Leveraging your Post-Event Data

When it comes to maximizing the potential of your event, what you do after is equally important as the event itself.

Because, in those days and weeks after your event, you’ll sow the seeds of your future success. To do this, you’ll need to leverage every bit of data you collected before and during your event.

While in a previous article, we talked about connecting your digital event tools to optimize event registration.

Now, we ask: how will you use this data to your advantage?

Engaging with your new audience

Having a system to collect attendee registration data opens up opportunities to engage with a potential new audience.

Who might this new audience consist of?

It could be new registrants, returning attendees, or non-attendees who registered but didn’t show up.

It could also be registrants who attended the event and signed up for a membership. Or it could even include your event staff and volunteers.

With every new audience, a new growth opportunity and door of communication will open to you.

It’s important to execute a proper and unique follow-up process to keep each new audience engaged, informed, and connected.

If your event registration process isn’t connected to your email marketing system, you’ll want to set it up to build your digital audience so you can:

• Promote future events
• Share news updates
• Send out any post-event content such as event videos, photo galleries, or blogs that contain an event recap

Each one of these communications should be be tailored to the unique needs of the individual audience. They’ll also start to create their own, smaller audience.

Throughout your post-event journey, you’ll start to see who’s more engaged and needs additional follow-up. You’ll also be able to gauge interests and plan on what to prioritize for your next event.

Gathering your event data

Data can make-or-break your entire event strategy. And receiving crucial feedback will help you plan more successful events in the future.

This data can be divided into attendee level data and event level data.

Attendee level questions gather basic details about each separate individual who is registered. These fields could be:

• Name
• Email
• Age Group Information
• Meal Choices
• Membership Information

Event level data is data you collect that’s specific to your event. These fields could be:

• Marketing related questions: How did you hear about this event?
• Feedback questions: Would you change anything if you were to attend again?

While gathering this data can provide valuable insight, it’s important to keep your forms on the shorter side to limit incomplete submissions and shorten the sign-up process.

Analyzing your event data

Some of the most essential work kicks in the moment you have to evaluate and understand what this data tells you. And gathering event data is a pivotal part of ensuring you’re generating value and creating better experiences for your guests at future shindigs.

Some of this data might include how many people attended the event, how many non-members converted into members, how many people registered but didn’t show up, etc.

It’s also important to note that not all data is relevant. So be mindful about what you are considering to analyze and weed out the information that might not be relevant to your marketing process.

Applying the data

There’s power in the data you collect from events. But how do you apply it?

With the right data, you’re able to ask the important questions, gain valuable answers, and provide your new audience with engaging content to keep them informed and connected. And with the data received from your event feedback, you now have the ability to apply it to future events.

For example, if there was an aspect of the event that attendees weren’t satisfied with (speakers, food, venue, etc.), ask follow-up questions to help in future planning.

If attendees signed up for more vegetarian meals, plan to reserve more of these for your next event.

There’s so much opportunity to gain from choosing the right questions, learning, and applying strategic actions.

So dig deep, analyze, explore, and you’ll gain massive insight about your attendees’ experience and perceptions. Then, let this guide you to change what didn’t work and constantly improve the quality of your events.