Your in-person conference or virtual webinar might be over, but there are important tasks to fulfill before you move on to planning the next one. Post-event data analysis and event lead follow-ups are crucial to maximizing your event's ROI and guaranteeing conversions long after attendees have left.
B2B events, particularly in-person conferences, are experiencing increased success. 52% of event organizers saw increased attendance at in-person events last year, and 48% of B2B event teams say they’re even more critical today than before the pandemic.
With conference attendance rates on the rise, a single conference might bring in thousands of leads—all of whom are potential customers. Without effective lead nurturing, your marketing teams’ efforts may be wasted.
Why post-event follow-ups matter
Evaluating post-event data should be a non-negotiable step in your events process. Reviewing data on attendee experience, both quantitative and qualitative, can supply a wealth of insights to inform how you plan and execute future events.
If you’ve been using an all-in-one events management platform to coordinate your conferences and virtual events, you’ll have automatically gathered metrics on event check-ins, individual session performance, and attendee engagement.
Your post-event data analysis will offer valuable metrics to evaluate your post-event ROI and inform your conference follow-up strategies. Attendee behavior insights, in particular, can tell you a great deal about whether a particular lead is likely to convert, as will other information, such as chat engagement and qualitative feedback.
B2B conversion rates are notoriously low; Salesforce estimates that just 2-3% of website visitors convert. Every event attendee is a potential lead, and the right event follow-up strategy will increase the likelihood of conversion.
While follow-ups should be sent at most three days after an event, you won’t always see conversion within such a short time frame. Indeed, post-event communication doesn’t have to exist in a vacuum—rather than being organized on the fly after each event, you can build your lead capture and nurture into a year-round marketing motion.
Choosing the right tools for event lead follow-up
The right lead capture tools will make capturing leads during your event seamless. Tools like Bizzabo’s Klik SmartBadge™ offer hosts, vendors, and sponsors real-time engagement and insights, enabling reps to adapt their sales strategy instantly on the event floor.
But afterward, when you’ve uploaded contact information for thousands of event participants to your CRM, how do you maximize event lead follow-up? For that, you’ll need the right sales enablement platform. For us, that’s Warmly.
Warmly’s website visitor deanonymization and sales prospecting tools make lead nurturing easier. When combined with Bizzabo’s event management software, they contribute to building an end-to-end, seamless lead nurture process.
After syncing your event leads with your CRM (which you can do easily with Bizzabo’s CRM integration), Warmly can notify you when an event attendee has arrived on your website and give you real-time insights into which pages they’re looking at.
At the same time, Warmly conducts lead scoring according to your ICP and buyer intent signals, assigning each lead a temperature. Signals include website pages viewed, off-site research, and demographic information.
By auto-filtering leads according to how warm they are, Warmly makes it easier for your sales reps to prioritize qualified leads, especially if you’ve found yourself with thousands of new contacts after an in-person conference.
Finally, Warmly can conduct personalized outreach to leads automatically. Building segments in the platform enables you to create different outreach sequences across email and LinkedIn based on visitor signals and attendee behavior.
How to maximize the success of post-event communication
92% of Forrester’s Q1 2024 State Of B2B Events Survey respondents said that improving post-event attendee follow-up was a focus for them this year. Although most event organizers know that follow-ups are integral to a post-event strategy, maximizing communication success can be challenging.
However, with the right tools, you can turn your post-event communication into a successful lead nurturing regime. Here’s how to optimize it with Bizzabo and a Warmly integration.
1. Track the success of outreach.
It’s standard to send a brief email to all attendees after a conference, thanking them for attending. This might be just the first step to a more extended post-event outreach sequence, but regardless, you must know who has arrived on your website after reading your post-event messaging.
By tracking visitors who arrive from post-event follow-ups, you can conduct A/B testing of email messaging and use this data to refine your marketing strategy.
Crucially, these website visitors already show intent by clicking through your email. So, what they look at while on your site can also help you evaluate how close they are to buying from you and formulate an ongoing nurture campaign to get them closer to conversion.
Warmly’s de-anonymization and visitor tracking tools allow your sales reps to see who’s visiting your website in real-time, particularly who has arrived from your post-event follow-up communication. Tracking what this segment of visitors views on your site can inform optimized landing pages for future post-event traffic.
2. Segment leads by attendee behavior.
Bizzabo’s Klik SmartBadge™ gives event hosts real-time information on attendee behavior. By syncing this information with Warmly, you can start building website visitor segments based on hyper-focused analytics.
For example, you could segment leads by the specific topics they engaged with at your event, then add them to a personalized email sequence that delves deeper into the topics they’re interested in (more on this in the point below.)
3. Conduct personalized outreach.
Personalizing an email to each event participant would take far too much of your rep’s time—but Warmly can do that instantly.
With the help of contextually aware AI software, Warmly’s Orchestrator tool can personalize each email for the specific lead, resulting in warmer communication and a higher likelihood of engagement.
4. Follow-up with no-shows.
You shouldn’t just be communicating with event attendees but those who didn’t show as well. While no-shows might have missed the event, they still demonstrated intent by signing up, and with powerful messaging, you can reengage them.
A standard Warmly playbook is to add all Closed Lost deals to a specific outreach sequence, and segmenting event no-shows can accomplish the same impact.
Although you may not have any additional behavioral data on these leads, they’ve likely visited your website in the past, so Warmly can match the data from your CRM to website visitor data.
5. Automate messaging.
You don’t want your sales reps spending tons of time on leads that aren’t ready to buy from you just yet. At the same time, it’s still essential that you include these leads in a post-event outreach sequence, as they can still be nurtured.
Warmly auto-adds prospects into outreach sequences depending on their demonstrated intent level. For low-intent prospects, these sequences might be limited to the website chatbot function, gently nudging leads to respond and answer questions they might have.
High-intent leads, though, will be automatically added to email and LinkedIn outreach sequences, and sales reps will be notified the minute they’re active on your website.
The Bizzabo and Warmly partnership: making post-event lead nurturing easy
We’re really excited to share how a Warmly integration can make your post-event lead nurturing more efficient and successful.
Combining the power of Bizzabo’s event management software with Warmly’s signal-based revenue orchestration platform gives event organizers the maximum chance of converting leads after an event. Website visitor data can also give you plenty of insights into how to optimize messaging after future events, in-person or virtual.
