As field or event marketers, we’re often focused on creating a memorable experience within the event itself. The difference between a good event and a great event is the care and consideration you fold into the experience you create for your event guests pre- and post-event too. The small details go a long way to leave a lasting impression on your attendees. Having a well-thought-out personal gifting strategy at your digital events can create those moments that leave that lasting impression and really “wow” your attendees.
There are a lot of tools out there to host a virtual event, but very few focused on building a bond between your team, your attendee, and all of the other event attendees. Personal gifting is the ultimate way to establish that bond at scale. By creating a one-to-one personal experience that is relevant, relatable, and respectful for your guests, you can deliver a digital event that will leave them awestruck from start to finish.
After hosting our digital event, YOUniverse, we wanted to share with you a few pro-tips to enhance the experience at your next digital event. Below are the ten ways to leverage Alyce to produce an event experience that is not only personal but memorable:
Reimagine Social Experiences
Use Alyce’s personal research to understand your prospect’s interests and then create experiences inspired by those shared interests. Use the interests to invite like-minded prospects and customers to join a virtual meet-up you host such as a mixology night or a virtual jam session. You can even use shared interests to pair up virtual event buddies, or structure breakout groups. Nearly every event prioritizes people’s 9-to-5 responsibilities ahead of their #5to9™ passions. Bring these two worlds together and help connect your attendees with other attendees who have the same #5to9™ interests!
Pre-event Personal Gifting for Digital Events
Set an Event Theme:
Use Alyce to send gifts to invitees that fit your event theme. Maybe you are hosting a cooking get together – send everyone a cookbook or cooking utensil from the Alyce marketplace to make the dish. Or perhaps you want to encourage people to “arrive comfortably” – send them a pair of slippers or headphones to make their remote attendance more enjoyable.
You could event host a breakfast and learn and hook each invitee up with a digital gift card to order breakfast locally on you. A pre-event gift will create emotional buy-in for the person to show up. This is because you’ve established a relationship built on reciprocity. You can also start with a smaller “seed gift” to drive registrants and then expand on it after the event to those that show.
We recently sent Rocket notebooks to key prospects we wanted to sign up for YOUniverse. To make the invitation more personal, we enabled each Account Executive with a Video Landing page. This gave them the ability to send a personal video invitation to their prospect.
Here’s an example of what our rep, Jen, sent to her prospect, Lauren:
Level Up Your Registration Process
Seamless Registration
Use Alyce’s post-gift CTA functionality to automatically redirect the gift recipient to the event sign-up page once they accept their gift. This will make the registration process really seamless.
You can also consider adding your event sign up page redirect to all Alyce prospect gifts you send out in the month leading up to the event just to give it more exposure.
Drive Registrants and Attendee Show Rates
Consider using gifting to drive registrants and show rates by saying the first xx to register and attend will receive an exclusive gift. This incentivizes show rates and avoids the complexity of running a contest/random drawing.
Reward Your Team’s Amplification Efforts
Use Alyce to run a spiff for internal team members (or event speakers) to drive event sign up. For example, the top three team members to drive to most sign-ups get a high-value Alyce gift. This creates a fun and healthy competition while getting the broader team bought in on your social promotion strategy.
Personal Gifting During a Digital Event
Driving Attendee Engagement
Use Alyce to incentivize in-event engagement. For example, the most active in the group chat, or those that participate in a poll, or post on social media using the event hashtag, get a gift. The possibilities are truly endless, it just depends on how you structure the engagement portion of your event or if you have any kind of gamification built into your event platform.
Personal Gifting After a Digital Event
Post-Event Communication
Send your post-event follow-up communications through an Alyce gift instead of a standard marketing email. Thank people for attending and then redirect them to the on-demand content using the post gift CTA feature in Alyce. Pro tip – gifting donations as post-event thank you gifts leave a sweet lasting impression on your attendees.
Reimagine your Event Surveying
Send out a post-event gift to attendees and instead of requiring a meeting as you do in a prospect gift, make the required action be to answer a set of questions about their event experience. People are more likely to offer up feedback if there is a built-in incentive.
Keep the Personal Connections Going
Leverage Alyce’s new video landing page functionality to add a personal video to your post-event gift. Perhaps the video comes from the session leader, or from your head of marketing or CEO. Send to accept rates skyrocket when you take this one-two punch of personal gifting + video.
Speaker Thank You Gifts
Gift your speakers post-event to thank them for being a part of the experience. Our customers see AMAZING feedback with this personal gesture, and it’s a great emotional bank deposit for these brand promoters!
RELATED: Need In-Person Event Swag Fast? Set up a Virtual Swag Store!
The ABPs of Digital Events
Whether you are planning a 10,000+ person virtual experience, or an intimate roundtable, take advantage of personal gifting at your net digital event. With opportunities to turn one-to-many generic “touches” pre-, during and post-event into truly one-to-one personal experience moments for your event attendees your company can perforate all that digital event noise.
Mary Matton
Mary Matton is the Growth Marketing Manager for Alyce, and is obsessed with all things inbound and demand gen. Outside of work, her #5to9 interests include perfecting her mobile photography, the quest for the perfect iced coffee, and spending time with the people most important to her.