Simple Ways of Personalising Your Attendees’ Experience
In several of our previous blogs, we’ve highlighted the importance of giving your attendees a more personal experience. With perhaps hundreds of people passing through the doors of your event, it can be a challenge to make your guests feel as if their time and individual contributions matters. That’s why it’s so vital to offer your guests an experience that seems personal to them. By making just a few small changes, you can make it seem as if every aspect of your event has the enjoyment and investment of the individual at its heart.
Although there are a number of strategies to achieve this, using an event app is perhaps the easiest, most efficient, and most convenient. These days, event apps such as Eventogy offer a variety of features that can be used to give your event a more personal flavour, with itineraries, messaging services and registration functions that tailor an event to the individual attendee.
Registration
Personalisation starts at registration. It should be done in a way that makes each guest feel like their presence is valued and their time important. First and foremost, the process ought to recognise the individuality of every invitee, and the particular reason each one is attending your event.
Therefore, a registration form ought to be tailored to ensure unnecessary questions and distracting segues are avoided. For example, someone attending a corporate event on behalf of a marketing team should not receive questions pertaining to salespeople. Furthermore, a registration form should not look as if it’s been built to a template, and should instead be appropriate to the event in question. Eventogy has a user-friendly form builder tool that makes creating unique registration forms much easier.
Registration forms also play a part in setting your guests’ expectations of an event before it has even started. A cumbersome or inaccessible event sign-up form will give a poor impression of your event, while an efficient one will add a professional gloss that will be reflected in positive feedback.
Communication
Event apps are fast becoming the bread and butter of event planning and attendee engagement. These tools handle a number of task, but one of their central functions is to make communication easier and more personal. By using details gathered during the registration process and through attendee input, an event app can direct guests along a specific path, with appointment, seminars, and information relevant to their interests. This will avoid giving them the feeling they’re being fobbed off with an impersonal, one-size-fits-all approach.
Using an event app, you can easily share updates and important information with each guest, tailored according to the sessions they’re attending or their relative seniority in a company. This way, attendees are receiving information that has been hand-picked especially for them. It can also prevent potentially irritating, irrelevant emails and message from reaching them.
Event interaction
Event apps are particularly good at providing an avenue for attendees to interact with an event. By giving them the opportunity to engage with speakers, and make a contribution to various sessions and seminars, they can feel as if they are being personally valued by an event, and that their attendance is important. For instance, Eventogy’s Attendee App gives a live polling option, so guests can interact directly with events as they happen, and provide instantaneous feedback to the organisers.
Even small things like a personalised schedule, a documents library allowing guests to access important information as it comes, and push notifications to remind them of upcoming appointments and sessions can make a huge difference to how guests interact with an event. By reminding them of what’s going on around them, they can feel like a valued, necessary part of your event.
Networking
Networking — especially through social media — is something we write about a lot, simply because it’s such an easy way to get people engaged with an event. Social media is so ubiquitous now that it’d be a surprise if it wasn’t integrated in your even in some small way, but there are other important ways to connect your guests with each.
For instance, by giving your attendees the opportunity to reach out to particular contacts they can craft a personalised event experience for themselves. Eventogy’s Attendee App features attendee and speaker profiles, so guests can access biographical details about their favourite speakers and, seamless networking with their fellow professionals.
Some event apps also provide a simple-but-effective tool for linking attendees. Apps like Eventogy feature a built-in messaging service that guests can use to communicate with each other during the course of an event. In this way, attendees can share information with each other, schedule meetings, or simply let each other know which sessions they’ll be attending. It’s an excellent way of getting people personally invested in an event.
This can also be facilitated by Eventogy, which offers a meetings manager feature on its Attendee App. This allows guests to arrange personalised, one-to-one meetings, either automatically or manually. As a result, guests have a convenient avenue with which to mould their event experience, and help create a personalised experience.
Another, even more simple method is simply to encourage attendees to connect to each other through their social media accounts — such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
Event Follow-Up
A personalised experience doesn’t end when an event does. To make an attendee feel as if their contribution was valid and valuable, you need to find a way to tailor the follow-up. For instance, after an event’s conclusion, the organisers might wish to send out further information, surveys and questionnaires, the contact details of key figures and speakers, or routes to take to learn more about the event’s subjects. Since each attendee will have had a different experience of an event, there’s no use sending out all of this at once as a flood of emails.
This is something event apps can help with, perhaps by keeping hold of an attendee’s schedule to make sure any surveys or follow-up information given to them is related to the appointments and seminars they attended.
With the development of new event technology solutions, it’s easier than ever to create an effective, personalised experience for event attendees. Event apps are a particularly useful tool, creating new opportunities for individualised content and information. While a very small event might have relatively little need of personalised experience, large conferences can feel very impersonal. By taking some of these suggestions, you can plan an event that ensures every guest feels valued and invested.
