Planning an event is a busy process. Between booking caterers and finding speakers to making sure the event goes smoothly, there's a lot to take care of. And, that doesn't even cover finding people to attend the event and making sure they don't forget.
With SimplyCast 360, you can create a campaign that allows you to automate communication with potential attendees and make sure everyone knows about your upcoming event.
To create an event management campaign, you will need:
- Send to List at Fixed Time
- Email Campaign (x4)
- Twitter Campaign (x2)
- Facebook Campaign (x2)
- Signup Form
- Delay
- Delay Until (x2)
- SMS Campaign
- Survey
- Decision
The first step of any event management campaign is to make sure that your existing audience knows about the upcoming event. First, drag in a Send to List at Fixed Time element and connect it to an Email Campaign. Click on the Send to List at Fixed Time element and choose the date and time you'd like to send your initial announcement and the list you'd like to send it to. If you'd also like to announce your upcoming event on Facebook and Twitter, connect one of each campaign to the announcement email.
In order to track who will be attending your event and who will not be attending, it is important to create an event signup form. Do this by dragging in a Signup Form element and creating the form as usual through the Startup Wizard. Then, take the link to the form and include it as a CTA in your email announcement as well as in your Facebook post and tweet.
After you've created your form and inserted the link into the previous email and the social media elements, if desired, you need to add a Delay element. Inserting this element here ensures that once someone signs up to attend the event, there will be a pause before they receive their confirmation email. Set the delay using the options in the left-hand menu and connect the form to it.
After the Delay, drag in an Email Campaign and connect the Delay element to it. This email will be the "Thanks for signing up!" email and can contain more details about the event.
After that, the next contact you need to have with your registered attendees is a few days before the event to remind them that it is happening soon. Since this reminder message will go out on the same day for all recipients, drag in a Delay Until element and choose a date and time that is a day or two before the actual event in the menu on the left-hand side of the screen. After that, drag in the type of message you'd like to send those who registered as a reminder. In this example, we used SMS but you could use email or voice as well. Off of the same Delay Until element you can also connect Facebook and Twitter campaigns if you'd like to post a reminder on social media as well.
After the reminder message, drag in another Delay Until element. This is the element that will stall the campaign until after the event, so choose a day and time shortly after the event. Connect this element to a Survey. Here, you can create a feedback survey that will be sent to all those who registered to attend your event. This is a great way to collect opinions in order to improve future events. If you wish to provide personalized email responses based on whether or not the recipient actually ended up attending, you will need to create that question in the survey and map it to a list field in the CRM.
To do this while creating your survey:
- Drag in a Radio Button Choice Element
- Create the question: "Did you attend the event?"
- Make options "Yes" and "No"
- Choose the List Field option in the left-hand side of the screen
- Select "Create New Field"
- Enter your chosen field name like "Attended Event"
- This is where responses to the question will be stored in the CRM
After that question is complete, continue to create your survey and email notification as usual.
Once you're back in the 360 workspace, add a Decision element after the survey and connect them. This is the decision that will determine if someone did or did not attend your event. Add two Email campaigns after this decision and attach the decision to both of them. Create the content for each email, one for someone who did attend and one for someone who did not attend.
Then, after the content is complete, click on the connection between the "attended" email and the Decision element. In order to make sure that only those who attended the event receive this email, you must:
- Click the three-barred icon
- Select Decision Settings
- Choose "Contact" in the first field
- Choose "Text" in the second field
- Choose the column you created in the survey from the third field
- Choose "Equals" from the fourth column
- Enter "Yes" into the final field
- Click "Submit"
Do the same for the other Decision/Email connection except enter "No" into the final field instead of "Yes."
And, there you have it: an automated campaign that will alert your audience of an upcoming event and manage communications with them before, during, and after the event on multiple channels.
Are there any other flows you'd like to learn about? Let us know in the comments below! If you're not a SimplyCast user but want to give the event management flow a shot, sign up for a free 14-day trial!
