The trade show industry has a billion-dollar sized problem. With more events popping up every year and attendee acquisition costs ranging between $30-100, it’s easy to assume event organizers are raking in the money. For many trade shows, however, nearly 50% of registrants don’t even show up to the event. Spread across 40 million attendees annually and this is well over a billion dollar problem.
Lack of attendee follow through is a major detriment to event organizers and to the event industry itself. With the success of events hinging on attendance, how can we solve this potentially devastating issue? Acquiring more attendees for an even bigger event may seem like an immediate solution, but here at InGo, we believe the problem can be solved by making your event feel smaller.
As events grow in size and reputation, organizers tend to lose a key component: personal connection. Registrants are less likely to feel committed in attending an event full of unfamiliar faces. That’s why we’ve developed a new feature that makes events feel more intimate, further increasing conversion to onsite.
It’s as simple as notifications sent via email. Our notifications automatically alert event registrants when someone from their network has also registered. When a colleague, old friend, or influential leader’s name pops up in your inbox to notify you of their attendance, the event immediately begins to feel more personal.
InGo’s new notification feature is helping millions of people re-establish old connections while fostering new ones, leveraging nearly a billion relationships. Our numbers speak for themselves with notifications sent via email being opened and clicked through 4-5x more than average. The success of our email notifications are backed by Eventbrite’s most recent report on email marketing. According to their study, 78% of event organizers state email as their most effective marketing tactic. The same study states, “Targeted, relevant emails drive 18x more revenue than general,” further supporting the positive response from our notification emails that contain the names of friends, colleagues, and other peers in the subject head.
Future of Business and Tech reports that individuals between the ages of 18-34 value in-person meetings than any other medium, preferring to maintain and develop professional relationships through face-to-face encounters. Targeting this natural desire to connect with fellow professionals in real life is an important marketing tactic for any event organizer. Letting registrants know which network connections are also attending is the first step in converting registrants to onsite. With InGo’s new notification feature, we hope to make events feel more personal, ultimately solving the billion-dollar industry problem.
