Using reminders to drive more attendance to your events

Anyone who uses events, either online or offline for demand generation or inbound marketing will likely suffer from the same challenge - all the effort you put into promoting the event and driving registrants gets diminished by half on event day as 50% of your registrants forget to show up.

There are numerous reasons for this, but let's look at them one at a time. Just plain forgetting is one of the common reasons, made even more common if you don't do everything possible to ensure your prospects are able to remember.

Giving them a quick and easy way to get the event details into their calendar is one simple way to smooth out the path to great attendance by eliminating one way in which they might simply forget to attend.

In the email editor, click the Insert/Edit Hyperlink button, which pops up the Insert Hyperlink dialog box. Instead of inserting a normal hyperlink though, change the action to "Open an ICS Calendar file". That provides a standard Calendar file that will work with Outlook or whatever desktop email/calendar program they happen to be using.

Click on the Select box to select your ICS Calendar file. If you've already created one, you can find it and insert it, but if not, you can create one in one of two ways. The first option is to create it manually by typing in the event timing and details. This gives you the ability to set times, reminders, subjects, etc.

In the Calendar Entry section, be sure to add in any online event details for your web conferencing provider for the meeting so your attendees have quick and easy access to the information they'll need to join.

The second way to create the ICS file is to have it automatically created from an existing event in the Eloqua Event module. Once your familiar with using ICS files, you'll be able to create one from an event in a similar manner to how we've created it manually here.

With that set up, just drop the ICS link into your email and you're done. When you send out out your "Thanks for registering" email, that link allows them to drop an entry into their Calendar with one click.

Nothing beats a great speaker and compelling, original content for driving attendance at a webinar or seminar, but the more you can help your registrants to remember the details of the event, the better your ratio of registrants to attendees will be.

What's in a name... job titles and normalizing data

Let's get right into the weeds for a second. When presented with a whiteboard and asked to describe how we'd target a segment, score leads, or personalize content, more often than not, we all tend to throw out "title" or "role" or "level" as a criteria at some point. It's important, and we definitely should. But, the reality is that most of us have fields like "title" coming in from a variety of free-form sources (web forms, lists, trade shows, sales, etc).

Think of the number of ways that one can type in a title that is essentially a Manager of Sales; "Sales Manager", "Sales Mgr", "Mgr Sales", "Manager, Sales", "Manager of Sales", etc. You get the point. When combined with all the other levels and areas of the business, it gets a bit mind boggling trying to come up with the right rule that would target a Manager of Sales.

If you are going to use Title for lead scoring, segment definition, personalization, etc, you need a better way. That's where data normalization comes in. Make it into a habit and you'll be much better off in the long run.

Luckily, it's easier than it seems. The best way is to build what our own Mike MacFarlane calls a "Contact Washing Machine". Every incoming list, form, upload, or data synch goes through this Program automatically, and is scrubbed, normalized, standardized, and cleansed. More on the whole "Contact Washing Machine" concept later, but for normalizing the Title field, here's how.

Add a step in the Program to run an Update Rule ("Update Contact/Prospect/Company Data"), and create a data normalization rule for titles. I'd recommend having two fields for title - the original field as the person typed it in, and a new field for "Normalized Title", it keeps things a lot saner than trying to maintain just one field.

For the data normalization Update Rule, you'll end up with a solid list of title options mapped to the roles you care about. Pull out a list of a few hundred actual titles in your database to get you started and use wild cards to look for the titles you are after.

Start with the most generic titles, and move down to the most specific, to make sure you catch everyone but are able to get the most precision possible. Building a list that looks for "*manager*sales*", "*mgr*sales*", "*sales*manager*", and "*sales*mgr*" should be able to find most of the ways of phrasing Manager of Sales as a title. Use these to set the Normalized Title field to "Manager of Sales", and you will then be able to use that field to look for any Managers or any Sales roles quickly and easily for scoring or targeting.

Leaks in the nurture process

Most marketers I know build their campaigns with a segment in mind to target. Maybe it's geographic, like people in Western Europe, maybe it's verticalized, such as a specific list of industries, maybe company size, etc. The challeng with this, is that there are always cracks in the coverage - people who are not in any targeted segment. These people fall through the cracks of a well-intentioned marketing program.


Here's an interesting experiment - we do this for a lot of clients if they haven't looked at the data themselves, and almost all of them are shocked at the results. How many of the contacts in your database have not received any communication from you in many, many months?


To find out, it's quite simple. Create a new Contact Filter, make it an Inactivity Based filter. Add a criteria for Sent Emails, and select no email in the last 6 months (or whatever timeframe you want to look at). Save it, and look at the results (click "View Contacts In Filter" for the full list if you want to eyeball it and see if there are great prospects there) . I'd be willing to bet it's a higher number than you expected.


Most marketers tend to think that they are overcommunicating, and that might be true for some segments. But there can still be a lot of perfectly good people who connected with you 18 months ago, and have fallen through the cracks.



If you don't have a general, catch-all nurture marketing campaign that is suitable for, and connecting with, all your contacts, you might want to run this analysis to see where you're at. If the list is small, excellent, but if it's larger than you'd expected, have a look at the data to see if there are opportunities you are missing.