Amy Barone, Sr. Director of Marketing Events & Engagement Programs at Tableau Software, shares her event marketing secrets in our A New Era in Event Marketing webinar with Harvard Business Review and AdAge. Below, she gives an inside look at how Tableau  grew and scaled a high-performance event program.

The events industry is evolving, and with that, marketers are saying hello to events that go beyond the “big show” (i.e., massive conferences with thousands of people) and instead looking at multi-city, repeatable programs they can run globally. 

While you can throw a large tentpole event — the one that involves year-long prep and half the annual budget — have you considered smaller, repeatable programs throughout the year that can have an immediate impact on your revenue targets?

Splash recently partnered with SiriusDecisions to host a conversation focused on going Beyond The Big Event with expert and Research Director, Demand Marketing Strategies, Cheri Keith of SiriusDecisions; veteran Senior Field and Partner Marketing Manager, Natalie Graham of Medallia (recent IPO); and Splash’s savvy Senior Director of Product Marketing, Sasha Pasulka. 

The trio covered the new era of events, defined repeatable event programs, and addressed the business impact of repeatable events, including topics: modern and effective event strategy and management, building field marketing programs, and event marketing at scale. This set the stage for event program owners and marketing leaders to consider how they will navigate going beyond the “‘big-event” mentality.

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person next to them?

Ten years later, our annual conference attracts nearly 20,000 customers and partners, our company has grown to 4,000 people, and we have a first-class marketing team with dedicated event professionals who are the best in the biz. Events have been a crucial part of our brand and help us better connect with our community, evangelize our customers, and ultimately grow our company.

Here’s how we did it:

No matter your business’s product or service offering, or if you are a large-scale enterprise or an up-and-coming fast-growth company, part of an organization’s growth strategy includes event marketing. As a marketer or event manager, you are the driver of your programs and responsible for deciding the type of event, cadence, goals, and of course budget — determining just how much are you willing to put on the line to get the results you need.

Let’s rewind to the first line of this blog post — we’re saying goodbye to the big-show mentality. I know what you’re thinking: Is Splash suggesting I should hit the pause button on hosting my large annual conference?! No, definitely not. We are, however, suggesting that implementing a strategy that allows teams to test ideas and move quickly to action can yield some truly amazing business learnings and results. And, we know repeatable field events are becoming a key tactic in marketing plans, as they help drive quantifiable outcomes; just ask the team at Index Exchange. These smaller, rinse ‘n repeat events are not only easier to pull off than a 1,000+ person conference, but significantly cheaper, and will likely prove a better ROI since they are higher, more curated touchpoints for your audience.

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In the latest study on event marketing, Harvard Business Review found that rapid revenue growth was fueled by event marketing — 52 percent to be exact. So maybe you’re nodding, perhaps even bought into the idea of the repeatable half- to full-day field event strategy — fantastic! Here’s how to bring your event programs to life, effectively and in a scalable way:

The first step to any event program is to take a deep breath and ask yourself, Why am I actually doing this?  Whether you’re an event marketer, demand gen marketer, or field marketer, it’s easy to lose focus of what you’re truly attempting to showcase for the company’s webinar, live event, or customer conference. Is your award ceremony an opportunity to showcase branding or a platform to give out your sustainable swag? What are you telling your sales team when they ask for follow-up materials? How many customers versus prospects are you inviting? Collaborate with your marketing team, ask your sales team questions, and put something on paper that will serve as a north star for the entire initiative.

For example, if you see in your analytics that one organization isn’t engaging with the initial email, it probably means they have a very strict firewall in place. So, now you know to follow-up personally or adjust your strategy for the next email.

This first email could come in the form of a teaser email to drum up buzz for your event, or even something a little more vague to get people interested (and curious).

Field marketers adjust their programs based on the needs of varying customer and prospect types. To do this, they need reliable tools to keep their brand, data, and communications consistent. 

If you or your field marketing team are leveraging one-off tools to showcase regional events, strategic scale and brand continuity is not feasible, and the value proposition you worked so hard to define will be overshadowed by the technical difficulties you encounter every step of the way. Your brand is your company’s identity, so why would you use tools that are not powerful or flexible enough to showcase it? From your landing page to email communication to name badges onsite, make sure your field marketing team has the proper tools in place to execute on-brand, seamless experiences every time.

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Here’s an example of a great looking event email:

Don’t just take it from us. Having a field event or repeatable event strategy that is consistent, scalable, and globally friendly pays off beyond what you (or your boss) thought was possible. Natalie Graham, who joined us for the previously mentioned Beyond the Big Event conversation, explained it best:

Image: Penguin Random House

Image: Conference Matters

When Natalie started at Medallia in 2018, she was faced with one-off tools for field marketing programs. The Medallia brand was not always displayed properly, teams were working in silos, and if field event data existed, it was hard to track down. Natalie is responsible for scaling the global field marketing program and had all the right ideas in motion to make an impact on the business, but was missing the tools to do so. To set a registration page for an event and ensure email marketing was ready to rock quickly wasn’t a thing; there was a ticketing process in place that usually took days, if not weeks. It was the furthest thing from self-serve, and the marketing operations team was saddled with the stress of handling all technical aspects of a global field program (landing page, emails, list management, campaigns... the list goes on). This simply wasn’t scalable.

Enter Splash. Once the Medallia team was onboarded with Splash, they were able to streamline all field event programs and the weight was lifted from the ops team. What used to take over a week and involved multiple departments, now took a mere 24 hours; and Natalie was able to build out the whole event herself.

Splash helps the people behind the event programs deliver a beautiful, branded, digital experience, and allow hosts to measure event impact accurately. "It felt to us that so many parts of businesses have breakthrough technology that really enables scale. We hadn't seen that in events yet, so we built it." - Sasha Pasulka

Want to see how we built it? Check out every corner of Splash's event marketing platform here. 

Image: Google Books

When it comes down to it, the goal of any event is to grow and nurture the relationship between your guests and your brand — whether you’re promoting a product, building community, or looking to increase brand awareness.

You also need to think about who you’re sending your emails to. Make sure you’re only sending to your engaged recipients — a good rule of thumb is to send to those who have opened or clicked emails in the past few months.

And of course, don’t send emails to users who have unsubscribed or whose emails have bounced in the past. This also means you need to constantly maintain your lists, and update them with any unsubscribe or bounce information.

^{Post-event page made with Splash}

This way, guests didn’t have to worry about memorizing each other’s names or drawing a blank when they turned to chat with the person next to them, and we also got to show off  our product in a natural way.

One of the best ways to improve email deliverability is to build a solid reputation with email services by sending high-quality emails day after day.

For example, you shouldn’t just send an email to 500,000 people in one day (that’s a huge red flag to servers). Instead, build up to a large email send by breaking it up over several days, and increasing the volume with each send (in other words: sending to 100,000 people five days in a row isn't great either).

P.S. If you're a Splash customer and considering a large-volume email send, talk to your CSM about the best approach for your strategy.

This is the most effective email deliverability tactic, but it’s also the most complex to achieve. Depending on your relationship with your guest list (e.g. VIPs or high-value accounts), you can request that their IT team have your company’s IP put on a “whitelist,” which would allow your promotions to bypass any company firewalls.

Even if your event doesn’t require a full seating chart with assigned seats, think about how you want the flow of your event to go, and how you can create natural opportunities for meaningful connections.

Image: designworkplan

•   A sense of privacy: a completely private and closed off room for dinner proved to be an extremely crucial element. At one of the venues, an open section in the room allowed noise to disrupt the flow of conversation — making it feel less private and less special of a night compared to dinners that were completely closed off to the public.

At the end of the day, throwing events mean nothing if you’re not providing value to your customers.

At our conferences, we provide “Tableau Doctors” on-site that help customers or prospects with any questions about our product. Not only do these one-on-one appointments empower customers to engage with us in a meaningful way, they’ve also been the critical to driving event ROI.

When planning the inaugural Mountain West Splash User Group meet-up, I couldn’t be more excited to welcome the area’s local Splash users to gather at Pluralsight in South Jordan, Utah on March 19. Everyone was going to be in one room, we would have interactive presentations from fellow customers, and we were all going to enjoy a group networking lunch after the main content.

About two weeks before the meet-up, and for obvious reasons around health concerns, I made the decision to switch to a virtual event. This might seem like a daunting task for some, but with the right tools, moving the live event to virtual was simple and only took about ten minutes. Here’s how I did it.

When planning the live meet-up, the plan was to host a lunch event. While this felt like the right format and time for an in-person gathering, I’m not sure it would have translated well to virtual, so we moved the event up to 10 am to accommodate more schedules. 

One of the most important aspects of the user group meet-ups is the collaboration between attendees. I wanted to host the virtual event on a platform that would allow the 20-30 attendees to engage with each other, just like they would at a live event. For that reason, I chose to host on Zoom instead of a formal webinar provider. Just like any other Zoom video conference, I scheduled the event with a unique URL, and published it to my calendar.

                         Total Event Cost: $50,000

                         Total Ticket Revenue: $57,125
            [(57,125 - 50,000) ÷ 50,000] x 100 = 14.25% ROI

But Hannah, the event program I run doesn’t involve ticketed events. Can I still measure ROI?  Glad you asked! The answer is yes, but I call it something a little bit different: event influence.

Once I created the Zoom meeting, it was time to go into Splash and modify the event location, time, and confirmations to reflect the changes. 

First, I went into the event settings and switched the event address from the Pluralsight HQ information to the Zoom conferencing information. 

Speaking of the little details, here are 51 of the tiniest things that can make the biggest difference at your next event.

Then, I made a quick change to the event page to notify any new registrants of the switch:

Following the page edits, I made sure the confirmations –– both on-page and email –– were modified to reflect the new virtual format. The on-page confirmation clearly instructed registrants to save the event to their calendar (using the buttons that Splash automatically populates) to ensure they had the Zoom link. The confirmation email automatically attaches the calendar item, but I made sure to add the full dial-in information for the Zoom meeting in the body in case some attendees needed to join by phone. 

Finally, I needed to ensure everyone who had already registered for the live meet-up was notified of the change. Instead of me reaching out to each person individually or exporting a list and sending from my marketing automation platform, I used the email tool in Splash to quickly draft a message, add a CTA to update their calendar item, and send to the quick list of registered attendees. 

When hosting a live event, you have the audience’s undivided attention because they are sitting directly in front of you, likely making eye contact. The content you present can be a little more “in the weeds” because you don’t have to compete with anything. When hosting a virtual event, you don’t have the same luxury. You’re competing with people’s phones and the endless stream of notifications happening on the same screen they are watching the virtual event on. 

I knew the SPLUG meet-up wasn’t going to be impactful if the customer speakers from Pluralsight and Marketo didn’t have visually pleasing, interactive, and easily digestible presentations. In our prep meetings, we ran through our slide decks to ensure every slide was colorful and informative, and our talk tracks were not so technical that some attendees would zone out. We also sprinkled in questions throughout each presentation to keep the audience engaged.

On the day of the virtual meet-up, I was really excited to see a “full” room. While most webinars don’t garner a ton of live attendance, our virtual meet-up had a 65% live attendance rate that stayed consistent throughout the 90-minute virtual meet-up. Using the Splash Host App, I was able to check attendees in, just like I would at a live event. I also asked that everyone ensure their full name was displayed, and to turn on their cameras so it felt more personal. Using the Zoom chat functionality, audience members chimed in with questions and comments throughout the entire meet-up. 

Even though we had to pivot from in-person to virtual, we saw incredible interaction and great value in the Mountain West Q1 SPLUG meet-up. Of course, nothing beats getting to meet the community face-to-face, but I feel like we scratched the surface on some serious value moving forward. The area our user group chapter serves is relatively small and very dispersed. When we get back to safely hosting in-person gatherings, we will consider creating our meet-ups as hybrid events and live-stream content to attendees who can’t join live. 

I’ve always been someone who tries to find the silver lining. And while this is one of the harder tests, I’m confident the event marketing community can find ways to keep connecting and move the needle.

Image: Google Books

When it comes down to it, the goal of any event is to grow and nurture the relationship between your guests and your brand — whether you’re promoting a product, building community, or looking to increase brand awareness.

You also need to think about who you’re sending your emails to. Make sure you’re only sending to your engaged recipients — a good rule of thumb is to send to those who have opened or clicked emails in the past few months.

And of course, don’t send emails to users who have unsubscribed or whose emails have bounced in the past. This also means you need to constantly maintain your lists, and update them with any unsubscribe or bounce information.

^{Post-event page made with Splash}

This way, guests didn’t have to worry about memorizing each other’s names or drawing a blank when they turned to chat with the person next to them, and we also got to show off  our product in a natural way.

One of the best ways to improve email deliverability is to build a solid reputation with email services by sending high-quality emails day after day.

For example, you shouldn’t just send an email to 500,000 people in one day (that’s a huge red flag to servers). Instead, build up to a large email send by breaking it up over several days, and increasing the volume with each send (in other words: sending to 100,000 people five days in a row isn't great either).

P.S. If you're a Splash customer and considering a large-volume email send, talk to your CSM about the best approach for your strategy.

This is the most effective email deliverability tactic, but it’s also the most complex to achieve. Depending on your relationship with your guest list (e.g. VIPs or high-value accounts), you can request that their IT team have your company’s IP put on a “whitelist,” which would allow your promotions to bypass any company firewalls.

Even if your event doesn’t require a full seating chart with assigned seats, think about how you want the flow of your event to go, and how you can create natural opportunities for meaningful connections.

Image: designworkplan

•   A sense of privacy: a completely private and closed off room for dinner proved to be an extremely crucial element. At one of the venues, an open section in the room allowed noise to disrupt the flow of conversation — making it feel less private and less special of a night compared to dinners that were completely closed off to the public.