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7 Things about Events Data that your Boss Wants to Know

If you are an event planner or marketer or ever organise an event for your company or client, how often have you been asked about things relating to events data, where you ended up scrambling to churn out such statistics or data points required by your boss or clients?

I was talking to one of my ex-colleague the other day and he was recalling how he was working late nights, just to churn out reports that his boss was asking for a major event that he was organising. As I look back to past emails and experiences from events, I manage to list down 7 things about events data that are most requested for by bosses or clients.

1)     Event Registration Data

This is the bread and butter of any events. Having a real-time update of number of people who have registered for your event (and having a central dashboard of that if you are in charge of multiple events) would be important for your daily or weekly update to bosses or clients.

2)     On-site Attendance Data

During an event, such as a large conference, a lot of times, a minimum attendance level is needed before we give the go-ahead for the keynote to commence. Having real-time on-site data about the event attendance is important. Using a mobile check-in application with real-time synchronisation across multiple check-in devices would help to provide such real-time updates to your bosses. You can just simply give your boss or client an account for them to access the attendance date on the fly, without the need to even call you as you would probably be busy with multiple last-minute request if you are the chief organiser.

3)     Specific VIP Attendance Data

Often, your CEO or Sales Director would be expecting some important guests to arrive, among many that they will be receiving. As some events have multiple entry points, it would be almost impossible for them to know who has already arrived and checked-in.

Having the ability to quickly search for a name to see if the person is there at the event would go a long way to let your management know that you know your stuff and have all things covered.

4)     Email Campaign Data

I was actually surprised when I spoke to some event organisers in Hong Kong last year that they are still using mail merge to send out their event invites and never ever have data relating to email open rate and click-through rate. So unless they receive a direct reply from those they email, they would never know if the email is legitimate and how the email recipients are responding to them.

Having a reliable email marketing platform to provide such data relating to open-rate, click-through rate and bounce rate allows you to determine the quality of your database versus the quality of your message to generate the intended response from your recipients.

5)     Tracks/ Workshops Registration Data

If you are organising a conference with multiple tracks or workshops, it would be important for you to keep track of the absolute number of registrations relating to each workshop, as more likely than not, your participating partners for the workshops would be asking you almost on daily basis closer to the date for such reports. You do not want to be spending one to two hours churning out such basic report, which to my surprise, that was what was happening to my ex-colleague, who spend at least an hour to churn out the report each night.

The key would be to upfront set-up your registration form correctly, and having the ability to filter in your event data management platform to create smart list which is then subsequently auto-refreshed real-time. Subsequent retrieval of the numbers would then be seamless and done within a minute instead of hours.

6)     Segmentation Data

Segmentation as a form of targeted campaigns are always useful for events. For example, if you want to target anyone in your contacts database who are working in a marketing function, you should be able to easily create that list as a Smart List by using the keyword Marketing as a filter for the job title field, and be able to determine the size of your targeted list upfront, with just a click of the button.

7)     Conversion Data

Out of every 1,000 contacts or emails sent out, how many are converted to registration? What is the ROI if I purchase another list of 1,000 contacts from database agencies based on certain criteria? Database marketing has become more challenging as people are receiving more promotional emails in their inbox so having conversion rate based on certain list or campaigns would be important. Knowing the conversion rate in addition to open and click-through rate allows you to plot your own waterfall chart to determine the size and type of database needed.

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