The days of generic one-to-many events are over — from mismatched networking sessions to one-size-fits-all event tracks. Today’s attendees want in-person and virtual events that feel as hyper-personalized as their Netflix homepage.
Attendees expect organizers to tailor every piece of content, networking opportunity, and session suggestion to their interests, goals, and challenges. And if they don’t get what they’re expecting, they’ll vote with their feet — out the door and never to be seen again.
How do you personalize and delight hundreds or thousands of attendees in a single event?
Forrester’s principal B2B marketing analyst Conrad Mills put it bluntly when he said marketers must adapt their event strategies, or risk losing their audience.
If that kind of ‘adapt or die’ statement has you whispering “but how???”, we feel you.
How do you turn generic events into personalized experiences? How do you personalize and delight hundreds or thousands of attendees in a single event?
Three words: event registration data 👇
In malfunctioning teams, event marketers capture leads and toss them over the wall to sales. No conversation, less cooperation. The sales process is totally separate from the event experience. It’s disjointed and impersonal — a thoroughly icky experience.
Dysfunctional cooperation is everywhere. So much so that marketers ranked sales and marketing alignment as their top challenge last year.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We know, we know— ‘how should I use my event registration data otherwise?’ In truth, you’re not far from the mark; there’s just some tweaking to the process that needs to take place.
The sales cycle can weave through the event experience. It can — and should — feel delightful. Buyers should enjoy their experience learning about a product or service and engaging with marketers, salespeople, and customer success pros.
Although an event registration workflow feels like an odd collaboration opportunity, it’s not. Co-designing event registration forms for events is the perfect way to get sales and event teams to collaborate to use all that juicy event registration data successfully. Working together, you can turn a transactional experience into something genuinely enjoyable.
Try these two baby steps to get started.
Your very first conversation with sales should be about targeting. Who do you want to sell to? What industry do they work in? Where are they based? How large is their company? What technology stack do they use?
A conversation is great, but your end goal is a common ideal customer profile (ICP) definition. You and your sales colleagues likely already have an ICP definition, but are they the same? Possibly not. So get aligned on definitions and make sure you’re singing from the same song sheet.
If you’re starting from scratch (or want to redo a dated ICP), Cognism has a great framework. So does Qualtrics. And Product Marketing Alliance.
Understanding your ICP means you can tailor their entire event experience — before, during, and after — for high-value attendees.
Once you know what your ideal customer looks like, you can design an event registration workflow that helps you find them. For example, if your ICP is Canadian B-corps in the healthcare space that are struggling with employee retention, make sure your event registration form is capturing all of those data points.
Understanding your ICP means you can tailor their entire event experience — before, during, and after — for high-value attendees. You can deliver a personalized version of your homepage and recommend pitch-perfect sessions that speak to their unique challenges and goals. You can invite them to closed sessions (exclusive dinners, anyone?) and roll out the red carpet experience. Even better; your event registration data from this year can help you create even more surprise-and-delight moments on a registrant by registrant basis for next year’s event.
At any time, your sales colleagues are probably running a few trusty plays while trialing a few more experimental ones. But how many times have you mentioned a sales campaign or program on your event registration page? Not often, right?
Integrating sales campaigns into your registration flow is a sales cycle shortcut. It’s like hanging a signpost and letting prospects find their own way to sales. Here are a couple of examples to get you started.
Ask attendees if they’re already a customer of yours. If they say yes, use conditional logic to ask a follow-up question, like if they want to test your new product or feature.
If someone’s address matches a target location, add them to a sales nurture campaign focused on local challenges, opportunities, and peers.
Remember to ask for additional data, too. Your sales colleagues won’t thank you for sending them unqualified leads. Answers like job role, function, or territory need to appear in your event registration data.
Healthcare ecosystem platform HLTH runs a customer acquisition play called the Hosted Buyer program at their events. It offers attendees a free event ticket in exchange for them taking a set number of meetings with sponsors.
The program sign-up process starts with a simple question on the event registration page: Are you responsible for evaluating or buying healthcare products and service solutions for your organization?
If the user says no, the form continues as normal.
But if they say yes, it fires up a conditional logic section to capture a brief description of their company, objectives, annual revenue, purchase history, tenure, and more. If you’re wondering, those qualifying questions come from the Hosted Buyer program team. It means when an applicant hits the final register button, the program team has everything they need to vet the applicant and process their application.
And they do vet every applicant. Because even with a tight registration page, there will always be unsuitable applicants just looking for a free ticket.
“We ensure that people are qualified and that the company they’re working for is the right kind of company,” says Matt Baum, Senior Manager of Product and Operations. “We want people in a position to make decisions. We want people who can come to a sponsor’s table and say, ‘I want to sign a contract tomorrow.’”
They want the magic of chance meetings and opportunistic introductions. The problem is, those chance encounters are random and rare. At least, they used to be.
Collect the right event registration data and you can create magic from nothing but form inputs.
Here are a few data-driven networking strategies to get started.
Many event registration pages already capture data on job roles and seniority. With those two simple data points, you can automate speed mentoring pairings, connecting seasoned pros with newbies.
Experienced attendees get to take people under their wing and novices get to learn from folks who have been there and done it all before. It’s a win-win.
Seniority isn’t a guarantee of capability, though. If you want a more granular strategy, get people to rate particular skills or subject matter knowledge and pair advanced practitioners with learners.
If that sounded like a lot of questions to ask every potential attendee, you’re right. Shakespeare said that brevity is the soul of wit. Same vibe for registration forms for events.
Luckily, you can use conditional logic in your event registration software to make your registration form a little more palatable. Never heard of conditional logic? Totally fine. Here’s how it works.
Your event registration page asks a simple trigger question: “Do you want to take part in mentoring?” If an attendee clicks No, nothing changes and they move on.
But if they click Yes, a hidden section unfurls. The new section asks whether they want to be a mentor or mentee, what topics they’re interested in learning or sharing about, and what level of mastery they currently have. You can also ask for more tactical information, like time commitments and availability.
Simple and effective… but we’re only getting started.
You can string together as much conditional logic, or follow up questions, as you need to turn your registration page into a personalized experience. So in this scenario, your logic would look a little something like:
Simple, concise, and personalized. Visibility rules allow you to ask the right questions to the right people at the right time. If someone doesn’t give you the right signal (for example, they say they don’t want to take part in mentoring), they can easily move on.
Conditional logic lets you gather data where it matters, while keeping the event registration experience friction-free.
Creating personalized networking sessions like these ups the ante for your registrants to actually show up at your event. While most of us don’t feel too bad about not showing up on a faceless business, we feel a certain obligation to be there when we commit to meeting with a person.
More importantly, your registrants may feel like there’s now a session ✨just for them ✨— and that personalization is priceless.
A lot of B2B events are aimed at homogenous audiences; it makes sense when you consider these events make money by getting a specific ICP in the room. That means you’re probably going to have a lot of people in the same role and at roughly the same stage in their career — and that’s perfect for peer learning opportunities.
Create small networking groups of attendees with similar attributes (job title, industry, seniority, interests, challenges, goals, and so on) in your event registration software. (Don’t have networking on your platform? Maybe swap to a provider that does.) Or use a mobile app to let in-person attendees find fellow eventgoers with similar titles or interests.
These work best when you give groups some prompts. Spin up small group sessions on your event registration platform. Riff on your event tracks and offer up discussion points or problems for the group to work on. For an extra VIP experience, consider assigning a moderator to each group.
When attendees have an opportunity to solve their real, day-to-day challenges with peers who are in the same boat, they’re likely to walk away from your event feeling like they got personalized value; and that’s putting event registration data to great use.
Countless B2C technology companies built their businesses on ruthless hyper-personalization. Remember when you found out not everyone spent half of 2023 on corntok? But when you go to an industry roadshow or conference, it’s a different story. More often than not, every attendee sees the exact same tracklist.
Some event organizers worry that personalization requires a heavy lift, complex algorithms, and Amazon’s engineering budget — but it doesn’t. We have a few ways to get started:
Matt Baum from HLTH says you can deliver a tailored experience to every attendee using a handful of simple data points from your event registration platform.
HLTH started with industry data. Matt‘s team painstakingly identified 11 target industries and made it a required field in their registration pages.
Before their event, HLTH’s content teams tagged each session and speaker with industry labels. They built out personalized homepages on their marketing automation platform for each industry. When someone from an automaker registered for an event, their event registration data dropped them onto the automotive persona landing page where each piece of content spoke directly to their unique industry challenges and goals.
When registrants walk away from the form feeling like the event’s content will truly be tailored to them, you boost your registrant-to-attendee conversion rate.
Industry data is a good starting point, but it’s not the only way to drive content personalization — far from it.
Capture attendee interests via a multiselect to learn precisely what they want to hear about. Or ask about their professional goals. Or their favorite speakers. Or what they want out of an event — things like networking, job opportunities, learning and development, or even entertainment.
Your event registration page should feel like a conversation. As people get deeper and deeper, you should learn more about them and tailor the content you’re recommending to their interests, goals, and challenges. Event registration data is what your business gets out of the interaction; it’s important to make sure your attendees get something out of it, too.
Expand your content focus beyond the event itself, too. Personalize pre-event nurture or education campaigns. Recommend on-demand sessions from past events and relevant pieces from your content library — blogs, eBooks, videos, whatever. After the event, build personalized on-demand microsites — just like HLTH’s segmented landing pages.
Lorraine Mariella, Founder and President of event consultancy Eventium, always includes a free text notes field in her registration pages. While the vast majority of answers are junk — “I’m bulking so need two meals” was one memorable example — occasionally she’ll stumble on gold.
One cryptic request that comes up time after time is for a small private room with a power socket and a small fridge. It’s for breastfeeding mothers. It’s a simple fix for Lorraine to secure such a room and let people know it’s available, but doing so removes a ton of stress and worry.
“I know what questions I need to ask during registration because I’ve done this before,” says Lorraine. “But I also want to give people an opportunity to tell me something that they think I may need to know but didn’t ask.”
Another time, at an event for sales leaders, someone’s PA added “Justin loves sriracha” to the free comment box. Some people would have discarded the comment, but Lorraine and her team saw an opportunity to create a moment of personalized magic. They went out, bought a small bottle of sriracha, and had it waiting for Justin when he checked in. He spent the whole event waving the bottle at fellow attendees and praising the organizers.
You can’t script moments like that… but you can capture the information you need to make them happen.
So far, you’ve seen how event registration data can elevate the attendee experience — providing a VIP sales experience, magical networking, and tailored content recommendations. But great data helps long before a potential attendee walks through the doors or even hits your event registration page.
Let’s zoom out and see how attendee data can help you find more (and more targeted) potential attendees.
Registered attendees can reveal your most effective lead sources and messaging angles. They can tell you what marketing channels they prefer. They can share their most-used professional communities — AKA your prime advertising locations. But they can only do that if you treat your registration page as an audience research tool and not just a checkout.
Without overloading your registration flow, you could easily ask:
Slice and segment your attendee list to create subsets of your best attendees — repeat attendees, ICP matches, top engagers, that sort of thing. Suddenly, you can see not just what channels are working to bring in the most attendees, but what channels are bringing in the best attendees.
Use that data to evaluate your advertising and marketing channels. Redirect your marketing spend to the channels and tactics bringing in the right attendees. Don’t be swayed by vanity metrics; ten ideal customers are better than 20 tire kickers. Be ruthless and optimize for quality.
Get it right and you’ll bring in more of your best potential customers, which will improve both your targeting and your relationship with your sales team. It’s a flywheel getting faster and faster, attracting more and better attendees and driving down acquisition costs.
Event marketers love data. But it tends to be data from during or after events. Check-ins, social media engagement, survey results, session activity, click-rates. That data is good, but it’s like running before you walk.
Great events build on a solid data foundation covering your most important people — your attendees.
Too often companies roll out free registration forms for events. (Google Forms, looking at you 👀) Truth is, a free form’s not going to cut it. To get the right data and insights, you need an event registration platform; somewhere to build experiences, capture key data, and start your event with a bang.
By building a smart registration page, you can better understand attendees, deliver a more delightful event experience, and ultimately maximize the ROI from your event by simply taking into account how to use your event registration data wisely.
So what are you waiting for?
Give your registration page the love it deserves today.
Socializing
People attend events to have a good time. Sometimes that means watching a great keynote speech or learning a new skill at a workshop. Other times it means kicking back and relaxing with a beer or a burger. Gregarious, outgoing folks can rock up at an event and instantly find new best friends, but introverted attendees will thank you for adding some structure.
Fire up a few socializing events — wine tasting, quizzes, tours, you get the idea — and capture interest on your registration page. Then play matchmaker and group attendees together.