Our marketing team cracked our client invitation “problem.” You see, we had a lot of clients we wanted to invite but for some reason, we couldn’t fill the room with the right people every time.
Customized tracking links can help your sales team crush those goals, and also incentivize them to break their personal RSVP records. In other words, you’re killing two business birds with one stone. Boom.
Not fully convinced? No worries. Here are five reasons why these little links will increase your event’s ROI and energize your sales team:
Making it personal is everything. And an RSVP is your lead’s first point of contact with your company. Makes sure you don’t waste it. With Splash, you can use tracking links to email each attendee, and let them know that you’re excited that they specifically are attending. This is what it looks like when you create the invite on our site:
This is where the sweet, sweet data comes in. Thanks to tracking links, you can see who has visited your event page, and how many people per category have– or have not– purchased tickets. That way, if someone who’s high on your priority list hasn’t hit ‘RSVP,’ you can send them another email to let them know how pumped you are that they’ll be attending.
Maybe the coolest use-case of this functionality is the ability to offer unique tickets to attendees based off of a tracking link. Offering a company-specific ticket, a VIP ticket or even a personally customized ticket can drive engagement by 250%. Plus, thanks to the unique link, you can tell which team member is responsible for the most attendees. We started taking advantage of this and it paid off.
In fact, you can even give your most desired guests exclusive access to VIP tickets. Giving these select individuals “insider status” will help them become more emotionally invested in your brand. From the earliest days of Splash, we were astounded with how many decisions ticket sellers would make based on the data from their tracking links. Based on these links, they would adjust their entire promotion strategy, take out new ads in a certain channel, or even fire a promoter.
When it comes to events, the biggest job of your sales team is to get people in the door. Tracking links give you the ability to monitor which members of your team are responsible for nailing down the most RSVPs. Before you start promoting your event, make it clear that whoever is responsible for the most guests gets a reward. As a result, you can start some friendly internal competition.
In many ways, the reward is ‘recognition’. The best teams have a culture of accountability and transparency. If you review the tracking link progress every week with a screenshot of the dashboard or an announcement at a team meeting, you’ll see people try harder to fill the room.
However, you don’t only have to give something to the person with the most attendees. For example, if they meet a predetermined goal– like 10 attendees that equal $300K in sales pipeline revenue– they get $300 each.
Without tracking links, it can be difficult to know what promotional channels are the most effective. You could be spending the majority of your budget on Facebook, when in reality your marketing push is the most successful on Twitter. Without data, it’s impossible to know.
Recently, I saw an event change their entire strategy due to data they received via tracking links. It was a foodie event and they had been spending on Facebook. After about two weeks of promotion, they realized that food-influencers on Instagram were actually driving the most sales. As a result, they targeted those people and comped them tickets in exchange for a post. They sold out the thousand person event in two weeks. It was wild.
Tracking links ensure that you optimize your advertising spend against the channel that deliver the highest ROI. That could be a social channel, a Google ad, or even your sales team. This information will also help inform your marketing strategy for future events.
As management expert, Peter Drucker, often says, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The same goes for your events. At least four weeks before you open your doors to guests, figure out how much opportunity you need in the room.
I like looking at opportunity in the room as my team’s goal. This is highly tied to Salesforce data, so if you have an integration with Salesforce, this can be very powerful.
Tracking links will help you measure how close you got to your goal– or ideally, how far you exceed it. Which salesperson got the most RSVPs? How much money did they make in ticket sales? How many deals did they close? Tracking links will help you answer all of these questions, and compare your room value to your close value.
Event management doesn’t end at last call. In order to make the most of your shindig, you need to follow up with your guests. Send emails to attendees from different ticketing tiers, and ask how their experience went. If you really want a detailed response, offer a gift card in exchange for their honest feedback.
This is also the time to set a meeting with all of those new leads. Remind them of all the great surprises you threw their way– this illustrates how well you understand them. Now is the perfect time to convert prospects into clients!
If you know where they came from, you know where they are going to be. We have seen a ton of success in targeting our prospects with relevant content in the locations from where they arrived on the page. In this way, tracking links inform our entire content and digital strategy.
It’s clear. Marketers who use custom tracking links greatly increase their chances of creating leads and making deals. So what are you waiting for? Go track someone!
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.
