Event Marketing Tips: How to Get Your RSVPs to Show Up

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

Ever feel like you’re getting a ton of RSVPs but no one is actually showing up to your events?

Getting people to your event can be a tremendous and stressful challenge for any event marketer. The first step is to understand your attendee’s key motivator for taking action.

In the newest Run of Show Weekly video, we shares our strategy on how to effectively promote your event by leveraging the things your audience craves most.

Learn to focus on your guests, build inspiration, validation, and create a memorable experience for those who attend your event. Within this powerful checklist, you’re attendees will be rolling in, ready to experience the greatest event of all time.

Check it out below:

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Video Transcript:

Today, we're gonna cover what everyone has been asking for, which is how do I get attendees to actually show up to your events.

"Hey Ben, How Do I Get People to Show Up?"

I get this email nearly every week, and it says, "Ben, I'm freaking out. How do I drive more RSVPs?" Or, "Oh Jeez, we haven't gotten enough people to RSVP. I'm nervous about not filling the room."

Have you been there? I definitely have. It's terrifying, right? You can spend all this time planning and thinking about how to create the perfect event, and you just aren't able to actually get people to RSVP or to attend.

Now, there might be a lot of reasons for this, and it could be something like your distribution mechanisms, timing of the event, or that people just aren't interested. What I've found more often than not is when I look at people's messaging or promotional material -- they've usually missed a couple things and haven't gotten people to understand the value of their event.

The GIVE Checklist

I've created a checklist that I use for all my events. This checklist will help you understand how to communicate and message the value of your event.

I'm going to walk you through this checklist, and what you'll find is that if you go through this checklist step-by-step and make sure to include each of these points in each of your communications around your event, you're going to see a huge uptick in actual attendance.

So let's walk through it together. I call this checklist G-I-V-E. The reason I call it that is because you're looking to give people a reason to actually show up.

2. Combine areas of expertise

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

1. Guests

G stands for guests. This is actually the most important thing you can focus on. Who else is going to be there?

In a lot of emails that I write, I'll say something like, "Hey, I hope you'll show up to this event. We're gonna have a great crowd." And guests are one of the prime things that we see driving clicks or conversions on pages. That's why you'll often see people list their sponsors, speakers or the other guests that'll be attending an event.

People want to meet other people at events, and we have a human drive to bond. So, making sure people understand who else is going to be there is a really big deal in your promotion.

2. Inspiration

The next one is I, inspiration. Inspiration is what they're going to learn or what is going to inspire them to change.

How will they transform into a future version of themselves by attending your event? Now, this can often be communicated with who's going to be speaking with them, what the content at the event will be, what they're going to learn or understand by going to your event, or how inspiring the music or the artwork at the event will be. I often find that people spend time on things because of who they will become as a result of it. So, if you can communicate that -- that's very powerful.

3. Validation

The next one is really powerful. This is V for validation. Especially in today's day and age, people define themselves not necessarily by what they have, but instead by what they do. It's quite existential. I often find that by telling people that this event is going to validate their identity or show them that, you can really drive attendance and action.

Let's give some quick examples: It's pretty easy when you see a band, like Phish. People who identify as Phishheads validate that identity by making sure to go to every single Phish show. And similarly, if you were to throw an event for real estate agents, something you could do is say, "This is a gathering for the top real estate agents in the world." And you better believe that someone who considers themselves to be a great real estate agent, is going to be there so they validate that identity.

4. Experience (FOMO)

It's a pretty powerful concept. It really plays with FOMO.

Speaking of FOMO, E is the last one. E is a really interesting one. It's the experience. What are you giving them? What is the memory that they're probably going to walk away with? This could be an experience of taste, sight, smell, or something they might hear.

Experience often has a lot to do with senses. Communicating how this is going to be a really interesting experience for them, and that they might walk away with a great pass-along story from, that's something that you're really going to want to communicate early and often in your event communication.

If you're interested in hearing more about pass-along stories, make sure to check out the video. I walk through how to build a pass-along story from scratch.

Drive Frequency and Urgency

That's what it is: G-I-V-E.

You want to make sure to layer in each of those different value propositions into each of your event communications.

If you're doing that, and making sure to hit each one of those, the next step is to layer in frequency and urgency.

Those are two really powerful drivers for getting people to attend your events. You're usually looking to notify people weekly leading up to the event. And you'd be surprised, people don't mind hearing from you as long as it's something useful and it’s something relevant to them. Of course, if someone unsubscribes, make sure to unsubscribe them. So, frequency is a great way to make sure to get people to remember your event.

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.

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

You have a ton of event data at your fingertips, but what do you do with it and who do you give it to? Check out our tactics for empowering your team with data.

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.