Getting attendees to an event is the goal of every event organiser, but each has their own unique way of approaching the issue.
For Alison Church, marketing director – UK & Global at Easyfairs, as soon as she first heard about social registration referral she thought it seemed like a really powerful way of tapping into the networks of potential visitors.
Social referral is a plug in into the registration process, allowing a visitor who signs up via social media to see who else in their networking is attending and invite their social connections along to the event.
After talking with several providers, Church chose Gleanin to implement the tool across several of its shows.
“Not only did it allow social referrals, but also email referrals, which we found worked really well and were the biggest chosen way of sharing,” she tells EW.“Also, the inline registration process with Visit by GES was a key driver.
“Above all, however, it was the flexibility and agility of the team there; when we were considering who we wanted to use across all our events, I sat down with Tamar and discussed a couple of limitations we had found in our trials; we came up with a few ideas, which were implemented within a month or two by her development team. And ever since the team has constantly been churning out new developments. It’s hard to find partners as quick to react as that!”
“We are very hot on our customer service and we try to work really closely with our customers,” adds Gleanin CEO Tamar Beck, who co-founded the company along with Ajay Mathur and Peter Richards more than six years ago. “We’re a small team but we’re very quick; all we do is this so it’s in our interests to make sure that anything that improves the results is implemented quickly,”
Gleanin’s work across Easyfairs’ events has expanded since the two companies started working together in 2015, with the social referral platform is now implemented across over 50 Easyfairs’ events throughout Asia, Africa, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US.
In the first half of 2018, the organiser saw an average of 14 per cent of visitor pre-registrants referring events to their contacts or networks. These in turn have delivered an average of eight per cent of registrations for the portfolio.
“Gleanin is one of the highest directly attributable registration sources for our shows,” continues Church. “Not only that, those registrations convert at a higher rate. I’m very much an advocate of referral marketing; we know how well it works in the consumer world, so it’s no surprise that it can deliver great results on our B2B events. It works well across the board on our events in a wide variety of different industries.”
When Gleanin starts working with a new customer the company may not be privy to the registration numbers from previous years, Beck tells EN.
“What we do know is our performance and what a client should expect us to deliver as a percentage of their total registration,” she says. “We benchmark our results every week, we benchmark against all the completed events and have an average and that’s where we set everyone’s expectations. Any new client should expect us to deliver, on average, 4.5 per cent of the total registration.
“With Easyfairs, I think the reason we’ve been doing really well is because their events get exceptional results. Easyfairs are quite big on standardisation; when they find something that works they roll it out. They are one of our best examples of that and we’re pretty sure that the high results are down to a very standardised set up. I’m convinced that is what gets us the great results.”
As is often the case with tech, the numbers don’t lie. Whether it’s for the reason put forward by Beck or something more obscure, the partnership between Gleanin and Easyfairs is certainly producing impressive results.