It takes a lot of effort and resources to host a successful event. You spend money on advertisements, venues, and content to attract the right audience. You've just spent hours preparing for the event. Now that it's over, you're left wondering what to do with all that energy and enthusiasm. Where do you go from here? What can you do to keep the buzz going? How do you communicate with your attendees to keep the relationship and excitement alive?
Event planners are always looking for ways to engage their audience outside of the event itself. You want your attendees to leave with a positive experience and a smile on their faces, but you also want them to take some action days after the event. Post-event engagement is a crucial part of your event plans as it lets you know how participants benefited from the event. It adds value, keeps the excitement alive, and creates fertile ground to bring attendees back.
Evaluate your ongoing event marketing strategies if you have challenges with staying in touch with your guests after the event. This post will provide you with the keys to a successful post-event engagement and walk you through some of the best practices, so you can keep your audience engaged after the doors shut and everyone goes home.
What Is Post-Event Engagement?
Post-event engagement is the act of engaging your audience after an event and maintaining long-term connections with your participants. It's a way to connect with your audience after an event, keep your brand top-of-mind, and build relationships with customers.
Though often neglected, after-event engagement is a vital part of event planning. You can use this time to collect feedback from attendees, promote upcoming events and products, or continue to build your brand's reputation.
Post-event engagement is a powerful way to build your brand, get more followers, and eventually make conversions. Constant communication with past and new attendees increases your network base and boosts your event planning experiences.
Why Do You Need Post-Event Engagement Strategies?
Many event professionals make the mistake of planning for the next event immediately instead of keeping in touch with the attendees. Here's why you should prioritise post-event engagement.
An aggressive post-event engagement plan is crucial to making after-event sales and attracting sponsors for your next event. After all, building a community is no point if you have no intentions of continuing the relationship. Here is why post-event engagement is so vital for you:
Use event content to achieve your business goals and marketing interest
Content created during the events provides opportunities for you to build a network of people and generate leads. Your content source includes recordings, presentations, PDF downloads, polls, and data created during the event. Post-event engagement allows you to use the content created during the event to help attendees apply what they learned, and better plan future events.
Communicate more during your post-event engagement strategies if you want to increase leads, make sales, or relate with new people. With your event's data, you now understand what your audience wants and could draft content that captures their interest. When you broadcast a new email, be rest assured that your growing community will take action.
Build brand loyalty
Post-event engagement enables you to build brand loyalty by creating opportunities for further touchpoints. Engaging your community members through valuable and exciting content gives you more authority and builds brand loyalty.
Some people who registered for the event would not attend, while others would participate a little. So, post-event follow-ups enable you to re-engage these persons or groups and remind them of future events.
Determine the level of participants' engagement and value to your business
With the event's data, you can know how attendees engaged during the sessions. Often, guests that are active during the event are more likely to purchase your products. Your sales team should create customised email letters that target these guests. If these actively read your post-event emails, it shows your lead generation and marketing strategy are working.
Sweap insights feature
Turn participants into long-term customers with post-event engagement strategies
Events boost your leads and make guests more willing to buy your products or services. Since finding willing buyers takes a lot of work, you have to nurture your leads once the event ends. You risk losing potential customers if you delay reaching your guests after the close of the event.
Help attendees apply what they learned
Participants often get busy with daily activities and forget the main objective of attending the event. But applying key takeaways equates to value.
Post-event follow-ups allow you to evaluate the event's impact on your attendees. Many participants may have challenges with applying what they learned. So, follow-up enables you to know where they need help.
You could consider sending your attendees extra materials or organising one-on-one training.
Relive the best moment of the event
Throughout your attendee journey, you should capture the most impressive moments in pictures or video form. After the event, you should utilise the possibilities where their memories are still fresh. Start posting those photos on social media with tags highlighting the big event.
If you have video clips, convert them to a short reel. Pictures and videos should highlight the remarkable achievements of the guests during the event to prompt a more positive reaction. You can also use this medium to tell prospective participants about your next event.
Close the event value gap
Post-event engagement closes the value gap between an event and its aftermath. Event professionals lose an excellent opportunity to engage with their audience between the events.
The fact is that most events aren't just one-time experiences; they're moments in time that continue affecting people long after they leave. Post-event engagement helps you stay in touch with your audience and even re-live some of your best moments from the event.
Above all, it presents opportunities to create long-term relationships with your audience, and also point out where the attendee is in the event attendee journey.
Examples for Post-Event Engagement
After an event, you should ensure that your attendees still feel engaged and excited about your brand. Post-event engagement is about keeping your audience engaged with your brand after leaving the event. Here are four ways to keep your attendees engaged after the event:
1. Thank You Email
As expected, follow-up emails are one of the most commonly used post-event engagement methods. They are simple and affordable, and you'll get quick responses from the participants. If well utilised, email follow-ups evoke a positive reaction and brand loyalty from participants long after the close of the event.
In this email, thank them for coming and mention that you genuinely appreciate their presence.
Then, ask them if they may still have questions about the topic or content of the event. A thank-you email is always a great way to show appreciation for someone who has taken the time to attend your events.
A well-written post-event follow-up email can strengthen your relationship with your audience and keep them engaged with your brand. Be sure to send this email as soon as possible after the event has ended, so people remember who you are and what you're about before they forget. And it doesn't have to be long—just a quick note that lets them know you were thinking of them and appreciate their presence.
Event follow-up emails often highlight the event's essential metrics and request attendees' feedback. You could share media files like videos and images or propose enticing offers for future event attendees.
Sweap's last Thank You Email
2. Share Event Recordings
Post-event period is when many people are still feeling inspired, motivated and ready to take action on what they learned at your event. You can use this time to share recordings of your event with those who attended, as well as anyone who couldn't make it.
In our Virtual Event Platform, event managers can upload the event recordings and send out an email with access to the recording. This way, even if people can't make it in person, they can still experience all the training, information, and inspiration from your event.
It's also important to share these recordings on video-sharing platforms like YouTube and TikTok, so people can easily find and watch them at their leisure.
Finally, don't forget about being active on social media. You can make the recordings of your event available for download on your website and social media channels. Make sure you post regularly using a unique event hashtag related to your industry, so people can find your content when searching online.
3. Send Email Nurturing Campaigns
You can use Sweap's email campaign tool to send out a series of emails, keeping your attendees moving down the marketing funnel and getting them closer to your brand. When they get back from your event, they'll probably yearn for more information and resources related to what they just learned.
Send them an email introducing them to free resources on your website, like blog posts and video tutorials, that can help them learn more about what they just learned at your event. Then continue sending these emails over time, gradually increasing their value as time goes by and keeping those leads fresh!
Outstanding elements of reach-out emails for nurturing leads include:
Thank you note
Post-event survey
Relevant content
Sorry, we missed you
4. Create an Event-Attendee Only Offer to Reward Them for Participating
Leverage post-event engagement by making attractive offers to attendees shortly after the event. You can create an exclusive offer that only your attendees can access.
If you wanted to launch a new product, you could offer pre-ordering privileges or discounts to your participants. You could open the presale window for about 24 hours to prompt your attendees to buy. After that, you could extend the offer for a few days for participants yet to purchase.
If you offer a product or service on a subscription basis, why not offer each attendee a free trial, so they can try it out for a set period without making an up-front commitment? If you partner with a recurring payment provider, you can customize trial periods, extend them when needed, and send trial-ending notifications to encourage conversion to a paid plan.
Another example: If you're hosting a virtual event on social media marketing, you could offer a free course on how to use Instagram Stories as part of your post-event engagement efforts. This kind of "thank you" goes a long way toward increasing brand loyalty and engagement.
5. Celebrate your team members
A post-event celebration lets you appreciate your staff and volunteers pulling off a fantastic event. Compared to planning an actual event, it doesn't take much work to host a simple after-event gathering. You can invite your participants if they want to continue partnering with you. Celebrating your team can boost team spirit, build a network, and promote your brand.
Official shoutout to Sweap's event moderator
6. Post content on social media
A solid social media marketing strategy for events is crucial. Posting relevant content on social media is a proven way to keep your participants engaged. You could tag them for each post to ensure they will respond positively. Interact with your attendees to build rapport and make them feel valued. Don’t forget your unique event hashtag!
Sweap's social media content to download
Prevent Your Event Attendees From Ghosting!
Creating an effective post-event engagement strategy is one of the biggest event marketing challenges, but also essential in meeting your business goals. After-event engagement promotes your brand, builds relationships, helps you get feedback, and prepares you for future events. Now that you've learned about post-event engagement, it's time to prevent your event attendees from ghosting. We hope this article has provided you with some helpful tips to keep your audience engaged after an event.
If you're looking for a way to keep these ideas in mind, consider our Event Efficiency Platform (our software solution for event professionals). With our platform, you can create and manage your events from start to finish—from registration to post-event follow-up and on-demand recordings and content. You can also easily track data about attendees and use that information to deliver more engaging experiences for them in future.
If you're looking for a solution that will help you drive more engagement with your events, check out our software, or contact us today! We'd love to talk more about how we can help you get the most out of your events.