9 Ways to Boost Registration for a Digital Event

By Nina Butler on June 30, 2020

Every marketer knows that feeling…

You and your teammates have spent the past several weeks, if not months, developing a digital event experience that pushes the bounds of your creative capabilities and has high expectations for business impact. In-person events are obsolete, and the pressure is on virtual to perform.

Your marketing programs are locked and loaded. Your ad sets are approved and ready to launch. Your social posting tool is chock full of promo assets. Your web devs are ready to flip the registration page on.

It’s go time.

And for a brief moment, you panic and wonder to yourself, “What if nobody registers?!”

We got you! This post will break down our nine best tips for how to increase demand and boost registration for a digital event and quell those phantom fears.

Using personal gifting to boost registration

Personal experiences are the bonding agent between you to your event guests and personal gifting is the ultimate way to establish that bond in a digital application. There are a variety of ways you can utilize personal gifting to deliver a one-to-one personal experience to your audience that motivates them to register for an event.

Five ways to use Alyce to boost registration for a digital event

1. Send your target prospects and loyal customers a gift

Chances are your event is intended for a very specific audience with carefully curated content that appeals to their 9-to-5 responsibilities. Utilizing those criteria, work with your Sales and CS teammates to identify best-fit prospects and/or customers to extend an invitation to.

With the perfect guest list in hand, send each person a gift inviting them to register for the event. Select a gift that matches your event theme to leave a dazzling impression on the recipient. Maybe you are hosting a cooking get-together: send everyone a cookbook or cooking utensil from the gifting marketplace to make the dish.
If you don’t have an event theme, that’s okay! Try encouraging people to “arrive comfortably” and send a compatible gift, such as a pair of slippers or headphones to make their remote attendance more enjoyable.

Pro tip: When sending these gift invitations to prospects and customers, make sure the gifts are sent as the Account Executive, Customer Success Manager, or Account Manager on the account; someone the gift sender is familiar with so the experience feels really personal to them.

2. Leverage video in your outreach

Video and personal gifting is the ultimate power couple. If you are utilizing Alyce to send a gift, consider inserting a video into your gift landing page to increase impact. Data shows a 50% increase in click-through rates when you pair video with your email outreach.

Pro tip: Think critically about the content of your video so it really catches the interest of your recipient. Perhaps you work with the keynote speaker to create a video saying why they’d love to have that person attend their session. Or maybe you have your CEO film a short video personally inviting the gift recipient.

3. Utilize a post-gift CTA to maximize exposure

Hopefully, personal gifting has become an evergreen part of your demand generation and outbound marketing strategy, and you and your sales team are sending out hundreds of gift invitations a quarter. Capitalize on all of those sent gifts and consider adding your event registration URL as a post-gift CTA to all Alyce prospect gifts you send out in the month leading up to the event to maximize exposure.

Our new post-gift CTA redirects the gift recipient to the event sign-up page once they accept their gift. This will make the registration process really seamless and the recipient will be more inclined to register after just having received a thoughtful gift from someone on your team.

Pro tip: When utilizing a post gift CTA you can either insert a URL as is or also include a headline, supporting copy, and a CTA. We recommend enabling the CTA pop up as these additional components give the gift recipient more context.

4. Feature a gift incentive in your event promos

Design a promotional strategy that advertises an exclusive gift to all those that register for the event. This incentive will be sure to drive significant registrations because who doesn’t love a good gift?!

With the registrations pouring in, instead of keeping up with the gifting of each person manually, send automated gifts to registrants using a Alyce with a trigger set up in Marketo. You can also utilize Alyce Activate™ if you aren’t a Marketo user by sending a universal gift link to a static list of people.

Pro tip: You can drive urgency by setting volume or timeline stipulations within your promotional language, such as the first 100 people to register or register by XYZ date will receive an exclusive gift.

5. Spiff your team to drive event awareness

We all know LinkedIn prioritizes content from personal pages over corporate pages. Leverage your internal team to drive event promotion from their own pages and reward those who drive the most registrants with a gift.

For example, the top three team members to drive the most sign-ups to get a high-value Alyce gift. This creates a fun and healthy competition while getting the broader team bought in on your social promotion strategy for your event.

Want to learn more about how Alyce can enhance your upcoming digital events? Check out our ebook: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Gifting for Digital Events.

Four More Ways to Boost Registration for a Digital Event

In a recent study by Marketing Charts, 83% of CMOs say they have witnessed their customers putting increased value on digital experiences. Treat this statistic as an opportunity to capitalize on your audience’s appetite to be dazzled by your upcoming digital event experience (and that includes how you market it to them!).

In addition to utilizing personal gifting to increase registration rates, here are other must-have components of a great pre-event digital marketing strategy.

6. Tease out pre-recorded content on social media

If you do a dry run of any of your presentations, or if your presenters pre-record their sessions for a simu-live experience on event day, cut a compelling clip and post it on social media as a teaser. Give your audience a taste of what they can expect if they tune in. FOMO is a real thing.

Pro tip: Utilize the speaker to cross-promote that content on their channels, increasing its reach on social and maximizing eyeballs on your event reg page.

7. Utilize pop-up notifications to promote the event

Utilize a tool like Drift to set up in-app notifications for your customers and/or website notifications for prospects visiting your site notifying them about your upcoming event. This is a subtle yet effective way to meet your audience in a channel other than email or ad.

Pro tip: Set up your bot so they can register right then and there with only their email. Then push that data into your CRM/MAP system to fire off the correct confirmations and trigger the desired next steps. Reducing friction wherever possible is key to seeing your registration rates climb.

8.Your website is your most powerful marketing tool

Stand up a banner or a nano bar on your website alerting site visitors to your upcoming event with a CTA to register. We utilize discrete nano bars all the time at Alyce to spotlight announcements, including upcoming events, new pieces of content, and company news, such as our recent G2 Grid Report Leadership standings.

9. Market through employee emails

Take advantage of the 100s of emails your team sends daily. Design a promotional banner linking to the event registration page for employees to use in their email signatures. Take advantage of that otherwise underutilized real estate and leverage your colleagues to market for you to their audience.

Pro tip: Provide your team with crystal clear directions on how to add the banner into their email settings. Decrease the learning curve as much as possible to maximize adoption.

Ride the digital transformation wave

Lean into this opportunity marketers have right now to deliver exceptional digital experiences at a time when their audience is craving them most. We recommend experimenting with a variety of techniques to boost registration at your next digital event. See what resonates best with your audience to give you the incremental lift you need to set record registration rates and silence that subconscious reg monster once and for all.

Photo by Simon Abrams