Data runs the world, more than ever. When you capture enough data, you’ll discover insights you’d otherwise not have found. Especially while organising an event, data plays a huge role. That’s why in this blog, we’ll go through what type of data you should collect to have a positive impact on your event.
Knowledge is power! What type of data is crucial for business events?
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Why collect data to organise events?
You collect data to enhance the chance of success for your business event. Based on your data, you can prepare yourself better, avoid mistakes, and work more efficiently. In general, data impacts two things: your upcoming event and events in the future.
Your upcoming event
To make sure your event runs smoothly, you’ll collect data from registered guests. Here you can ask for practical information to prepare for their arrival: What menu did they choose?; Do they have allergies?; What workshop do they want to follow?; etc. It’s best to think about what you need to know upfront to prevent you from asking for extra information from guests.
Future events
Next to practical data, you should collect behavioural data before, during and after your event. This type of data you’ll use to:
- Evaluate previous events, and draw lessons for the future.
- Understand individual behaviour of individual guests to optimise your guestlist.
In conclusion: data is crucial for your event’s success. Without it, you’ll have poorer guestlist quality, and you’ll learn less from mistakes. But, what data should you monitor exactly? Let’s deep-dive, and give you some practical takeaways.
The most important metrics for business events
Every event has its objectives. Therefore it’s logical that you look at different metrics for each event. However, there are some overarching things to increase the chance of success. The only requirement is that you have a decent knowledge of your audience. Because when you know your audience, you can carefully build up your guestlist with qualitative guests that contribute to your objectives.
To identify a quality audience for your event, look at behavioral data from previous events. This offers a goldmine of insights. Let’s go over the metrics from which you’ll draw the strongest conclusions:
Invitation conversion
Historically: how many people did you need to invite in order to have a full event. This data helps you estimate how many invitations you’ll need to send out. This allows you to put tactical quotas on the different sales departments. For example, The Brussels department must invite at least 50 people, so that 20 come to the event. . And the Amsterdam office needs to invite 30, to generate 10 guests.
Subscription patterns from guests
How often did a specific guest decline your events? Is it still worth it to send an invitation to a future event? Or is there a pattern in their reactions? Do they always accept product launches but never webinars… If this is the case, send out your invitations adequately.
No-shows
No-shows are guests who’ve accepted your invitation but eventually never show up. No-shows can sometimes give you immense learning. So try to always follow up on reasons why someone decided not to show up. Maybe it’s due to your communication? Sometimes people forget about the event because they’ve never received follow-up emails.
Guest interests
Have you ever sent out an email to guests where you question them on their interests? If you did: take them into account. It can happen that someone loves product launches, but actually hates webinars. If that’s the case, only send him the invitation to your product launches.
Registrations per sales department
Map out the guests from your different sales departments. If it turns out that sales reps from one region get more people to your event, but sales from another region close more deals afterwards… Look for the reason behind this, and handle it! Or, you can use these insights to distribute your invitations between the departments tactically.
It all comes down to the wrong guests creating a negative spiral to your event. So it’s best to think twice about who you’ll invite. You see, the quality of your guests is of life importance to the success of your event.
The biggest challenge: keeping data organized and consult it easily
The biggest problem with using data isn’t necessarily the amount of available data. Most companies have more data than they realise. The biggest difficulty is keeping this gigantic pile of data organised.
InviteDesk created a nifty tool that centralises and automates even-data. So you don’t have to go through endless Excel lists. And you’ll never need to manually update your data after an event. On top of all this, the tool has a connector to implement this data in your CRM or marketing automation tool.
Do you want automated and organised event data? Try an InviteDesk demo