A screenshot of University of Nottingham Malaysia’s Virtual Open Day.

There are several strategies to determine how well your event performed. One of the most effective ways is to pay attention to your attendance rate. In this article, we’ll share 4 ways to boost your virtual event attendance and a few digital marketing tools to leverage to drive your virtual event engagement.

1. Reminder Emails

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Reminder emails are a great way to engage with your registrants or attendees for making announcements about any upcoming events. The process is simple: you just need to schedule a specific time to send out designated emails to your attendee list.

If your event is live, you can also immediately send out the emails as a gentle reminder to your attendees.

There are two groups of people you can send emails to:

  1. Registrants who have not logged in
  2. All registrants, which include attendees.

What’s even better? Fairwiz’s reminder emails are unlimited, so you can schedule as many as you want. If you’re unsure how often you should send them to your attendees, we recommend a minimum of three times - a week before, a day early and an hour earlier.

Schedule at least three reminder emails before your virtual fair to engage with attendees.

Benefits

Having a scheduled email reminder system prevents the hassle of setting up alarms and sending emails out manually. As the reminder email is an in-built digital marketing feature offered by Fairwiz, you don’t need to use a separate email system because all of that can be completed within our virtual fair software.

2. Push Notifications

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Another way to boost attendance is to provide registrants with a friendly reminder through push notifications. Our push notification function lets you send out automatic web push notifications to users who opted to receive them. Like reminder emails, you can send them out before the event as invitations, promotions or on the day itself to welcome attendees. If the attendance rate is low, use it to highlight important activities for attendees to check out, such as webinars, talks or live chats, to improve response rates.

There are no limits to the number of push notifications, and just like our reminder emails, you should send out at least three push notifications - a week before, a day early and an hour earlier.

Use push notifications as friendly reminders to increase event attendance.

Benefits

If you have hundreds or even thousands of registrants, push notifications save you a tremendous amount of time by sending out messages all at once. It is an extremely helpful tool, especially for users who don’t check their emails frequently because the web notifications are pop-ups that appear on both desktop and mobile screens. This helps to increase engagement rate as push notifications can easily direct users to your registration platform. All of this can be done within Fairwiz, so you don’t have to spend time using multiple platforms to schedule your web push notifications.

3. Google UTM Feature

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One of the ways that you can promote your event’s landing page is to build a tracking list to increase the attendance rate. If you use Google Analytics, Google’s Campaign URL Builder helps track where traffic originates when visitors click your event landing page. All you need to do is fill up three main sections: the website URL, source and medium.

The website URL should be your event’s landing page link, whereas the source is the location of where you are getting traffic from. For instance, you might insert this URL in your newsletter or Facebook post for event promotion. The medium section refers to the marketing medium of your campaign. This could be through banners, ads, emails and so forth, depending on how you choose to share your campaign link.

An example of how you can use Google’s Campaign URL Builder to customise your UTM tags to track where your registrants & attendees come from.

When done filling up the required details, Google generates a unique URL containing UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tags which are extensions placed in your URL related to your event. You can then insert this new URL in your digital campaign to track your registrants and attendees.

Your Fairwiz event landing page URL with UTM tags.

Benefits

A campaign URL with UTM tags comes in handy when you’re trying to figure out which digital marketing campaign produces the best results in driving visitors to your event page. This is because an effective campaign analysis enables you to track website traffic. In Fairwiz, we integrate with Google Analytics so you can identify which campaigns achieved higher click rates and focus on them for future events.

4. Post-event Survey

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After all the effort of planning and conducting your virtual event, it’s time to wrap things up with the last crucial step - post-event surveys. Post-event surveys allow attendees to evaluate your virtual event performance and for you to fully understand the impact of your event. Once your event ends, Fairwiz will automatically send emails to attendees to take the survey.

Fairwiz’s automated post-event survey via email.

Remember to keep the survey short and simple. Longer surveys tend to have higher dropout rates. Fairwiz’s survey questions are generally about:

  • Satisfaction rating for your virtual event
  • What do your attendees like the most about the event
  • What they dislike about the event
  • Whether they are interested in participating in your future virtual events

Do look forward to the future as we have plans to allow customisations for survey questions as well!

Once attendees complete a post-event survey, Fairwiz will store their data on your dashboard to view. Besides that, you can choose to download survey responses by clicking the export button to refer to them whenever you need them.

Fairwiz’s automated post-event survey enables you to check your attendees’ overall response to your virtual event.

Benefits

With Fairwiz’s automated survey, you can increase your attendance rate without the need to look for other online survey channels. A post-event survey is a good indicator of the success of your virtual event. It helps to determine whether the event has met your attendees’ expectations and if you have achieved your goals. You’ll be able to identify your target audience’s wants and needs so that you can revise your event planning strategies and make better adjustments. Aside from knowing your audience better, attendee feedback allows you to recognise the strengths and weaknesses of your event to see how you can increase your reach & attendance rate with your future events.

To learn more about how Fairwiz can help boost your virtual event attendance, book a demo or send us an email.