Live Event Attendance
Tracking Software
As a live event manager, you probably spend time worrying and wondering whether your events will succeed.
Will guests love the experience? Will you meet attendance goals? How can organization and execution be improved? No matter how many live events you’ve hosted, these questions have probably crossed your mind at one time or another.
To answer all of your event management pain points and questions, we have one simple solution: event attendance tracking software from In The Room. When you are able to track guest attendance—and not just at your overall event, but at each individual session—you’ll get countless benefits to help you optimize your event.
What Is Attendance Tracking Software?
First, let’s take a look at live event attendance tracking software and what it can do for your next event.
The function, really, is in the name. Event attendance tracking software lets event managers track guest check-ins at live events. Event managers use different methods of tracking attendance. Some systems use barcodes or QR code scanning, some use RFID technology, some use check-in apps, and some even go the archaic route and use handheld counters or keep track of the numbers on paper.
However, the difference between a good attendance tracking system and a great system is in the details. Does your software only track overall check-in rates? Can it collect attendance numbers at each talk, lecture, or session within the event? Are you able to see who stayed for the entire session and who left early?
The data that can be gathered from corporate event software gives insights into everything from attendee engagement and the success of each speaker or session to your ROI and marketing effectiveness. The more advanced the software, the deeper and more helpful your metrics and data will be.
Advanced Attendance Tracking
Utilizing event attendance software can make a huge impact on the success of your live event. The only question that remains is which software are you going to choose?
The more data provided by an event management system, the deeper the insights you’ll gain. With these insights, you will be able to refine your marketing and organizing strategies for the future. To optimize data tracking, consider choosing powerful event attendance tracking software from In The Room. This software will tell you more about your event guests and better track who is “In the Room.”
How Can Advanced Attendance Tracking Help Me?
You may be wondering whether advanced attendance tracking will make much of a difference for your brand. If the attendance system you are currently using tells you your overall attendance numbers, do you really need more information? After all, you’ll be able to tell from the overall rate whether you met your overall attendance goals.
At In The Room, we believe that event managers should be doing two things: optimizing events for guest satisfaction and effectively monetizing them. When you choose a high-powered attendance tracking tool, you’ll have the data needed to be able to accomplish both of these goals much more easily than you could without it.
Understand Your Attendees
To give your guests the best experience, you need to know who they are. Getting to know attendees involves data tracking for the overall event as well as for each individual talk, lecture, session, or activity. Knowing average guest ages, job titles, home locations, and other details can tell you more about them.
Conference attendance tracking is one of the most efficient ways to learn about guest profiles and preferences. With advanced tracking software, you’ll know not only how many people attend each session, but who is “In The Room” and how long they stayed. When you have more data for analysis, the advantages are endless.
Benefits of Event Attendance Tracking
Improve Guest Engagement
Nearly all event management systems will tell you how many people check-in to an event. Some event tracker software programs will even tell you who attended each session. However, what should really interest you is a program that can gather demographic information about the guests who attend each session as well as drop-off rates. (Both of these can be measured using advanced software from In The Room.)
The drop-off rate refers to the number of guests who leave a session before it is over. If a specific session has an exceptionally high drop-off rate, you can infer that something about it—possibly the speaker or session topic—was not very engaging to the audience.
Comparing session drop-off rates with other event-driven analytics can help you understand which sessions resonated with your guests more than others. This lets you make changes to future speaker line-ups and session topics to find the most engaging speakers and topics to keep attendees happy.
Evaluate Your Marketing Strategy
Once you have a better understanding of event and session attendance rates, drop-off rates, and get a closer look at the demographic profiles of your attendees, this can influence future marketing strategies.
For instance, let’s say one talk had very high guest attendance and a low drop-off rate, and from gathered data you are able to see that it was most highly attended by women aged 28–40. This would tell you that the session was a particular success with that group of people. From here you would be able to effectively adjust marketing efforts to target ads towards women in that age range.
Keep Your Registrants Interested
Every live event will have more people registered for the event than attendees who check-in on the day. Life has a habit of getting in the way of planned events. Regardless of the final numbers on the day, it is still helpful to compare the number of registrants to the number of checked in guests.
For example, if you find there was a high registration rate but a much lower-than-expected final attendance rate this could indicate a decline in interest before the start of the event. To keep those who register excited to attend, make use of email marketing, website updates, and social media to provide sneak peeks, highlight keynote speakers, and build anticipation. It’s important to keep your live event on the registrants’ radars.
Adjust Your Budget
Optimizing the budget for a live event is one key to success with planning and management. Attendance tracking provides data in several ways to help facilitate this.
Examining attendance and drop-off rates will help indicate which speakers are worth bringing back and which are not. When you find a speaker who is a hit with your audience, you will also be able to look into similar options to ensure attendees return for the next event.
Real-time attendance tracking can also help gauge the food and beverage budget. Knowing the number of guests in attendance in the hours leading up to a meal will help you predict how many people to cater for. These more accurate numbers will save you from spending too much money on food and drinks that will not be consumed. (Plus, it will keep your guests happy because you won’t be under-ordering food and leaving people hungry.)
Bring In Valuable Speakers
If you want your event to attract a large number of guests and keep them engaged, you’ll want to feature the best speakers in the field. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to rope in the big-name speakers. Having accurate data from attendance tracking software will show them your event is worth their time.
Providing potential guest speakers with the numbers around past events demonstrates the impact of attending your next event. Additionally, if you can use advanced attendance tracking to highlight attendance rates for sessions similar to theirs, this can go a long way in showing how their own sessions would be well-attended.
Ensure Guest Safety
Every guest wants to feel safe at all times during any live event. You can give attendees a better sense of security using attendance tracking software.
Using advanced tracking software from In The Room will show in real time how many people are present, letting you know how many security staff members you will need to keep everyone safe. Data tracking can also help prevent unauthorized people from gaining access to the venue.
Smoothly Handle Behind-the-Scenes Operations
If you’ve run a trade show event before without access to trade show tracking software, you probably have experienced some chaotic moments. Not being able to manage a trade show in real time may have left you feeling frantic, trying to manage all the behind-the-scenes operations while maintaining a smooth façade in front of guests.
An efficient attendance tracking system that provides real-time updates would have smoothed the process. Don’t be caught off guard when certain stressful situations pop up—for example if a room fills up more quickly than anticipated.
With the right software, you will be able to monitor the room as it fills to capacity. If the need arises, you can swiftly add more chairs so none of your guests are left to stand in the back. You will also be able to inform guests through messaging or an online event page that the session is filling up. This way, interested people can hustle to the room and grab a seat. Overall, attendance tracking tools help all event operations move more smoothly and efficiently.
Assess and Boost Your ROI
A live event ROI, or return on investment, is an essential piece of data to gather and analyze when planning future events. You can gauge event ROI by using advanced live event attendance tracking software.
When you compare the overall cost of operations with the total attendance rate, this lets you calculate the cost per guest. Likewise, you can compare your total revenue with your overall attendance rate to find the revenue per guest. Finally, compare the cost per guest with the revenue per guest to determine your ROI.
Once you have your ROI numbers, you can compare them with previous events to see whether your brand was able to boost the return on investment. You can then measure your ROI against many of the previously listed factors—attendee drop-off rates, marketing budget and strategies, or selected speakers and session topics—to judge aspects of the event’s success and to optimize future events.
Follow Up with Your Guests
You may think your work is done once the live event is over. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Effectively following up with event attendees will help you to bring in repeat guests for future events. It is much easier to market to people who are already aware of your brand than those who see an advertisement for the first time.
Following up with past attendees helps to keep your event and your brand fresh in peoples’ minds. It is also a great way to get more information about how your guests feel about how the event went. However, follow-ups are not one-size-fits-all.
Imagine registering for an event that you were excited about. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, you weren’t able to make it. However, to add insult to injury, you start receiving follow-up emails from the brand asking for your opinions on how everything went. You’d probably feel disappointed and annoyed being asked about an event you never attended. You’ll probably unsubscribe from the company, removing them—and any of their future events—from your mind.
To avoid this scenario, an advanced event attendance tracker can help you do two things:
- Keep track of who actually attended versus those who registered but didn’t attend
- Integrate guest data with email marketing targeting for easy follow-up emails
Maximize post-event follow-up communication with a software program from In The Room. Not only will you be able to avoid the situation above, but you will also be able to ask no-show registrants about why they couldn’t attend. This no-show data can also provide insight. Did they forget about the event? Did they lose interest? If either question rings true, it may be time to adjust marketing and planning strategies for the future.
Additionally, keeping up a good rapport with every guest, even those who weren’t able to attend, can be beneficial. With a software program that integrates email marketing and allows you to see guest profiles, it is possible to send individualized surveys, thanks, and personalized messages based on guest attendance activity. Doing this will encourage repeat attendance and help guests feel like you see them as individuals, not as dollar signs.
In The Room: The Superior Attendance Tracking Tool
It’s evident that using attendance tracking software will benefit you as an organizer, your guests, and your live event in many ways. If you really want to level up your next live event, you’ll need an attendance tracker that can give you real-time updates on check-ins, drop-off rates, and share demographic profiles of every attendee.
At In The Room, we believe in creating a sleek, seamless experience for guests and optimally monetizing events for host brands. We built the best software available because no one else on the market had the technology to manage events the way we wanted to. With our advanced live event attendance tracking software, attendance tracking can be an effortless way to gauge goal metrics and make each event more successful than the last.