Event planners must consider customer retention strategies to keep the revenue stream consistent and steady. The biggest challenge faced in this industry is event planning business customer retention.
You can’t plan one or two events successfully and expect the next ones to be as successful as the previous ones.
Your clients don’t come knocking at your door. You have to work for it. Luckily for you, there are retention strategies that successful event planners are using. In this article, we have used some of the best customer retention strategies event planners can use. So, keep reading.
Communication is Key
The first rule of success in customer retention for your event planning business is to keep the communication going. It includes understanding different participants and stakeholders of your business.
Understand Your Clients
Who are we talking about? They would be your clients, event attendees, staff, etc. You have to talk to them as much as you must listen to them. Start with their requirements from the events and listen to their previous experiences from other events they attended.
Use Social Listening
Try out different social media channels where your customers are following you. It also helps to communicate with them during events you host. For event planners, one event can lead them to their next client.
As an event planner, you must learn to distinguish between what you want to listen to and what your customers say. Invest in social listening tools like SproutSocial, Hootsuite, or BuzzSumo.
Engage with Your Clients
Engage with your event attendees on social media. You can treat the good experiences they leave on social media as user-generated content and promote that. You can also engage in posts where clients share their dissatisfaction and reassure them to help them out.
Run a Survey
More than anything, it requires you to be proactive in your measure. Have a survey ready to hand out at the end of the event. You can also ask your event staff to reach out to attendees who look unsatisfied, bored, or unhappy. Address their problems and prepare solutions that can potentially transform your business.
When running a survey, it’s critical to have a purpose and tailor your questionnaire around your purpose.
- Start by understanding your audience (the attendees). It helps to learn about their behaviors, habits, and sentiments.
- Don’t shoot random questions. Personalize them to understand your attendees.
- Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions.
- Analyze your survey results before taking action.
Make Selective Improvements
Learn to see feedback objectively. It’s good practice to take surveys and improve areas where your business needs improvement as per the clients. However, there’s an extent to which this is helpful.
Look for the Client’s Pain Point
You can’t expect all your clients to provide objective feedback. Whether using a Google survey or other tools for a digital survey, look for the common grievances and feedback most clients provide.
Analyze Event Experience
64% of event attendees say they would love an immersive experience through the event. On the contrary, 44% say that tech solutions can improve their experience. 78% of the event attendees suggest that they’d prefer more affordable yet premium seating arrangements.
Only Act on Relevant Feedback
Once you have the data and the feedback, create a list of areas that need improvement. Look for more common problems most attendees shared. It helps to improve upon those areas first.
It’s also common for some of your guests to have something unkind about one aspect of the event that most people liked. In such a case, there’s no need to try to improve upon it. They are probably having a bad day, so, their feedback may also not be thoughtful.
Use Analytical Tools for Event Planners
Use tools like Eventbrite, Google Analytics, and 10 times to gain analytical insights about your competitor’s events. Aligning your customers’ feedback with where your competitors excel can help with event planning business customer retention.
When running your event planning business, it’s critical to keep improving. But it’s also important to know the extent of change you must implement. Too much change made too fast can exhaust you and create the wrong impression in the minds of your clients.
Personalize Your Marketing
As an event planner, it’s critical to know your clients and personalize your marketing per their needs. However, not all your clients have the same personality.
Identifying Event Attendees
But, if you are planning niche events, you should know what most of your ideal customers want.
Do you have the personality of your ideal customer in mind? This is critical to build your ideal customer persona and create your marketing campaign with them in mind.
There are three core aspects of understanding your event attendees and creating personalized marketing for them. You can personalize your message based on the –
- Contact
- Persona
- Account
When creating a marketing message based on contact, you target a marketing director, a CMO, or industry-specific roles.
When creating a marketing message using the persona, you will personalize it based on their industry expertise. You’ll have to differentiate between someone who’s working in the edtech industry and someone who’s working in financial services.
Running your event planning business also requires you to manage people. Creating your marketing message with a personalized tone is also part of managing them.
Personalizing based on the account means creating your marketing message for an industry or an organization you are targeting.
Use Personalized Marketing Channels
It’s important to consider the channel through which you send your message, not just the marketing message. For a contact-based event attendee (client), emails might work well. On the contrary, an industry expert (persona-based client) would respond better to social media like LinkedIN.
Stay Consistent
The best way to get more attendees to attend your second event starts with your current event. You must constantly keep people updated about the next event you organize.
Creating Awareness
Event planners who host recurring events must communicate with their attendees about the next events they have lined up.
Use your social channels to drop the announcement about the next events. Running remarketing ads on social media also works if it’s an event where you’re expecting lots of attendees.
Build Event Brand Style Guide
It would help brand marketers to create unique brand value for your event management business. Work on a memorable tagline, clean, attractive logo, and brand image.
Use Event Management Software
Various event management softwares and tools help you track, manage, and organize your events. Some even provide analytical tools to help you analyze data and gain helpful insights.
A few good mentions would be EventAir, Whova, Cvent, Zoom Event, and Trello.
Keep Experimenting
Keep an improvement mindset. Go for a better and bigger event each time. Stay consistent with your efforts and use analytical tools to understand customer pain points.
The event-related data available through analytical tools should help you identify the key areas where your clients face issues. Keep improving those areas and use measurement tools to evaluate the measures implemented. This evaluation enables you to understand the efficacy of the steps you have taken.
If something isn’t working, you must rework your plan and implement a newer solution.
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