We’ve seen many events flop from the moment they hit the market. Many times failure comes from the event’s invitation. Your event invitation is the prospect’s first impression and you don’t want that impression to be – DELETE ME.

We cover a number of event best practices in this blog. We discuss design and copy. We make recommendations on what elements to include in your messaging. We discuss design rules and options. Today let’s go back to the basics.

Here is a list of elements every invitation should include. If you run a lot of events, you might want to print off this checklist to avoid missing important pieces in the future.

• View online option
• Forward to a friend link
• Unsubscribe option
• Name of host individual or organization
• Header image
• Headline
• Sub-headline
• Personalization tag (Dear recipient name,)
• Body copy (with reasons to attend)
• Call to action
• Register button
• Save the Date calender file (to save locally to recipient’s calendar)
• For businesses, host’s logo
• Event details (date & location)
• Agenda breakdown
• Contact information (email and/or phone number)
• Reference information (so those answering the phone have relevant event information)
• Legal copy (privacy statement is a must)

Used Event Stuff is a great website that’s been so successful in the US it’s now branching out into the UK.  It’s essentially eBay, except more tailored towards event planners and marketers.

Event professionals can find pretty much everything here, from practical items like vases and easels, to furniture (6 glow bars for $1000!),  to more exotic items like custom made crickets, Marilyn Monroe themed chairs and other strange event gems.  If you’re planning your own wedding, it’s worth a look – there are things like linens and centerpieces here too.

Chucking event related material the day after the event is costly both economically and environmentally, so this is a great green alternative for both sellers and buyers.

While there are cases where a trusting client is great, they can also be a liability. Customers that let you do your thing aren’t challenging you. You aren’t pushing the envelope to please them regularly. Instead, you can rest on yesterday’s laurels.

Problem is, slowly your work won’t keep up with the evolving competition and you will eventually lose the business to someone who does it better.

The other issue with clients you don’t hear from frequently is that they may be giving you a clear sign that they don’t really care what you do. The downside is that if clients aren’t aware of what you’re doing for them, you won’t get credit when you get results. Ever have a client take credit for a victory you know your work helped win? Next thing you know your client is convinced they don’t need you. And, again, gone is the business.

Delivering good customer service can be a challenge, but the sometimes the more painful it is the better your chances at customer retention.

Hosting an event offers a case in point.

When you’re running an event and you know way too much about attendee John Doe, count your blessings. Have you had Mr. Doe call you three times to chat about the agenda? Did he even mention the typo in paragraph two of your reminder email? Do you know his dietary needs by heart? Does he stick around after the presentation to talk to your sales representative?

Guess what? You may just have a hot lead on your hands.

Don’t worry about too many interactions with customers or event attendees. Worry about the under-the-radar guests that slip out immediately before your Q&A session. Less conversation is usually the sign of a lost opportunity.

1.  A massive sense of urgency:  the movie will only play in theaters over the course of two weeks, meaning you HAVE to see it now, or never.  (Update: today Colombia Pictures announced that they’re extending the limited to run to November 29th.)

2.  Advance sales: 1600 US showtimes were sellouts.  This helped gauge interest and open lines of communication with fans – seriously, is this a movie or a live-concert event?

3.  Incredibly fast turnaround time:  Michael Jackson died on June 25th, and the movie, which primarily contains footage of his rehearsals for a series of London comback concerts, was produced in around four months.  Is it about exploiting the recent climate of grief, or honouring it?

4.  The big secret:  The singer’s life has always been shrouded in mystery, and the movie is no different.  The questions around what content will be shown only contributes to the hype.  Curiosity has extended beyond MJ’s fan base as all the major news sources have been speculating on what the final product will look like.

Of course, with so many fans around the world, word of mouth marketing for this campaign goes without saying.  A poll of visitors at the Fandango movie website shows that the number 1 movie costume for Halloween this weekend was Michael Jackson.  Go figure.

Plain text is e-communications at its most honest. No frills or graphic tricks to draw you in unfairly. You either like the content or you don’t.

Here are some quick tips for your next text-only email:

1. Since there are no images, it is important to have a single and dominant “Register Now” hyperlink near the top of the invitation.
2. Email clients tend to break up the lines of text at inconvenient places causing the email to appear broken and disjointed. The solution is to keep lines of text short and add a hard return at the end of each one. A good rule is to restrict the length of each line to 65 characters.
3. Use ++++++++++++,  ===============, or **************** to improve the visual appeal and break up sections.
4. Test your campaigns thoroughly over time. You want to understand how plain text and html emails perform in your specific market.

Does turning a flight of stairs into fully functioning piano make people more inclined to climb them?

Volkswagen launched a successful media-bending brand campaign earlier this month centered around the notion that fun can change peoples’ behaviour.  Thefuntheory.com is a site with 3 experiments captured on video that showcase Volkswagen’s efforts to make the world more fun while at the same time benefiting the environment and people’s health.

One of the videos (which now has almost 5,000,000 hits on YouTube) captures commuters’ reactions to a staircase leading out of the subway that looks and sounds like a real piano (66% of people took the stairs!).  Another one turns a recycling bin into an arcade game.  Another one transforms a garbage bin into an almost bottomless pit, complete with sound effects.

The campaign works not only because of the original concepts, but because it blends a number of media vehicles, each of which compliment the other:

1.       Experiential/event marketing – it directly engages the customer in person

2.       Permission marketing – the customer decides whether they want to participate in the campaign or not

3.       Viral video – the concepts are entertaining and make for “must forward” material

4.       Incentive marketing – VW is holding a competition encouraging people to submit their own fun ideas that will change people’s behaviour – the winning idea takes 2500 Euros.

Makes me think:  as event marketers, how do we make sales events more fun?  How do we build real, authentic, true engagement into multi-day conferences?  How do we connect with people on a more personal, intimate, permissive level?  How do we better blend online and offline campaign vehicles?  PodCamps and other unconferences certainly address some of these elements, but we must continue thinking of ways to push the boundaries of events in the digital age.

Sidenote:  Hugh MacLeod was in Toronto last week talking at a Mesh conference, and his notion of the social object contains clues for how to engage customers with fun:

“When dea­ling with cor­po­rate types, I always run up against the same ques­tion at least once or twice: “I work in a cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment, I get paid to pull levers on behalf of my client. Please show me where the lever is in the Web 2.0 space”. To which I always ans­wer, “I can’t tell you where the lever is, because it doesn’t exist.” Then I tell them, “You don’t create social objects by pulling levers; you create social objects by crea­ting social ges­tu­res.” Then I tell them, “Virals don’t start life out as virals, they start life out as gifts. And gifts are always in con­flict with their own value.” Then I tell them, it’s a brand’s job to be inte­res­ting. And what makes a brand inte­res­ting is the human inte­rac­tion around the brand, not the inhe­rent qua­li­ties of the brand itself. Some peo­ple get it, some peo­ple don’t, some peo­ple kinda get it, even if they’d rather not.”

The problem with this approach is that budget often dictates the quality and outcome of a campaign. Instead, you need to start at the end and work your way to the beginning. Get creative to achieve your objective within budget but do not chop your campaign cost without any concept of whether it can still deliver.

Consider how many sales you need to close in a year in order to make your campaign a success. Depending on how long it takes to sell your product/service and the average revenue generated from each sale, you should be able to come up with some helpful numbers.

Your objective must be based on two things:

1. Your ultimate goal in new sales opportunities. (e.g. $1,000,000)
2. The historic average of each sales. (e.g. $85,000)

With a revenue target of $1,000,000 and an average deal size of $85,000, your company needs to close  approximately 12 deals a year (i.e. 1,000,000 / 85,000 = 12).

Once you understand your objectives, you can begin to understand what you need to put into your marketing in order to succeed. If you cut corners you may be sabotaging your marketing investment.

The next big question is what investment is needed to convert 12 sales?

In order to get an accurate answer to this question, you need to test your own tactics in your industry.

Researching our events at Starshot over the years, we have identified these drop-off rates:

• Expected Marketing Response Rate 2%
• Prospect to Lead Conversion 20%
• Lead to Customer Conversion 20%

Now, if you skimp on the quality of your go-to-market communications and design, (in our case these tactics may include an html invitation and telemarketing,) you will likely achieve less than 2% as a response rate. If you present a less than stellar event experience and/or presentation, you will likely achieve less than 20% prospect-to-lead conversion. And, if your sales team skimps on follow ups, you will likely receive less than 20% as a response rate.

There is a direct correlation between your results and your investment. Many business owners will go in blind and won’t consider what they can actually get out of a marketing campaign. However, every time you trim your campaign, you chip away at the outcome of your efforts. Perhaps even to the point of making a marketing effort not worth executing at all.

Why so many?

Because Facebook is an extremely powerful platform for event marketing.  A visit to the Facebook Statistics page shows that Facebook hosts 3 million event listings each month, from pizza parties, to office get-togethers, to massive political movements.  Why is it so effective?

For three primary reasons:

1. It’s completely free. That’s a big one.
2. Personal endorsements are quickly becoming the new best way to market – and they’re viral. “Friends as Filters” means more people today are overwhelmed by the internet’s information overload, and prefer to rely on their friends’ recommendations for everything from events, to restaurants, to products. Families invite friends, friends invite colleagues.
3. Facebook lets you contact more qualified attendees than other traditional demand generation methods, especially if you get the attention of like-minded individuals in specific Facebook groups as well as those “Big Shot Networkers” who have hundreds of attentive friends.

Last week Josh Catone over at Mashable put together an excellent and in depth HOW TO guide for organizing an event on Facebook.  Swing over and check it out here.

Cloud is a metaphor for the Internet, and computing is just broad and vague enough to incorporate a growing notion of technical functionality.

According to a Gartner definition sourced in Wikipedia, “Cloud computing is the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources as a service over the Internet on a utility basis.” In practical application, it means working from software that is not installed on your hardware; it means storing and accessing your files remotely. It means a team of people can work live from the same document regardless of location. It means there will be a team of technical geniuses working on the back end to perfect the tools we use every day. When there’s a glitch, it gets addressed immediately, no waiting for patches or version upgrades. It means I don’t have to waste my time working around imperfect technology. I can actually use the tools as they were intended, rather than putting on my tech support hat to figure out a problem outside of my scope of knowledge.

So, why does this matter to event marketers?

Just about every form of business success depends on a business’s ability to innovate. As events morph into virtual happenings such as webinars and podcamps, we should be thinking of what events might look like in the future.

My imagination sees something like this:

Two keynote speakers (Speaker 1 & Speaker 2) living in different communities (or continents even) can work together on the same presentation file, using Microsoft SharePoint for example.  Each can make changes and see the work of his/her colleague in real time. Speaker 1 will be attending the physical element of the event but doesn’t need to carry a copy of the presentation. In fact, Speaker 2 is adjusting her slides from her home office while Speaker 1 arrives at the venue.

When the presentation begins, Speaker 1 accesses the presentation file online and runs his portion of the event. Speaker 2 begins her portion and references statistics from last year’s Sample Organization Annual Report. (She just added these statistics last minute.) Unbeknownst to Speaker 2, Sample Organization’s CEO is attending this event from his office. He speaks up, elaborates on the study further, and identifies a small margin of error overlooked by Speaker 2. Speaker 2 adds the figure to the event slide and attendees all over the world see the change.

The speakers have planned to end the presentation with a live poll. (Imagine polling a live studio audience without the physical limitations of the studio!) The results are generated instantly from contributions around world.

Create a buzz, spread the word and those who missed the event can re-live the event on demand. And for a dynamic experience, those who watch the recorded event after the fact will be able to respond to the poll which is constantly updating as new respondents add their input.

Some of the most lucrative content in media is perishable content such as sports games and news. In a time where it’s easy to store your favourite movies and tv shows on your PVR or computer, content with a shelf-life attracts an audience in real-time. The live elements and functionality of cloud computing can give events the power of NOW – so your sales event can benefit from the appeal of perishable content.

When a prospect crosses over your registration barriers and expresses a real interest in your event they have essentially pre-qualified themselves. Your objective is to lock in a personal connection by not relying on “faceless” confirmations and reminders.

This is where you must really pay attention to the details.

For example, you should never sign confirmation emails or auto-responders from “The Event Team.” Always let the prospect know exactly who is running the event and delivering the content. Make it standard practice to give prospects the ability to respond to live email addresses or call and speak with your event lead directly.

The language used in any confirmation must always be warm and gracious and set a personal expectation of meeting the prospect on event day. If you want to go the extra distance, send each registrant a relevant piece of preparation material in a personal email that asks about any particular topics the prospect would like to cover at the event.

These seemingly small details help you better align the event with your audience’s needs.