How do you measure the success of an event? How do you measure your ROI (Return on Investment)? How do you understand your customers?
When running an event, the best measure of success is within your data capture. Data capture can help companies make important, methodical decisions by enabling understanding of trends, solving customer problems, and generating new ideas for the business. No matter how big or small your database is, the important part is how you use the data to enhance and grow your business following an event.
There are multiple ways to capture data to improve the customer experience you offer and gain valuable insights for future marketing promotions.
What Can Data Do For You?
• Profile Your Customers: The better you know your customers, the better your marketing is going to be.
• Measure ROI: Prove the impact of your efforts and understand how events impact overall business goals.
• Improve Your Events: Data can help you understand how your events are performing, how to optimise events, and how to make future decisions.
Gathering Your Data
Before the event even begins, you can capture data from the registration process. Set up a registration form to collect customers’ email addresses above everything else. Email addresses are ideal for future marketing communications, allowing you to build a consented organic database.
You can also use the registration process to capture data such as job titles, company names, industries, referral sources (how they heard about your event), and consent data.
On the day of your event, you can gather data from check-in records (attendees, no-shows, time spent at the event), on-site surveys, social/press mentions, and meetings (e.g., sales conversations).
Post-event, you can send surveys to gather feedback, including favourite parts of the event, favourite speakers, what they would have changed, and whether they liked/enjoyed the event overall.
Tools To Collect Your Data
You now know what you want to collect, but how do you go about doing it? There’s a whole host of methods out there, but all the best methods involve technologies that have been seamlessly integrated into the event:
• Event registration or management software
• On-site systems
• Web analytics
• Marketing automation software
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• RFID/NFC tools
• Chatbots
• Social media
• Communication tools
Measuring Your ROI
In its most basic form, ROI can be calculated by the following formula:
Value of (business won – amount spent) / amount spent
A great way to track your ROI is to monitor KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics. Keep in mind that KPI and/or metrics do not tell the full ROI story.
The top 5 metrics tracked by global companies are:
• Number of attendees
• Number of qualified sales leads
• Brand awareness
• Social press mentions
• Amount of sales pipeline generated
Events are not just about what happens at the event; they’re also about the data you capture and how you use it.
At Coalition, our teams have worked on data capture for live events for over a decade, with some of the world’s most renowned brands. For on-site teams, capturing the right data and maximising the live moment requires engaging, confident event staff who understand the importance and value of data capture.
