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From the June 2006  issue of Communications News

Beyond your online event

Knowing your audience is critical in order to connect and communicate your message successfully.

by Nancy Christman

Although you may not be a psychic, you can peek into the minds of your participants before your next Web presentation. How? By leveraging data collected before, during and after your event. Beyond planning and developing compelling presentation material, you can have even more impact through collecting and using audience data from all steps of your Web event.

This information can be used to measure your return on investment and to analyze your results for better planning for future events. It can even identify which members of your audience are most likely to buy your products and services. Comprehensive reporting about who you invited, who registered and who actually attended provides insight for maximizing your database for marketing efforts in conjunction with and even beyond, your online events.
Once you have presentation content, a compelling title for your event and a firm schedule, you are ready to begin collecting insight to who your audience will be and what their interests are. Most often, an e-mail blast service is used to send an invitation to the targeted audience. The e-mail invitation will include a link to an event registration page where your guests will sign up to attend and get more details about your event.

Some Web event services now make tools available that help simplify the invitation and registration process for Web events. Invitation message templates and registration page outlines provide tested guidance on what information to include, what information to collect, even where links are best placed within the message or on the page.

Look for tools that give you the ability to easily import target lists and send invitations, and also report delivery and open rates, click-throughs, opt-out requests and undeliverable messages. This reporting detail gives you insight to how contacts responded to your message and how effective your target list was.

The key to gathering the best data from registrants is to keep the registration process short and not burdensome–ask no more than two or three questions in addition to the standard demographic or contact requirement. Too many questions will discourage registration, but the right questions can encourage participation.

Include questions that invite registrants to pose questions to be answered by the event. Ask about their future or past plans for using the type of information you are going to share. Invite them to tell you what their biggest issue is that you can address or solve. Gather this data with a mix of multiple choice answers and open-ended questions so your results analysis will be easier, but your information will be deeper.

Now that you now know what the key issues are for your audience, be sure to include them in your presentation agenda. You want to use this information to connect with your audience. For example, you can present a list of the top 10 issues and ask your audience to rank the top three. Use other information you collected at registration to personalize your presentation–for example, recognize the large group that are online from Illinois or the fact that you have more mid-level managers than CEOs or more health professionals than artists in your audience.

You can also make your Web event more engaging and satisfying for your audience by including interactive features like additional survey questions, polls and pro-con exercises, and then sharing the results in your presentation. Your attendees will feel like they have influence over the direction of the presentation and be more involved.

The information you collected through registration is bound to create more questions for you about these attendees. Include an opening poll that lets the audience get to know each other and lets you get to know them. For example, how many different industries are represented? How many different job types are in the audience? How widely varied is the experience level?
Archiving or replaying your event will enable you to extend the life and reach of your presentation. You should still be able to collect all registration information on an archived event. For added value, make sure your Web event service keeps all of the interactive elements (e.g., polling, surveys, testing) active so that you continue to capture that information about each attendee to your event replay.

You should be able to use the data from replays in conjunction with your analysis of the live event. Using this type of event replay even allows archive attendees to send questions during the event. These questions would be forwarded to an e-mail address that you define for monitoring and response. An archived event like this posted on your Web site can become a 24x7 “lead machine.”

Easy-to-use and easy-to-understand reporting is key to capitalizing on all the feedback as effectively as possible. First, make sure you have fast access to a summary report, preferably online, so you are able to get a quick understanding of the overall success of your event. This can give you an indication of what type of immediate follow-up you may want or need to do with your audience. Web event reports should be exportable in an easy-to-use database format (typically .csv), enabling easy import of the data into your CRM or lead-tracking software for individual follow-up by your sales or customer service team.

You can evaluate, score and rank the leads, attendee experience or training effectiveness through more in-depth analysis of the information submitted prior to the event at registration, during the event through the interactions, or after the event through a feedback survey used to close the event. Take advantage of Web event reporting tools that let you measure and track how attendees responded to all the interactions in your presentation.
You can evaluate who your best presenters are and which are the most effective questions for eliciting audience response. By tying the pre-, during and post-event data together you now have a valuable depth of information about your audience that helps you prioritize which attendees to contact first, how you might design targeted one-to-one sales programs, or how you need to refine your communication plan to more effectively deliver your message.

Nancy Christman is vice president of marketing for Vcall, Richmond, Va.

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