When you host an event, it’s always exciting to see the success of your marketing efforts in real-time as guests pour through the doors. You might get a rough estimate of your attendance numbers just by eyeballing the crowd at registration, or maybe you’ve used a handheld tally counter to keep track.
But have you ever considered a more sophisticated method of tracking attendance? The right event attendance software can help you keep track of attendance at every scheduled talk, performance, or meeting within your event.
This might seem like a lot of work if you aren’t sure what to do with those numbers. However, using event attendance tracking at your next live event will do a lot more for you than just providing the number of attendees. This data can be used to gauge your brand’s ROI, measure guest engagement, optimize your budget, personalize post-event communication, and more.
Benefits of Tracking Attendance
1. Gauge Your ROI
There are a number of factors to consider when gauging your event return on investment. Tracking attendance numbers can give you an idea of your ROI in these ways:
- Help calculate your overall cost per guest.
- Determine the revenue brought in per guest.
- The above two numbers can then be used to find the total ROI (a percentage showing the difference between your revenue and cost per attendee).
When you have the ROI results, you can measure your event’s overall financial success and start planning the budget for your next live event.
2. Attract Keynote Speakers
Not being able to get well-known and respected people to present at your event can significantly decrease the number of attendees. Big names will boost registration numbers. However, the bigger the name, the more convincing it can take to get them to come speak.
If you don’t have the numbers to back up your pitch, good luck attracting prominent speakers. If you can provide accurate counts of your previous event attendance numbers, speakers will be much more likely to get on board.
Using High-Powered Attendance Tracking
If you use a handheld tally counter to track your attendees or look at the number of badges left unclaimed at the end of check-in, it’s time to step into the 21st century and embrace technological advances. You’d be shocked at the metrics that advanced event attendance software can give you.
First, let’s explain what we mean by advanced or high-powered attendance tracking and how it can help you beyond measuring your ROI.
What is Advanced Attendance Tracking?
You may be measuring your event’s overall attendance just by the number of people who walked in the doors at check-in. But this doesn’t account for how many people attended each individual session, how many stayed through the entire event, and it won’t tell you anything about your guests.
When you use advanced or high-powered attendance tracking software, you’ll always see who is present. Advanced attendee tracking may include using facial recognition technology, RFID equipment, or other technology. High-powered tracking gives you more insight into the people who are in attendance.
Advantages of Advanced Attendance Tracking
1. Measure Engagement and Optimize Your Budget
Using the latest technology in attendance tracking is invaluable for accurate data collection for event management. During your event, advanced tracking methods are able to measure guest engagement by paying attention to which sessions were full to the brim, which were not well attended, and noting which sessions had guests leaving before they were finished.
Gathering this detailed level of information allows event organizers to judge which speakers or sessions were worth hosting and which were less popular. Information like this is extremely helpful in optimizing your budget for the future.
2. Personalize Your Follow-Up Communications
Using a high-powered event attendee management system will allow you to access the profiles of everyone who attended the overall event and each specific session. This information is useful in personalizing follow-up communication.
Having access to guest profiles means that you can send:
- Surveys querying no-shows about the reasons they didn’t attend.
- Summaries or recordings of sessions to those who attended them.
- Reminders about returning speakers to those who went to their sessions.
- Individualized questionnaires to attendees asking what they liked/didn’t like about the specific sessions they attended.
These are only a few examples of emails you can send to your attendees after your event has concluded. Data collection on attendee guests is an innovative way to optimize future events for maximum attendance and to drum up excitement with previous attendees.
The Power of Advanced Attendance Tracking Software
Tracking attendance at any live event is crucial for successful analysis and future planning. The numbers don’t lie; having that concrete data is essential to determining ROI and attracting big-name speakers.
Many event managers do not understand the insights that advanced attendance tracking software can provide. Knowing who was present in the past will allow you to optimize your future budgets, maximize revenue, and personalize your marketing campaigns and communications.