B2B Events Healthcare Marketing

The Results Are In: Your Best Event Follow-up Process

First off, take a deep breath. You’ve almost made it! The hard(est) part is over.

With two of the biggest conferences in health IT underway or wrapped up, we thought it would be a great time to share our results from our mini HITMC Survey on the Best Event Follow-up Process.

First off, thank you to everyone who participated in the survey. Secondly, as a reminder, these are the questions we asked:

  • What is the best time to follow-up after an event/conference?
  • And what medium gets the most traction?
  • What type of follow-up do recipients respond to?

Like you, we are already planning on how we will be following up with everyone we got to meet and chat with at both ViVE 2022 and HIMSS 2022. Hopefully these results give you a bit of insight of the best way to follow up post-event in the coming week and for future events and conferences.

Give Recipients More Time

Although it is a common belief that you should follow up as soon as possible after an event or conference, our results show that over 50% of respondents actually prefer follow up to happen 1 week after the event. Even more interesting was 23% of respondents prefered an even longer window: more that 1 week after the event. 

As you plan your follow-up strategy, it will be good to keep this longer window in mind. A longer window allows your attendees and the people you met more time to get back into a routine after an event/conference before hearing from you again.

Tips for follow up:

  • Personalize the follow up – mention a conversation you may have shared from the event.
  • A thank goes a long way – include a word of gratitude within your follow up.
  • Offer how you can help – provide the benefits you offer and how they help the recipient. Avoid getting too deep into features.
  • Ask to connect again – suggest a time to meet up for coffee if you live in the same area. If you’re not local, suggest a video chat, phone call or connecting at the next industry event.

Email Leads the Way

While there are some recipients who still perfer a phone call or text (8% of our survey respondents) as a follow up after an event, it’s no surprise that email still dominates as the best form of communication for follow up.

Eighty-five percent of our respondents said that they prefer to be connected via email following an event and conference.

And if that isn’t enough to convince you that email is the best form of communication to apply to your post-event strategy, recent stats show that 99% of email users check their inbox every day, and 74% of Baby Boomers think email is the most personal channel to receive communications from companies and brands, followed by 72% of Gen X, 64% of Millennials, and 60% of Gen Z.

All Conference Leads Aren’t Sales-Ready

After investing in a conference, you probably had some great conversations. Maybe some of your talks felt promising, but if you don’t follow up in the right way, your email could go unread or you could disengage your contacts entirely.

Did you know that according to Marketing Sherpa only 27% of your leads are ready for a sales call? By presenting a special offer or product demonstration, you are missing the mark with a good chunk of your leads. If fact, 78% of our survey respondents said that they are most likely to respond to a follow up communication that offered educational content more than anything else.  With that being said, a more effective way to engage with your guests is to send educational content that aligns with the event they just attended.

It’s important to note that 22% of our respondents also said they would likely respond to a communication that asked for a meeting request. This tells us that if you have meaningful conversations or develop good connections with your attendees at your event or conference, requesting a meeting could prove to be a solid follow up approach as well.

We hope you found this helpful and we wish you the best of luck in your post-event follow up process this season!

 

 

About the author

Brittany Quemby

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