Event Marketing: How to Increase Your Registration to Attendee Ratio

Event marketers dream of the day when every single one of their RSVPs actually show up to an event. While chances of this actually happening are slim, there are proven tactics to improving your RSVP to attendee ratio.

In the newest Run of Show Weekly video, Splash's CEO Ben Hindman delves into a 3-step strategy and measurement methods to boost your attendee conversion rates.

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On today's Run of Show, we're gonna talk about how to get people to not just sign up, but to actually show up to your events. Let's get started.

Have you ever been so excited to attend an event that you put it in your calendar and counted down the days to when that event's gonna happen?  Now, that's how we want our attendees to feel about all of our events. We want them to be giddy with excitement, just counting down the days to when they walk through those doors.

But how do you do that? How do you make sure that people who actually sign up, actually show up?

We call that the RSVP to attendee ratio.  It's a really interesting indication of the health of your event program.

Today we're gonna walk through how to measure it, set benchmarks against it, and ways to improve your RSVP to attendee ratio.

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.

To drive the attendance-RSVP ratio, one of the most powerful concepts that I've been using is based on human instinct, and human drive, called reciprocity.

I was first made aware of reciprocity from Robert Cialdini in his book, "Influence." If you haven't read it, it's a must-read for anyone who's in the sales game. It's a simple but powerful concept. I'm reading from his book here, "Reciprocity is the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit, so giving and taking are to be repaid in equivalent measure."

So, what does that mean?

For our event it means that if somebody, like your attendee, gives you their investment,  they are going to be expecting something in return. Now, how do we get people to give us things, and how do we use reciprocity to drive attendance?

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.

Let's walk through step-by-step how we lock it in. Now, the first step is to get someone to actually invest in your event, to trigger the process of reciprocity. And the best way to get someone to invest is to charge for it.

Money's always an easy way to make someone feel invested. I threw an event a couple of weeks ago, and we charged $18, and we saw about a 95% attendance rate, which is insane. It was only 18 bucks, but people felt like it was enough that they didn't want to miss it.

 
Another way to get somebody to invest is to get them to apply. Now, this is a pretty interesting technique. It's quite clever, and we see it in a couple of different event types that want to feel more exclusive. They ask for people to submit an application to be accepted to attend the event. That's a great way for someone to invest their ego and put their ego on the line, making them feel like it's a more important event. I like that one a lot.

But another way to do it is to get someone to invest time and energy into attending your event. Anyone who's attended Burning Man knows this very well. It takes a lot to get to that event, and nobody misses it, because you've booked your flights and your RV far in advance. If you can get people to actually book a hotel room or to book a flight in advance, there's a high likelihood that they're actually gonna show up.

You'll want to get your attendees to double-confirm. Just getting somebody to say and to give their word that they're going to attend is a way for them to invest in your event.

Once they've invested, the next step is to confirm that they've made a good decision in this investment and to start to begin the next step of reciprocity. I'm a proud founder of an event called the Summit Series, and the Summit Series is a big conference for entrepreneurs. The next one's in L.A. And as this event is coming close, the team has been emailing me with clever announcements about chefs, speakers, details about the venue, every single step of the way making me feel more and more excited about the event that I've purchased a ticket to.

Our data shows that you have about five emails in the sequence before people start to not become interested and you start to not see any effects on the RSVP to attendee ratio. But, you have those five emails to really drive home the concept of this being a great event that they need to attend.

The last email's really interesting. I call it the "lock it in email." It's a really important one, and it should always come from a personal email address, or a text message, or a phone call. The most important part is that it comes from a person. This email is to schedule a commitment with the attendee. You typically want to use this only on your VIPs, but if you have a big enough team, you can use this on everybody at the event.

How do you actually execute this lock in?

The goal is to schedule a time, a specific location, and a person that that attendee will meet with. Get specific, for example saying 9:15 right outside the venue to the right of the door, you'll meet with a new CEO that I think you should really meet. If you can get that specific, you're gonna see people feel committed to attending your event.

The reason for this is it's a lot easier to flake out on an event than it is to flake out on an actual person. If people schedule commitments, they typically try at least to show up.

Before we break, a couple other things to think about as you're planning, measuring, and improving your RSVP to attendee ratio.

We have a couple clients who every single time someone doesn't attend their event but says they will, they use that as a leading indicator to try to understand what went wrong. They follow up the very next day and find out why that person didn't attend. They don't take it personally, but they focus on it.

Emails are another great leading indicator to measure and to improve your RSVP to attendee ratio. If people aren't opening your emails, there's a likelihood that they're actually not attending. Another secret on that one, keep track of if people are actually adding the invitation to their calendar. That's pretty sneaky and a good one.

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.

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.

How do you effectively communicate the value of your events to your audience? Promote your event with the G-I-V-E Checklist.