As a large retailer, the Burton team would rely on their social media accounts to stay connected with buyers and send out event invites. However, the team struggled to manage attendees, keep them engaged, and accurately anticipate turnout. With Splash, the Burton team now creates on-brand events, collects attendee data and metrics, and streamlines their workflows all from one place.
In 1977, Jake Burton Carpenter founded Burton Snowboards out of his Vermont barn and dedicated the rest of his life to snowboarding. Since its founding, Burton has played a pivotal role in growing snowboarding from a backyard hobby to a world-class sport by creating groundbreaking products, supporting a team of top snowboarders and pushing resorts to allow snowboarding. Today, Burton designs and manufactures industry-leading products for snowboarding and the outdoors. As a sustainability leader within the outdoor and winter sports industries, Burton is the world’s first snowboard company to become a certified B Corporation®. Privately held and owned by Donna Carpenter, Burton’s headquarters are in Burlington, Vermont with offices in Austria, Japan, Australia, Canada and China.
Event strategies are an ever-evolving thing. And for companies or industries traditionally focused on running in-person events, the pandemic has forced them to rethink how they make things happen.
Take brick-and-mortar retailers, for example. They’ve historically relied on in-person experiences to connect with their customers and create new ones.
Burton, one of the largest retailers of snowboarding and outdoor products, was no different. Before the pandemic, they hosted a variety of in-person events, from in-store product launches to partner speaking events to on-snow activations. Behind these events in the Americas is Morgan Bennett, Senior Manager of Brand Marketing.
Morgan and his team also work on longer-tail projects, like 2021’s One World movie premiere. Their original plan was to host the premiere in theaters across North America, but when Covid cases ramped up once again, they embraced the pivot nostalgically: with a drive-in movie experience.
That’s just one example of how Morgan and his team at Burton have embraced the changing events landscape. We recently chatted with Morgan about event challenges, their overall events program, and how they create memories that result in repeat, dedicated customers.
As far as event challenges go, Morgan sums it up best: “You can produce the world’s best event. But if you’re not getting people to attend, engaging them correctly, or following up, the world’s best event falls flat.”
Morgan recalls earlier days at Burton, where he and the team worked with a lot of different tools that didn’t offer the best experience for driving attendance, engaging with attendees pre-event, or following up.
“We had social accounts for each of our stores because they had very direct relationships with their customers,” said Morgan. “But we had trouble building lists of people who were frequent event attendees. There was a lot of importing Excel files and sending out emails. People would show up, but it wasn’t a polished experience.
“Social platforms made it too easy to RSVP without any sense of commitment. Where I would normally account for a 50% attendance rate, I couldn’t count on that with social media — they were wild cards. So it was really hard knowing how many people we could expect to show up.”
Another big challenge Morgan’s team faced was engaging with attendees before the event, as the social platforms they were using lacked customization and opportunities to brand the event page.
On top of all that, Morgan said everything was manual. And when you’re producing up to 100 events every year, that’s a recipe for late nights and frustrating, tedious work.
They needed scalability, so they started looking for it.
With increasing expectations and increasing pain points, there were four things in particular Morgan and his team wanted from a new event marketing platform: scalability, an easy-to-use interface, sophisticated design capabilities, and the ability to directly communicate with attendees.
“The ability to replicate on-brand assets across events was so important,” said Morgan. “It had to be something that delivered a better brand experience than social platforms could. It also had to be something that people without any web development or design background could easily work in.”
And because Burton wanted to build their customer database, they needed a tool that could support that.
“We were looking to create new customers, which meant we needed to be capturing emails. We needed to get customer metrics, offer opt-in language, and be able to re-engage with them. Our social platforms weren’t able to help us.”
After evaluating a few event marketing platforms, they chose Splash.
Once we had Splash, we could drive people to a customized, curated, and on-brand event page. It really changed the perception of how premium our events were and how premium our brand was. It was something that a social media event page and our old processes could never do.
Morgan Bennett, Senior Manager, Brand Marketing
Today, Morgan and his team at Burton provide an engaging experience for attendees — even pre- and post-event — because of their partnership with Splash.
“Splash really gave us a much cleaner look because it’s a curated experience,” said Morgan. “Attendees are leaving their social media platforms to register. They’re engaging with our website. It’s no longer a mindless click of the Yes button, which was game-changing for us.
“This also helps us build events where we have firm capacity limits. When people register on our Splash event pages, we are better able to manage invitations and are more confident in the attendance rates we get.”
And as far as scalability goes, Splash lets Morgan and his team streamline their work like never before.
“Splash has taken away a lot of the pain points of making individual, one-off requests to our creative teams and gives us more autonomy,” said Morgan. “Because Splash lets us create templates and put guardrails up on the brand elements, we can really focus on the experiential elements.”
Splash has been huge for saving time and reducing manpower, and we’ve seen big improvements in the premium experience our customers are having. I can truthfully say that Splash has been the single-most helpful events tool I’ve ever worked with.
Morgan Bennett, Senior Manager, Brand Marketing
