Executing a virtual event requires hard work, dedication and precise planning. A successful virtual event is one which drives registration and keeps attendees engaged.
It makes sense then that you should have a way to measure impact once your event concludes. After all, this effort is wasted if it doesn’t yield a return on investment.
One way to track success is to cultivate, nurture and score the leads generated by your virtual event. Read on for strategies involving lead management and making the most of your virtual event metrics.
How Can Virtual Events Improve Lead Management?
Today, most virtual event platforms provide hosts with access to real-time dashboards which track all attendee activity. The tracking begins with event registration and progresses to sessions attended, documents downloaded, spaces visited and more.
This activity data can enrich your attendee profiles, further qualify your prospects and give you a better understanding of what your audience is interested in. In turn, it can create more personalized follow-up and nurturing strategies.
Why is Lead Nurturing Important?
Automate the follow-up with virtual event attendees by using a marketing automation platform to create a lead nurturing campaign. The goal of this campaign is to further qualify leads and hand them off to a sales rep when purchase intent is signaled.
Lead nurture campaigns that leverage emails sent out on a specific cadence can be enhanced with virtual event attendee data. Attendees can receive nurture content that relates directly to the content they consumed at the event.
After creating multiple emails with targeted content to fit your specific use case, you can set the cadence of your emails. You can create multiple lists of attendees that fit specific personas, level of qualification or product interest.
The more specific you make your nurture emails, the better the results.
The more touches and conversations you have with your attendees, the more likely they will convert to happy customers.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring can be a very useful marketing automation tool for properly qualifying leads who are marketing qualified and sales qualified. Robust scoring models can pinpoint the sweet spot for when a lead is ready to be contacted by sales.
By pairing lead scoring with your virtual event data, you can gain valuable insight into your leads and their position in the sales cycle.
Once you outline the information that would be most valuable to your use case as a trigger for someone who is “qualified” you can set up a specific campaign that listens and looks for these triggers to complete some action.
Each organization will differ, but it is common practice to send an email to the sales representative once one of their assigned prospects becomes qualified based on the rules and triggers outlined from the virtual event.
In this alert email, you can include basic information about the lead and use tokens to pull in the specific triggers from the virtual event that designated them to become qualified. Using data collected from virtual events in lead scoring programs enhances your marketing qualification strategy immensely because this behavioral information is collected behind the scenes.
In a virtual event, leads can create their own personalized experience without being pursued by a salesperson; as a result, their activity is completely authentic and can signal the proper time when Sales should step in.
Here is a sample of how you may break up your lead scoring for a virtual event:
The way you score may change depending on your event, content and needs. Create your own worksheet, and update and edit it with your own models based on your specific use case.
What Additional Lead Management Steps Can You Take?
There are several ways to evaluate, qualify and deliver the leads generated by your virtual event. Here are a few additional ways to manage yours:
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Send qualified leads to sales via integration between your virtual event platform and your CRM system (i.e. Prioritize the warm leads that clicked on a CTA in the event asking to speak with sales).
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Review chat transcripts to clues on prospects’ sales readiness. For example, questions about product features and pricing may indicate that prospects are actively researching for a product purchase.
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Evaluate surveys to determine leads’ overall satisfaction with the virtual event. Use the survey results to determine the best method for Sales to follow up with leads.
Get a Demo of Our Virtual Event Platform
Whether you’re hosting virtual or hybrid events to reach customers, employees, investors, or partners, Notified is here to help bring your vision to life.
We host over 100,000 webcasts and virtual events annually on behalf of thousands of customers around the world while providing dedicated support with a focus on data.
All virtual events include:
- Dedicated project manager
- Interactive environments with live & on-demand programming
- Flexible branding and personalization options
- Accessibility – anytime, anywhere, and from any device
- Robust analytics and reporting
And, from strategy and planning to implementation and delivery, our consulting services team supports you every step of the way.
Contact us today to set up a free demo and learn more about our consulting services.