Choosing the right sales and automation software to replace your manual email marketing efforts is a great way to stay on top of potential leads, convert prospective attendees into registrants, and boost sales.
Considering the benefits of using a marketing automation solution like, Infusionsoft, you’ll never want to manually create confirmation and reminder emails again. In fact, by using marketing automation software, you’ll get access to all sorts of useful features like scheduling and sending marketing emails, managing registrant information, and using it to send personalized emails to your attendees.
In this article, we’ll share some actionable tips on how to automate follow up marketing for events with Infusionsoft. Before we begin, let’s quickly take a look at what Infusionsoft is and why you might consider adding it to your event marketing tech stack.
Article Outline
What Is Infusionsoft?
Infusionsoft is a complete sales automation platform that’s made up of a CRM [customer relationship management], sales pipeline automation, a marketing automation builder with drag-and-drop features, and e-commerce capabilities.
What makes Infusionsoft a popular sales and marketing automation solution are the powerful features that allow you to score leads, automation your marketing activities, and manage your sales pipeline.
Event organizers and marketers can use Infusionsoft to automate follow up marketing and keep track of prospective attendees. It makes it easy for marketers to gather feedback from participants after the event, automate lead nurturing, send a sequence of welcome emails as part of onboarding, and automate the event registration process.
Infusionsoft seamlessly adapts to the needs of small companies, including event management businesses. If you’re already using Event Espresso as your event registration solution on your WordPress website, consider using the Infusionsoft Integration add-on to fully automate your attendee interactions and email marketing campaigns.
Next, we’ll take a look at how Infusionsoft can help you automate your post-event marketing efforts.
4 Ways to Automate Follow Up Marketing for Events Using Infusionsoft
Here are some of the ways you can streamline your follow up email marketing with Infusionsoft:
#1: Follow Up With Attendees After the Event
One way to make the most of your event marketing efforts is by reaching out to attendees after the event. An easy way to do this is to use the attendee contact information you collect during registration. However, this can take up a lot of time if you do it manually — especially if you have a long contact list.
Ideally, you need to start interacting with attendees immediately after the event. That’s when they’ll be most interested in sharing their views about your events and providing feedback.
One way to do this is by transferring attendee contact information to your CRM software and tag each individual as an attendee for your event. Next, you can use automation software like Infusionsoft for scheduling emails to be sent right after the event.
You’ll also want to create an email template and personalize it for each recipient. For example, you could address each attendee by their name or mention their business’ name in the email message. This way, you’ll streamline your email marketing efforts and offer personalized experiences to all your attendees.
#2: Automate Lead Nurturing
It’s important to keep in mind that your attendees might not be ready to take action the moment they receive your marketing email. You need to give them time to learn more about your event and how they’ll benefit from attending.
This is why savvy event marketers spend time learning about their attendees’ needs and targeting their audience with the right messaging at the right time. As a result, they’re able to create lasting relationships with their target audience.
Although it certainly takes time to nurture prospects, it also enables your sales reps to focus on contacts who are most likely to act on your conversion goal – whether that’s to register for your event, check out your products after the event, donate to your cause, or sign up for your newsletter.
Automating your lead nurturing process enables you to keep prospects engaged with your brand and allows you to stay in touch with them without any extra manual effort on your part. To do this, start by organizing contacts (i.e. your prospective attendees) into segments using tags. Once that’s done, set up an email sequence that nudges them towards your conversion goal.
A best practice is to send informational resources to your prospects each month in order to educate them about your event activities and answer any questions they may have. These email sequences can include:
- Links to social media pages.
- Blog posts.
- Photos, attendee reviews and testimonials, or presentation slides from past events.
- Your event landing page URL.
You can also set up a Contact Us button that lets them get in touch with a sales rep without having to go through your event website.
#3: Send a Sequence of Welcome Emails
Organizing a successful event isn’t the end of your interaction with your attendees but an opportunity to build new relationships and nurture old ones. You can create a good first impression by sending welcome emails to attendees or registrants to show them that you look forward to seeing them at your upcoming event.
By automating your welcome emails you’ll be able to keep in touch with your registrants until the day of the event. You can use this as an opportunity to share event details, photos from past events, and information about your cause. Additionally, you can set up Infusionsoft so that an event ticket purchase triggers an email sequence that confirms the purchase and thanks the attendee.
Let’s look at some actionable tips on how to stay in touch with event registrants using Infusionsoft:
- Organize registrants into segments such as first-time registrants, repeat attendees, etc….
- Set up email sequences for each segment that:
- Thanks them for registering and introduces the event.
- Provides answers to FAQs (like how to reach the venue, where to stay, what to pack, etc…).
- Shares links to your event page, social media page, and blog posts.
- Offers a discount to repeat attendees or optional upgrade (this is a great opportunity to upsell or cross-sell attendees).
#4: Automate the Event Registration Process
Savvy event organizers know that keeping track of all the tasks in your to-do list can be difficult – especially when your email list grows to include dozens of entries. You need a way to focus on planning and organizing the event instead of overlooking minor details such as new sign-ups, confirmation emails, and reminder notifications.
Register attendees through your website using a simple web form that gathers the attendee’s name and contact information. This is possible with Event Espresso. Next, you can use Infusionsoft to automatically send confirmation emails to your registrants that include a thank you message as well as important event information such as date and time, venue, and schedule.
Here are some actionable tips on how to automate the event registration process:
- Use event registration and ticketing software to create a registration form and sell tickets.
- Set up Infusionsoft to automatically send registrants a confirmation email.
- Trigger reminder emails (using Infusionsoft) to be sent out the week before (or day before) the day of the event.
Conclusion
By automating follow up marketing for your events, you’ll be able to maximize your event marketing efforts and continue engaging with attendees after the event. We shared some actionable tips on how you can automate follow up marketing with Infusionsoft and Event Espresso.
Let’s quickly recap some main points we covered in this article:
- Follow up with attendees after the event. Infusionsoft can help you collect attendee contact information and schedule follow up emails.
- Automate lead nurturing. An email sequence that includes links to social media pages, blog posts, testimonials, and reviews can help you nudge prospects towards registering for your event.
- Send a sequence of welcome emails. You can set up an email sequence to thank new registrants for purchasing tickets, share links to your event page, and offer discounts.
- Automate the event registration process. Infusionsoft enables you to automate event-related tasks such as online event registration, confirmations, and reminders.
What marketing automation software do you use for collecting registrant information and sending marketing emails? Let us know by commenting below.
We use Mailchimp to send out Marketing emails and of course Event Espresso to register entrants.