Are you sending the same email to all of your event leads?
Here’s why you shouldn’t:

There are a lot of things that have to go right when you’re capturing leads at live events. You have to have the right planning, the right booth, the right staff, and the right follow up. It’s that last one where people get tripped up. How do you engage people and set your activation apart from others?

Let’s examine what normally happens. The attendee comes to your booth, you scan them, and your marketing automation software takes over. They receive a very beautiful thank you email crafted with love from your marketing department. Which is then promptly buried by dozens of similar emails with similar messaging from all of your competitors.

Their emails are probably going to follow the same flow. 

Hi Name,

It was great seeing you at Event X! We loved talking about Industry with you. If you would like to know more about us, click on the link below! Request a demo, leave a comment, or just look around. Have a great day.

Be honest, would you click that link? I probably wouldn’t. If I did have a legitimate interest, I’d probably wait on a call from the salesperson.

Marketers, this is your chance to warm up the lead before the salesperson calls. Thanks to powerful event management tools that can automate first touches almost instantly, you get to set the tone of the relationship. So what should you do?

Leverage the Data You Capture

If you’re using your own Event Lead Capture solution like Captello, you can customize your form to ask questions specific to your organization. Questions like “which of our product lines are you interested in?” 

If your booth staff are doing it right, you should already have an idea of what your leads are looking for. 

Systems like Captello get this data in real time as you submit leads, letting them instantly segment based on interest. Now instead of seeing an email with a generic call to action, I get an email inviting me to watch a video about the solution I’m looking for. 

You can go even deeper with conditional emails that change their content based on demographics like the lead’s location, job title, and organization. When you seamlessly change content based on what you know about the lead, you create a compelling message that seems nearly handcrafted.

Send the Email from the Lead Owner

If you’re not staffing your booth with the sales people who will be following up, you really should if you can. They’ve already had a chance to build rapport with the lead. The lead is probably already expecting to hear from them again.

Solutions like Captello automatically track who captured the lead; no waiting for late-night entries into your CRM before you know who the owner is. Because of this, you can send the email from the lead owner, even if it is minutes after the initial capture. 

Instead of getting a generic email from marketing@yourorganization.com, I get an email from Brad. I remember Brad. I like Brad. What’s he got to say?

Skip the Email Altogether

Hear me out on this one! I’m not saying you shouldn’t follow up or that you shouldn’t leverage emails. But for that initial follow up touch, what if you did something unexpected? 

Imagine having a VIP box on your form. If your booth staff feels this person is qualified, they can check this box. Now instead of getting an email like the one above, they get a text 5 minutes later that sounds something like this:

Hi Brad, it’s Chris from Captello. Great talking with you. We’re doing a cocktail dinner later tonight. Would you like to join us?

Now that’s what I call engaging. Best of all, the sales person didn’t do a thing; it was all handled automatically in the background. 

And that’s the trick; everything should feel personal, like it was sent just to that lead. If you want people to engage with you, make them feel like you’re engaging them on a personal level.

Want more ideas on how to engage with event leads? Follow the Captello blog, or schedule a demo here.