love the animation in this video? Check out Ink Factory. 

Want to see more Run of Show Weekly videos? See our archives page here. 

Video Transcript:

The right people in the room makes the event.


Close your eyes and imagine the perfect event, and see it in your mind's eye. Now, it probably didn't have to do with the décor or the food or even the lights (although the lights are very, very important and we'll talk about why in another episode).


It almost always has to do with the crowd and who is in the room.

Own Your Event List

When I started my career, I got the privilege of working with one of the best people in PR. Her name was Flavy Benoi. She was a French woman, she was badass, and she always stood out front of every event in her Louis Vuitton shoes checking people in. Even though she was the head of communications, she owned the list.

 

She would kiss people on the cheek as they walked through the door and she would mark something off in her notepad, and then she would go home and she would update all of her lists.


From her, I learned the power of tracking, honing, and growing lists with every single event that I throw.

Partners are incredible -- they help you bring in new audiences, they can often decrease line items, and they can often make your event look super legit. So, how do you get great partners?


The way to think about it is to identify it into stages. You find the right partner, you wanna pitch that partner, and then you really wanna lock it in, and execute, and get the most value out of that partnership.


We're gonna walk through each three of those things right now.

Make Your Event Flow

Let's walk through a real life scenario. We're throwing a 100-person event. So, in order to fill the room with 100 people, I like to send out about 10 times the number of invitations, so that's inviting around 1,000 people.

 

Then, I like to try and get about 4 times the ratio of RSVPs to the capacity of the room. That comes to 400 people. In an event, you typically see what's called a flow, in and out of the venue throughout the event. You're really gonna try to get about 150 people or more to actually attend the event, so we're gonna look for about a 1.5x attendance rate.


The goal that we're gonna talk about today, is how to improve the percentage between RSVPs and attendees.

2. Combine areas of expertise

We’re also guilty of planning events around our own ideas and wants as event marketers.


But keep in mind that while we’re the experts with events, we’re not experts with how to close deals -- that’s where the sales team comes in.


Sitting with sales and understanding how they’ve effectively used events to help expedite and close deals is important info you need to shape the overall event experience. For events that will truly help close deals, combine your team’s knowledge of event execution  with the sales team’s expertise of closing opportunities.


Even if you’re looking for a snapshot of an adorable dog, you definitely won’t be disappointed.


How Your List Changes Through the Event Lifecycle

The definition for the list is simple, it's just a group of people, but it's a segmented group of people, a targeted group of people. How we use these lists actually changes at every single step in the process. 

‌• Before the event: we use these lists to promote the event, and fill the room with the right people.

 ‌• During the event: we use these lists to prioritize our time, to know how to engage with people, when to engage with them, and how much energy and effort we should spend with that person.

‌• After the event: we use these lists to hone and craft personalized messages to re-engage and drive value from these attendees.

To better understand this, what we did was we analyzed all of the lists, all of the classifications and buckets that event marketers are using across the slash system, and we started to look for commonalities and try to understand how people are organizing their lists.


We did find that many people are using about 9 different types of lists. So I wanna share that with you and walk through the nine types of lists that we most commonly see. Let's rattle them off together.

Here are 9 Ways to Segment Your Attendee List

 

comp ticket strategy

 1. Persona: It's typically a list like a VIP list, a press list, or a client list. Who is this person in relationship to your business?


2. Participant Classification: This is typically the relationship to the event. This could be their ticket type, are they a speaker, are they a sponsor.


3. Title: Your list of CMOs, your list of VP marketings, or your list of engineers.


4. Geography: This is typically auto-tagged based off of where the event is held. So is this your New York City list or your Beverly Hills list or your Austin, Texas list?

 

5. Superlatives. We often see this a lot. This is the most of something. Is it the most socially engaged or the most likely to purchase? Or maybe this is the person with the most dollar value associated with their contract. What are they the most of? A superlative list will help you identify that and start to segment that.


6. Behaviors: These are typically behaviors that have been done in the past. We see this a lot. People who have bought X amount of tickets, or people who have attended three or more events, or people who often will open emails. This is a high engagement rate on the email clickthrough. So these are behavioral lists, ways that people behave.


7. Event lists: This is typically lists of annual tentpole events, like CES, and the list of people from CES or our South by list. We also see this with event types. Like, "This person has gone to a lot of educational events."


8. Partner lists: I actually built a lot of partner lists by empowering my partners or my affiliates with a tracking link. When somebody RSVPs to that tracking link, I automatically build a list based off of who came through that front door. Partner lists are a really great way of starting to create automatic segments of people based off of who you're partnering with, which a lot of times is often net-new attendees.


9. Interests: These are lists based off of what people like. They could like JavaScript or they could be into fashion or, "Just give me somebody who's super into basketball." The way to start to build this list is to pay really close attention to what sessions people are attending or what event types they're attending, or to custom answers to questions, to very specific questions, or you can enhance this other data with all sorts of other information around the internet and build lists like that.

comp ticket strategy

3-Step Reciprocity

I've developed a three-step process to use reciprocity to drive the RSVP to attendance ratio. The three steps are: (1) get that attendee to invest, (2) confirm that they've made a good decision, and (3) lock it in.

A List Is Like A Garden 

whale bait attendees

 

Note: If you're interested and you're gonna be pitching for partnerships soon, I included some of my best templates as a downloadable in the article with this video. So feel free to go download that and use my one-sheet template. But this is the general outline of what I think makes the best one-sheets. The point of a one-sheet is to communicate visually how legit and real your event is.

whale bait attendees

As you're building this, and as I build my lists, I try to keep in mind three things.
 

1. Organize your lists early. A list is kinda like a garden. You just wanna always water it and fertilize it and keep track of it. It's a living, breathing thing, and you have to work on it. That means keeping an eye on the engagement numbers, cleaning it a lot, and understanding if this list is still working or if it's time to retire that list. It also means that whenever I'm uploading a new list or I ever take anybody into my database, that is the moment when I'm trying to tag them and sort them. It's the kind of thing that if you do it, it takes a couple extra minutes in the moment, but you thank yourself later and you start to build out larger, more segmented lists.


2. Update your lists constantly. People change. People get different jobs. They change their interests. They learn new things. They change who they are. So progressively profiling attendees and either removing them or adding them to certain lists is an important thing to do. You can do that with modern-day marketing automation technology.


3. Measure the health of your lists. The metric to measure how healthy a list is, is actually a conversion ratio. Typically, we look at it at a conversion at any stage of the funnel, be it opens, or click-through rates or, you know, percentage to RSVP rate or even the percentage to attendance rate.


It's that conversion ratio that is gonna tell you how healthy your list is. As you're building out lists, you wanna keep a really strong eye on that because at the end of the day, if your list isn't converting, and especially if you're thinking about email deliverability, you gotta get people off that list or rethink how you're using that list or maybe use that list for a different event type.

Okay, that is a deep dive into event lists. I hope you found it useful and I hope you build out lists. And always put my name on your VIP lists. Okay, cool. Check that off. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's "Run of Show."



Consider These 3 Things Before You Comp Tickets

 (1) Percentage of attendees-to-opportunities: Assume it is going to increase if you comp tickets. What I mean to say is, do you think you can fill the room with a better attendee list that are more likely to turn into actual revenue? If you think so, make an assumption. In this last formula, the scenario you saw, we assumed that it would jump from 10% to 25%. I'll leave it to you to determine what percentage you think you can drive it to, if you had higher quality attendees. 


(2) What is your ACV? In our scenario, we talked about a 25K ACV, that's great. That's a nice ACV. Candidly, if you've got that average contract value, you have to comp tickets. It’s a no brainer. If you've got $100,000 as an average contract value, it is really a no brainer. But what we have found is that, if your average contract value is about $15,000, it might not make sense. You really wanna be above $15,000 for comp tickets to make sense for you.


(3) What is your Sales Cycle? Ask yourself, are you willing to wait for a good amount of time to actually see that revenue recognized? We've been looking at our data, and especially for some of these larger user conferences, you can see a sale cycle be about a year. That means that, from the time that person became an opportunity to the day that that dollar is deposited in your bank account, it could be a full year, if not more. So you just have to ask yourself, are you willing to wait that long, as opposed to getting the little dollars in now, with the ticket revenue? Can you wait for a much larger contract in a year or more?


Increasing Your Budget

The next step to locking it in is to treat every partner really like a sponsor, like a paying sponsor. These people, whether or not they're adding value or they're giving you money, you need to treat them as if they have really paid to be part of this event. That means consistent follow-up emails. That means being attentive to their needs. That means sending them a really beautiful recap report after the event. I find that if I treat my partners like sponsors and I really put that in my brain and in the brains of the people on my team, I get a lot more out of that partnership. They end up coming to the table and really delivering the value that I originally expected.


Last but not least, own it. Own the entire process. I’ve found that the best way to really get the most out of a partnership is to put one person on your team on that partner. Make sure that reminder email goes out. Make sure they bring their brand VIPs. Make sure that they have strong collateral at the event, that their booth is set up on time. It's that type of stuff. Giving them a very clear and thoughtful Gantt chart, leading them through that process, that really squeezes all of the juice out of a potential partnership.

Want to figure out how many comp tickets make sense for your strategy? We got an easy formula for you to use.

 

Download the template now.

comp ticket strategy template
event partnership contract templates

Don't know where to start? 

 

Download the Partnership Agreement Template.

 

Download the Partner Pitch One Sheet Templates.

event partnership contract template

3. Show that people are attending your events.

Last but not least, people get people. If you can show that people are attending your event, and they're telling other people, you can display that. That's the type of stuff that actually drives attendance.


So, you're gonna want to show and get RSVPs early and often as you can. Then get those people to commit and tell their friends about it. We found that that is the number one way to drive RSVPs.

Invest, Confirm, Lock it In

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.


Best of luck with your events.

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.


Best of luck with your events.

Bring Out the Urgency

Urgency is one of the most powerful techniques that I've seen in terms of driving ticket sales. You can use urgency in things like "Early bird sales end soon," or you can say something like, "We're almost full," or "This is going to be a really important event for you to attend." Drive that point home with frequency and urgency, and make sure, in all your communications, to go through that checklist, G-I-V-E.

After you've outlined every single step in the process, your next step is to figure out who the major players are. This might be someone who's actually at your organization, or an agency, or even a freelancer. You're trying to figure out who's involved. I find that a really great framework for figuring this out and defining it in a very visible and transparent way is something called the RACI model. It's a great model that I see some of the top event planners that we work with use.

How RACI Works:

RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed.

(1) Responsible is the person who ensures that the work gets done.
(2) Accountable is the person that actually executes the work. Who presses "play," clicks "go," presses "send."
(3) Consulted is the person who gives approval that this work has been completed.
(4) Informed is the person who's an FYI for that stage.

A quick example: during the promotional stage, the person who is responsible might be your demand gen person. This is somebody who has to make sure that the right people are invited and we get the right RSVPs. The person accountable is the person who actually presses "send." That might be your marketing ops person or a promoter that's involved in the event. Consulted, is a leader in the promotional stage or VP marketing or VP sales. This is somebody who needs to make sure the right guest list is being promoted.


Probably informed for the promotional stage is your CEO or a salesperson who just needs to know that we're sending out invitations, or your client's RSVP. That's how you RACI. And your job is to RACI each of these different segments. This process is something that we call roleing [SP] up, R-O-L-E, roleing up. I found that identifying who is involved and what they need to do at early, early stages in the process, is paramount to having a great event. You really want to understand the players and what they're supposed to do, and to communicate that early and often.

Rolling Out: Timelines and Deadlines

The next step in this process is called rolling out -- that's identifying when. We know who and we know what they need to do, but when do they need to do it?


As you can see, this rolling out process looks a lot like a Gantt chart. We've layered on top of themselves all of these different stages. You want the promotional phase and the creative phase to overlap because we're going to learn a lot in the very early stages of our promotions. We're going to know how we might need to tweak things, and you need that creative team involved in the process. You do want to create deadlines. Make sure that everything has a clear beginning and a clear end, otherwise, I found things just don't get done.

The Final Step: Pulling It All Together

1. Get everyone involved early

I can't tell you how often I see people overlook getting the entire team, or at least as many people who fall under the responsible category as possible involved in the process early and often. If you can, get everyone in the room during the ideation stage. If not the ideation stage, make sure they're in the creative stage. I love the old adage, "If they plan the fight, they won't fight the plan." So you wanna get them involved.


2. Use data

Use data. I like to use data at different stages of the process. You can use data and measurement as an energizing tool, as your energizing bunny. The best way to feed this bunny is with carrots. But, you might also use the stick. What I meant to say is you can use a dashboard to show people how many RSVPs somebody is driving and get them really excited, or you can show them where you're not hitting, what's not working for you as a way to get people onboard and focused on their goal. I do find that using data at every single stage helps you sprint this marathon that is an event.


3. Communicate a lot

Last but not least, you want to communicate. Communicate a lot. I always would say to my event planning team, "Our entire job, not just part of our job, our entire job is communication, both with our attendees externally and with our team internally." Setting up a communication cadence early in the process, makes this whole machine work.

That's our role up and roll out process that we've found work great for us. Have any extra tips we missed? Let us know how you run your events in the comments!

Here’s an example of how to build a pass-along story from events that I hosted a couple of months ago for some of our top clients. Our clients are some of the top event marketers in the world and we brought them all together in a cool venue here in New York.

 

I went with my team in advance to think about what emotion we wanted them to feel. The emotion that we came to after a lot of debate was them to feel love, and appreciation for their job and for themselves and for the craft that they do.

 

That's where we started, but how do we get them to feel love? We threw out a lot of ideas for storylines that they would take away. One of the most important things that we could focus on was the format of the event and how their experience would play out throughout the day.

 

Fast forward 'till after the event. I wanted to test this pass-along story and see how effective we were. I called up a lot of the different attendees and asked them, what was the story that you told when you got home? More than that, who did you tell it to? Retell me that story.

 

The stories, more often than not, weren't really about the content that they learned or a certain data point that they heard. Instead they started talking about what had happened. They spoke about somebody that they met at a cocktail hour or a piece of swag that they're really excited about. Or even a musical interlude that had happened right before a speaker such as the violinist and how amazing she was. That's what they focused on.

 

What was even better was that interwoven into each of those stories was the emotion, and they were using interesting adjectives. Over and over again, we started to hear words like excitement and appreciation and inclusion. It was those adjectives that we wrote down because that was our goal, and our focus.

 

Remember, it's not about how you communicate your content and what you say. Instead, it's really about what people are really going to remember inside of these stories and how they feel.

On top of getting help from the sales team in areas they know best in, you also want to be careful in how your offer up your own expertise to them. Don’t try to push decisions in any certain direction or take complete control of the event’s reins.


Instead, present to sales the options and ideas that you’ve seen work well. Sit down with them and provide guidance on the experience you think you should create based on the targets you want to show up.


As marketers today, one of our core responsibilities is to support our sales counterparts in their quest in drive revenue. When planning your next event, remember Craig’s rule: change your sales collaboration approach from “here’s a marketing event, I need your help with it,” to “marketing is going to help you throw a sales event.”


❤️  Special thanks to our Tech lead, Guillermo de la Puente, for his hard work on this project.

Now that you've got the right people in the room, here is how to measure it.  Get the tools for calculating the opportunity in the room.


author

Ben Hindman

Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.

About the Author

Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.

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