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:
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
