Managing Events with Your Zoho CRM
Attending events is a part of your business that connects the
real world to your Zoho CRM calendar. They are a powerful way to build relationships and track interest in your brand. Event participation is also a great trigger for marketing automation.
Setting up an event system that connects directly to your Zoho CRM is important in fostering deeper relationships with your leads, clients, employees, and vendors. Event sponsors, staff, and attendees all contribute to these relationships; store this information in your CRM to effectively use events for marketing and sales. You most likely are familiar with event software. Setting up more complex events and storing that data in a CRM for later use may be something new. Tracking your event data has long-term benefits for all kinds of organizations, not just event-focused companies. Attendance and registration can tell a lot about a person and their interest in your company, products, and services.
Use the same software for internal team meetings and conferences. The idea is the same – keeping long-term track of attendance and participation in the Zoho CRM helps as a management tool for your own team.
Connect your event marketing, registration, and attendance to your Zoho CRM
You connect your event marketing, registration, and attendance to
your Zoho CRM. Integrated event management and CRM helps you gain maximum exposure for your event, while gathering important data for use in growing your business, Events, as in other parts of your Zoho CRM, are a tool for insight and expanding your footprint in the world.
Bringing People to Your Brand
An event is a great way to expose your brand to a lot of people. While events may not have the reach of online advertising, the quality of the engagement is much higher. People spend a lot of time at events, and if you’re hosting, sponsoring, or even just attending, your emotional connection is likely to be much greater
Driving awareness with events
As a business that either hosts or sends your staff to events, you have an opportunity to expose your brand to your market in an emotional, visceral way. This awareness can be used to bring you more leads, and ultimately drive revenue.
Common methods you can use to promote awareness are:
Sponsoring
Many large events, such as conferences, provide opportunities to sponsor an event in exchange for promotion. Be careful with this approach and do your research. Make sure you sponsor events that your target market attends. Many sponsoring brands are forgotten as soon as attendees leave the event. If you spend money sponsoring, ensure you can measure the return on investment (ROI) by obtaining data about the attendees or having your brand exposed to them before and after the event. As with most investments, the more you spend on an event, the greater the likelihood attendees remember you and become leads.
Make realistic calculations based on the number of attendees, the percentage who are potential clients, and the likelihood you get them started on your buyer journey,
Setting up a booth
Large meetings and conferences often have booths as part of the event. Be sure you’re prepared to meet as many people as possible and have a strategy for following up. Your booth should look professional to attract attendees. Employees working the booth should be assertive, but not too pushy. Your primary objective is not to sell there but to capture the attendees information so your sales team can do a proper follow-up. Either have a fishbow to collect business cards or a scanner to scan business cards directly to your CRM.
Attending
When you attend an event, your goal should never be to hand out as many business cards as possible. Meeting people in person is about
listening, and then thinking about how you can help that person. Your team
can get much further by establishing a few strong relationships, and not
having a competition about who can meet the most people.
Hosting
If you host an event, you control the environment. Large or small, putting effort forth to bring people together opens the doors to many people and companies to know what you do and how you can help them.
Educating leads and clients through conferences
Many businesses hold meet-ups or conferences to bring together clients and share valuable information. When you have the opportunity to educate your peers and potential clients, examine the ROI of that carefully. Speaking to a group of people establish you and your brand as thought leaders and experts.
That naturally draws people to you, as you’re the source of answers to their questions. If you aren’t hosting the conference, and are attending the conference, think about the educational benefit of having a booth. Your primary objective should be to educate people at the conference. Education may be about your business, but think about how you can give people the knowledge they can walk away with that helps them do their jobs better. It might be a free informational brochure or a giveaway that helps them in their job.
In all cases, only in special occasions should you attempt to directly sell someone at a conference. You can give an attendee a discount or promotional code or a free promotional item, but unless you’re selling a product at the conference, the relationship is far more valuable than whatever you’re selling.
ship with your contacts, communicating value by hosting or attending repeated events is a good strategy. Some organizations encourage membership by giving discounts on events, and some provide access to special members-only events.
Matching attendees by interests
The software you use to manage the event should be tightly connected to your
CRM. All the attendees should be recorded in your CRM, along with any preferences you learn about them through their registration.
One way to drive event attendance is to give attendees insight into who else is attending. You can do that by publishing the entire attendance list. But if you want to protect attendees’ privacy, you can simply provide a list of the bigger brands that are attending to give attendees a general sense of who is coming and why.
Another solution is to offer attendance matching, telling an attendee who RSVPS that another attendee has similar interests. Familiarity and a sense of belonging with people with like-minded interests goes a long way toward bringing people together. Your event management tool should use your Zoho CRM data to make connections between your event attendees.
Setting Up Registration Options
Every time someone confirms attendance, you have an opportunity to personalize the attendee’s event experience. The registration options you ask for should correlate to the services you provide to the attendees, but you also have an opportunity to gather more information for your CRM.
For example, an event registration page may ask an attendee what topics that
attendee is interested in learning about. It helps drive experience at the event, but it may also come in handy for your sales team in better understanding a lead’s interests.
Determining what to ask for you should have the ability to completely customize your event registration. Gather information that helps better serve your attendees and customers. A list of common options to consider when setting up your event are :
Contact details
This data translates directly to your contact data in the Zoho CRM. Email address and name are common fields to request, but you may want to dig a little deeper. Asking for general preferences may help you segment your market. The more you ask, the better you can segment your marketing, but you don’t want to make registration so challenging that people don’t want to sign up for your event.
Event-related preferences
If you’re giving people options for different tracks, food choices, or VIP access, you can ask for those preferences at registration time and build any price increases into the registration process. If you’re up-selling event-related items such as shirts or other collateral, include them in the online registration to give you another way to generate revenue.
Discounts
You may want to give reduced pricing to attendees. You can offer discounts in a few ways. One common way is a discount code that can be entered at registration time. You do run the risk of attendees sharing codes, but that may be an acceptable risk to you. Another way is to automate the discount based on the group the contact is in; or in a custom data field, you can reduce the price of admission.
