When thinking about 5 questions to ask when looking for an event venue in yesterday’s blog post I talked about knowing about your audience – and how it can help you to decide on a venue for your event. When you are registering delegates or selling tickets to an event (especially using an online registration system) your customer is already giving you information (whether it just be their name and email or more information such as credit card details and address) – so why not take the opportunity to ask them more information as part of the process – you’ll probably never get a better time to collect information about your customers and they won’t mind as much because they are already in the ‘form filling out’ mode. You could ask:
1) First Name, Last Name, Email address – these are a given and when combined with an email marketing campaign (more on that later) are the key information that you need.
2) Address – use this information to locate your customers – are they clustered anywhere in particular? As I mentioned before – if the majority of your contacts (paying customers or not) are in one location, then you should focus your events in that location – they will be more likely to attend if they don’t have to travel too far
3) How they travel to events – if the majority travel by car, you should consider venues with good motorway links – whereas if they travel by train city centre venues might be best. Also – if people travel by train they may not want to take lots of materials or giveaways with them – so think about offering digital giveaways
4) User feedback – if you are are organising an event why not get the delegates to define some of the content? Ask delegates what questions they have and then have a panel discussion – or ask festival goers which bands and acts they would like to see – nothing better than a user-defined event
5) Reason for attending – whilst for most entertainment events (concerts, festivals etc) it will be obvious why people are attending, business events can be more difficult to define – are delegates there for networking, information or to eductate themselves? Finding out can help to shape your event
So if you want to personalise and tailor your event, ask the audience and find out what they want.