Retail events are best known for their ability to give consumers an opportunity to experience your brand firsthand. Teams spend countless hours planning the perfect signage, merchandising display, entertainment, and anything else that will elevate the guest experience.
The thing retail events are lesser known for? Collecting data.
Let’s do some math: if a retail brand has 100 stores and each store throws one event per month and collects 30 RSVPs per event, that’s 36,000 opportunities to collect new or existing customer data. By collecting data at every event touchpoint, retailers can learn more about their audience, and continue building meaningful engagement and relationships.
From RSVP forms, to on-site check-in, to post-event feedback, there are several opportunities for retailers to collect event data before, during, and after the big day. Here are the data points you should collect at each stage of your retail events, plus how to use it to maximize your event program.
1. High-Level Event Data
Chances are, you’re throwing a lot of events a year. Do you know which event type is the most effective? Which stores, location, or time have the best event engagement?
You’re tracking these key pieces of data in your event technology:
By using this data to complement your event analytics data, you can understand which events are driving RSVPs or attendance, as well as date, time, location, and promotion details to understand if those factors play a role in event effectiveness.
For Experts Only: This data is especially effective when you have teams in the field creating, planning, and executing their own events (i.e. using event request forms). You (in HQ) can use pre- and post-event surveys to understand why they are throwing the event, which events are the most requested, or which are the most successful (so you can double down).
2. Basic RSVP Data
The most common thing we hear at Splash when working with retail brands is that they only need to collect RSVPs for venue capacity reasons. However, collecting RSVPs should be mandatory for all events because it’s the perfect opportunity to collect email addresses, phone numbers, opt-ins, and any other important consumer information.
When there isn’t an RSVP or call-to-action on an event’s assets, the only way to measure guest data is by looking at unique pageviews, which doesn’t provide strong enough data to report on the actual attendance of your event. Pageviews tell part of the story, but RSVP data represents the characters of that story.
The primary data points that can come from collecting RSVPs for each event are generally:
• Name
• Email
• Opt-In data: either for more marketing communications, loyalty member acquisition, or liability waiver.
3. Secondary RSVP Data
Beyond this primary data, an RSVP form is a great opportunity to collect more information around your consumers (whether or not they’re actually RSVPing to your event).
All forms of secondary information are unique to the brand itself, but a good rule of thumb is to collect any information that will help 1. fill out a Loyalty Member Profile and/or 2. arm you with information you can use to serve them a better, more personalized experience in the future (another event that’s similar to the one they attended, a big sale, promo code, etc.). Here are some examples of that data:
By collecting this data, you can further fill out their Consumer Profiles in your CRM and progressively profile your consumers.
Pro Tip: Don’t collect all secondary data points in one fell swoop, and always ask questions that relate to the experience they are expressing interest in. If there are fewer and more relevant questions, guests will be more likely to share this data about themselves.
4. Check-In Data
Primary data collected for check-in data is very simple - you want to know if guests showed up or not. The best way to collect this data is with an event check-in app, enabling event managers to easily track who has checked into the event, capture the data instantly, and automatically sync it to the rest of your systems.
Pro Tip: Make sure that your team on-site knows how to collect this data by having them take Splash’s free course on using the Splash Host App.
You can also utilize a check-in app at the end of the event to check guests out. This data will help you understand how long guests stayed at your event – did most guests stay until the end? Was there a clear time of a large drop-off?
5. Walk-In Data
Capturing walk-ins is just like collecting RSVPs before an event – it’s an opportunity for you to capture the insight that they have walked into your event. The information that’s most important to get from walk-ins is how they heard about the event.
This will enable you to understand if it was your marketing efforts that drove them in-store or if it was because they saw your event and came in off the street. If you notice that a lot of your attendees are coming in off the street - that’s a great thing! It means that your signage was well-executed, and can turn into best practices for other stores to follow in the future.
6. On-Site Survey Data
If your event’s goal is for a consumer to sample your product, you can leverage Splash's Host App to collect feedback in real-time either in self-service mode or with field marketers asking for feedback. This enables your team to not only collect data from consumers, but also measure how your field marketers or brand activation managers are performing in the field.
Pro Tip: Use Splash Reporting Dashboards to monitor the field marketers or brand activation managers activity - reward those who are succeeding and make improvements to those who don't.
7. Post-Event Survey Data
It’s not always easy to drive engagement with post-event surveys, so these usually need to have a carrot attached to them to create incentive. It’s a win-win: guests get a discount code or an enter-to-win for another experience for completing the survey, and you get valuable information about your event.
• Name
• Email
• What did you think about the event?
• Would you come to more events by our brand?
• What did you think about the new product that was featured?
Pro Tip: Limit the number of open-response questions and focus on drop-down selections and ratings to get the most out of your data.
8. Sales... After the Event
Knowing if a customer has purchased something as a result from your event can influence how you target them in the future. In your post-event comms, track purchases with dedicated tracking or promo codes that tie back to your event.
Purchasing data can help you segment your customer database for future marketing initiatives. Turn the big buyers into VIP loyalists or brand ambassadors, and nurture that relationship way after the event ends.
The most important thing to remember is that all of this data needs to go somewhere. After all, what’s the point of collecting this data if you’re not using it? Ensure you have the right systems in place to capture, analyze, and integrate your data.
Splash users: If you’re leveraging Splash, you can use event dashboards to house all of this data and sort with powerful filters (by region, location, etc.). Additionally, Splash’s API can push this data directly into any Data Lake’s or Business Intelligence tools for further analysis.
Now that you know what data to collect, see which metrics the top retailers use to prove event success, plus how to calculate each one.
