If you’ve been planning events for years, you probably think you have it down to a science. You know how to find and vet the best speakers, caterers, and venues. You know how to attract your ideal audience for maximum exposure and attendance.
But there may be one thing you’re forgetting. Do you know all the ins and outs of tracking attendee behavior? Do you know how to collect this data? And do you know how to analyze it and turn it into actionable insights?
Whether you’re relatively new to event management or have been doing it for a long time, you likely still have much to learn about collecting and managing attendee behavioral insights.
Why Collect Data?
Let’s address the first question: why is collecting data on attendee behavior necessary?
Helps You Build Your Ideal Guest Profile
Many event planners think that marketing their events to the general public is a great idea. After all, don’t you want to reach as many people as possible?
As it turns out, that’s not what you want. You need to target your ideal audience to maximize conversions and registrations. To do that, you have to build your ideal guest profile. Who do you want to attend your event? What are their demographics and interests?
Collecting data on your attendees’ behavior helps you understand more about them and their interests. This will help you build your ideal guest profile so you can target your marketing to those in similar situations.
Assists You in Future Event Planning
Maximizing registrations and check-ins is just one factor in making an event successful. Replicating an event is one thing, but improving on it is another.
When you track guest behavior at each event, you’ll have a much better idea of what they like and want to see more of, as well as what they weren’t interested in. This data can help you tailor your future events for even greater success.
How to Collect Data
You can collect data on attendees’ behavior at your event in several ways.
Before the Event: Take Advantage of Registration Questions
When you craft your registration forms, you should include questions about each registrant’s demographics. These can consist of any of the following:
- Age
- Gender
- Income level
- Geographic location
- Job position
- Career industry
If you need any other relevant information, be sure to include it in your form. If you’re not sure what would be appropriate, remember this: you’re using these forms to gather information you’ll use to understand your ideal audience and tailor future events for them. Some information might be relevant for some event types and irrelevant for others.
During the Event: Track Movement
While attendees are at your event, it’s crucial to track their movement and attendance at each session using RFID event management software. This will allow you to see the attendance rate at every session-not just your overall event’so you can see which were the most successful.
A key component of using RFID technology is gathering not just the attendance rate but also the drop-off rate. This is the rate at which guests joined a session but did not stay for its entirety. A session with a high drop-off rate may indicate that it did not resonate with the audience. Tracking the drop-off rate is essential in understanding your guests’ preferences.
After the Event: Conduct Post-Event Surveys
Asking attendees directly what they thought of your event is a foolproof way to learn more about their behaviors and desires. You can use the contact information you gathered during the registration process to send post-event surveys and collect attendee feedback. You can then use this feedback to adjust your future events.
What to Do with the Data
Tracking attendee behavior and collecting data is only the first step. Once you have the data, you’ll need a robust event attendee management system to help you process and analyze it.
As you sort through the data, your software should help you identify trends in guest behavior and preferences as well as any relevant outliers. Outliers will help you address immediate concerns and learn about one-time failures.
You can also use the data trends to build your ideal guest profile further. When you have a better understanding of your ideal audience, you can then gear your marketing efforts toward the members of this audience. Data trends-particularly those you’ll find in survey answers, session attendance rates, and drop-off rates-can help you understand how to adjust your marketing.
For example, you may have spent a significant amount of time and effort marketing a particular session or speaker that had a high initial attendance rate but also a high drop-off rate. These numbers can tell you that that session topic or speaker was unsuccessful. You can lower your marketing efforts on this part and instead focus more on other sessions with low drop-off rates.
You should also use the results from your data analysis to tailor your future events. Whether guests didn’t enjoy a session topic, loved the food from a certain caterer, or wanted to see more networking opportunities, you can use this data to make sure your next event gives them more of what they want and less of what they don’t.
Tracking Behavior to Foster Success
There are many intricate components to tracking attendee behavior. It can feel overwhelming to make sure you’re covering all your bases in gathering data, correctly interpreting it, and adjusting your future marketing campaigns and events. However, if you’ve got helpful event attendance tracking software to help you out, you’ll be one step closer to planning and carrying out your most successful event yet.