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How to segment event attendees

Smart event attendees segmentation with Gevme event technology solutions

A few years ago, the owners of a flash sale site, Doggyloot, discovered that there is a correlation between the type of dog and the purchasing behaviour of its owner. To test their theory, Doggyloot decided to start segmenting their existing clients based on the age and size of the dogs that they owned. They asked people to fill in a quick survey, asking them about their dogs’ birthdays and sizes. Based on these insights, Doggyloot built three email lists that began targeting their customers with different messages. What do you think happened? There was a 750% CTR increase.

Segmentation is a powerful thing. According to an independent email marketing expert, Jordie Van Rijn, email segmentation teaches us to think in groups, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do since your contact base consists of different groups of people that have different expectations and needs.

Just as it worked for Doggyloot, segmentation can work for your event promotion and can help you maximise attendance and maintain a long-lasting relationship with the audience.

Benefits of segmentation

Why you should segment event attendees

Strategic segmentation can be a big plus to your bottom line. Here’s what it means in the context of event attendee segmentation:

  • Increased open and click-through rates = increased revenue: Tailored content that answers registrants’ questions and resonates with their needs can’t leave them cold. By sorting your potential attendees with the help of lists, it’s easy to provide the right people with the right content and incentives. You’ll also get more people interested in your event and, ultimately, more invitees converting into attendees.
  • Sticking to a sales cycle: If there’s one reason why personalised messages are important, it’s the different stages of interaction with your event. From awareness to the decision, your invitees go through different points of a sales cycle. Targeted content is your foolproof tool for making communication relevant at each of these stages.
  • Reduced unsubscribe rates: Irrelevant emails make people unsubscribe. Period. Segmentation will help you get to know the target audience, and you will gain a better understanding of how to appeal to potential attendees through content.

If you want to get greater insight into how segmentation can benefit your email marketing performance, check out the detailed stats on different segments by MailChimp.

Ways to segment event attendees

Basically, segmentation is the process of establishing commonalities among your audience. The most basic and effective ways to segment event attendees online are the following:

  1. Registration: All of the data that comes on a registration form can be used to your advantage. This usually includes contact details and information related to demographics, gender, geography, age, and professional interests.
  2. Survey: With automated survey technology, event organisers can interact directly with each attendee before, during, and after an event. This helps capture the most important feedback and identifies specific interests among your audience. For instance, if 40% of attendees say they loved the VR entertainment used at your event, you should note that this segment probably enjoys reading content about smart tech, VR/AR gaming, AI, etc. This is a great opportunity to keep interaction alive after the event!

Here’s the hack: pick an event management platform that connects registration and survey apps. This way, you won’t have to do any of the integration work since the data will be transferred automatically.

Key event attendee segments

Let’s be honest. Event attendee segmentation is tough, particularly because the industry of events is currently huge, which means event-goers can be picky. The right event communication strategy—with a great deal of personalisation included—is what you need to succeed. Choose the most relevant audience segments that you think impact the value of your event.

Demographics: This is the starting point for all event marketers who want to capitalize on segmentation. By using common attributes like gender, age, or marital status, you can come up with some basic profiles of your attendees to make sure you don’t waste your budget on attracting the wrong audience.

Open rates: Depending on how your audience responds to the emails you send them, you can hone your messaging throughout different stages of interaction. The most basic strategy would be grouping recipients into those who open emails, those who don’t open emails, those who open emails but don’t click the CTA, etc.

Geography: The locations that your target attendees are coming from can impact many things, from time zone to email etiquette differences. Geography-based personalisation will help you talk to your audience in their own language. For instance, if you have a segment of Chinese attendees, you might want to make messages more formal than with a U.S. audience.

Firmographics: An attendee’s profession isn’t the only criteria that can help you make communication more targeted. Obviously, if you organise a design contest, you will be focusing on designers and design studios, but you shouldn’t stop there. Firmographics helps businesses segment a specific group of professionals into smaller segments based on the level of responsibility, years of experience, company size, etc.

Special offers: Analyse the audience that was converted through special offers like promo codes, referrals, etc. These insights can then be used to treat the segment as one that is more responsive to promotions than others.

How to segment event attendees with Gevme

The integration of smart list technology and customized surveys makes Gevme an efficient platform for event audience segmentation:

  1. Create a survey based on your personal needs. You can either choose the questions from the list or add your own. Segment event attendees with Gevme. Step One
  2. Build smart lists that capture the contacts of your custom audience segments. These lists can be easily filtered by name or status as well as exported or transferred across different apps. Segment event attendees with Gevme. Step Two
  3. Pick the lists that you want to target, and use Gevme Email Marketing to automate blasting. Segment event attendees with Gevme. Step Three

    Conclusion

    Event audience segmentation is the lifeblood of any event promotion strategy. We hope that the tools discussed in this article will help you get to know your target attendees so that you can choose the messages that truly appeal to them.

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