80% of marketers believe that live events are critical to their company’s success. What’s more, nearly one third of everyone surveyed said that it’s their single-most effective marketing channel, according to this study. Whether it’s tradeshows and conferences, field events and meetups, or webinars and hangouts – marketers are insisting on more and bigger live events and are dedicating more and more budget to them every year. And therein lies the challenge.
With more marketers throwing more money at more events every year, savvy marketers are going to have to find different and better channels to promote their events in order to maintain their edge. That’s why Sigstr is thrilled to announce our next-generation set of event marketing capabilities that will help you drive awareness, registration and attendance better than ever before.
Using Sigstr to promote events has been a longtime favorite amongst our customers. Why? Because they’ve seen such a tremendous boost in performance when using employee email as an advertising and awareness channel. According to our recent State of Email Signature Marketing report, 38% of all campaigns deployed last year were focused on promoting events.
Event Marketing Rockstars: Invoca and SalesLoft
For example, call center intelligence vendor, Invoca, ran a five-month Sigstr campaign to promote their 2017 Summit. Invoca’s Marketing Operations Manager, Jen Rios, said, “Before the conference even began, Sigstr had already influenced much more in pipeline, which ended up translating to a 477% increase over the previous year.”
Likewise, sales automation leader, SalesLoft, ran a similar Sigstr campaign to promote their annual conference, Rainmaker. Over a five-week period, their Sigstr campaign racked up 271,000 impressions. Salesloft CEO, Kyle Porter, told us that “One out of every eight clicks on a Sigstr campaign turned into a new registrant for Rainmaker.”
Some of our customers even use animated GIFs to drive meetings at conferences.
With customers already seeing such phenomenal success using Sigstr to promote events, we’re absolutely ecstatic to introduce Sigstr’s next generation of event marketing capabilities that will bestow even more powerful tools and tactics to event marketers. And it will give them the edge they need to stand out in an increasingly cramped channel.
Countdown Timers
Keeping anticipation and excitement for an upcoming event is tough for event marketers to do without becoming spammy. With countdown timers, you can schedule campaigns to progressively display event deadlines within every employee email that’s sent. This passive campaign keeps the cadence of reminders going without ever become annoying. In fact, the world’s leading event management software vendor, Cvent, uses this functionality to promote discounted early-bird registration for their own live events.
Registration Segmentation
It’s bad form to keep promoting an event to those who have already registered for it. Now you can use Sigstr to display “Register Now” messaging to people that haven’t signed up yet and “Reminder” or countdown timers to those who have registered. Similarly, you can easily make your post-event promotion more targeted by assigning people who registered and attended your event with “Thank You For Attending” campaigns. For those that didn’t make it, use “Sorry we missed you!” messaging that promotes your event recap or webinar replay.
Sigstr Viral
Combining forces with other companies to host events is a great way to lower event costs, mitigate risk, and create a bigger presence and registration list. When you’re creating an owned event with partners, however, it can be challenging to ensure they’re doing everything they can to help promote the event.
Sigstr Viral easily allows you to make sure that every person at your partners’ company is promoting the event – and they’re getting the proper attribution for the registrations they’re driving. Create a single page where your partners can copy and paste the HTML code to drop directly into employee email signatures or your ESP. The HTML code comes complete with the configurable parameters you need to track registration attribution. Your partners – who don’t need a Sigstr subscription – will love you for it, and you can rest easy knowing they’re promoting your event with every email sent.
Geographic Targeting
Let’s say you’ve got an upcoming field event in Denver. Why on earth would you want to promote that event to everyone in the world? With geographic targeting, you can align your regional events promotion to only those people in a given area (you’re welcome, everyone that doesn’t live in Denver!). Even if you’re doing a multi-city roadshow, you can run multiple geographic campaigns at once to keep your promotion targeted to those areas while still promoting other content everywhere else.
Industry and Persona Targeting
Like Geographic Targeting, keep your event promotion ads limited to only the individuals in a particular role or industry to ensure the content is relevant. This targeting isn’t just limited to events – your vertical-specific content can be targeted to your industry segments as well! You can count on your click-through and conversion rates peaking way up when you’re delivering hyper-targeted content with Sigstr.
When you combine ad targeting functionality with scheduled countdowns and registration segmentation, you’re able to create highly personalized campaigns that touch every point in the event’s lifecycle. Learn more about how Sigstr can help your events rock, see more promotion examples, and get in touch with someone from Sigstr.
