Where's your focus & "chopping up" event attendees
Matt writes the following ...
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"How can you manage expectations of the customers? Maybe some of my customers would like more info from us, but I don't want to send them stuff they don't want and lose customer's interest (and annoy them), or just get caught up in the piles of other forms of advertising that is constantly bombarding every one.
I want to make sure that our message sticks out from the crowd and would love some way to be able to separate the people based on their interests. We currently don't have any information tied to our e-mail or text listings to separate who wants what—or shouldn't I care?"
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First, Matt is doing something massively important.
Can you identify what it is?
Matt is using a customer-centric mindset, bravo!!! It's not about what he thinks. Matt is being very cognizant of his prospects and customers. It's a very mature event organizer approach. And it's missing from most events. If you want more people at your event, stop focusing on your ego ... and focus on their ego!
I'm going to amalgamate my response to Matt's series of questions with one strong suggestion. And to answer his last question, "Yes Matt, you should absolutely care!"
What follows applies to every single event, including free events.
My suggestion is that Matt segments his marketing target lists. In the purest sense, have one list for prospects and another list for customers (attendees).
Side note: even if you have a free event, you should be issuing tickets.
Once someone purchases a ticket (or becomes an attendee), put them on a customer only track. Fair warning, it is more work to use segmentation. But it alleviates many of the concerns Matt pointed out above.
Here's a hard data point to drive home the importance of segmentation. It comes directly from recent client work.
List "A" is a customer list and list "B" is a prospect list. The only notable variation is the P.S. copy was removed from list "A." Three event info messages were sent to both lists. List A's response rate was 3x more that of list B for each of the three messages sent. Again, same message. That's the power of segmentation!
Want to get more list info? Check out the articles below: