September 2005
Best Practices: Attendee tune-up
Accessories Show cuts attendee database by half to more than double attendance, quadruple the show floor and grow revenue 132 percent since 1998
By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

When Norwalk, CT-based business-to-business publisher Business Journals Inc. bought the 150-booth Fashion Accessories Expo (www.accessoriestheshow.com) in late 1997, it also acquired a database of 60,000 prospective attendees. Like last season’s designer apparel, that asset quickly depreciated.

“Database management is not the forte of many trade show management companies,” says Britton Jones, President and CEO of Business Journals, which publishes Accessories magazine. “As publishers, we go through BPA audits on a regular basis, so we have more organization and structure to our database management. This database was a mess. There was no way to track attendance. It was just a bunch of contact information.”

And that contact information was outdated. Initial mailings for the January, May and August shows, renamed “Accessories The Show,” returned volumes of undeliverable mail. Fine-tuning the list became a priority. They restructured the database so they could track verified attendance by season — Fall/Winter, Holiday/Resort and Spring/Summer — and know not only how many shows but also which shows buyers attended.

A full-time retail development person was hired to identify buyers to add to the list by poring through fashion magazines, searching the Internet for fashion-related sites, and searching for retailers who exhibitors and prospects already sell to.

 “We developed a top retailer list with people we knew should be on the floor,” Jones says. “We also included our exhibitors in the process and asked them who they wanted to see on the floor.”

Over the next year and half, they not only added qualified names to the list but also subtracted unproductive names. “We had to go through a series of shows,” Jones says. “If they hadn’t come, if we had never heard of the store, and if they were not on our top retailer list, we took them off the list.”

Last year, the registration contractor began using the magazine’s subscription form, which collects contact information, as well as accessory categories, number of stores buying for, annual sales volume and price range of the stores. Bar-coded badges enable tracking of who comes to the show on what day and how long they stay on the show floor — information that further qualifies attendees.

Today, the Accessories show database numbers 29,885. And though postage now costs considerably less, the show spends more money on attendee marketing than in the early years. Accessories spends $180,000 per season on promotion, direct mail, advertising, telemarketing and online.

Instead of mailing one brochure per season, the program now includes a tiered approach that targets the top tier with six mailings per season. The bottom tier gets just three to four pieces per season. The most desirable retailers, comprising about 1,000 names, experience a one-to-one marketing blitz with 4,000 phone calls per season.

As a result, Accessories enjoys nearly 100 percent participation by top retailers. “We’re down to a handful of stores that we want to attend our show but who don’t attend on a regular basis. A couple of years ago, it was probably a couple of hundred,” Jones says. “We’ve increased attendance by more than 200 percent since we bought it, and we’re still racking up double-digit gains.”

This year, Jones expects attendance to average 11,000 over three days, which run concurrently with the Fashion Avenue Market Expo (FAME) and Moda Manhattan, a juried ready-to-wear show. Venue bound at New York’s Javits Center for 16 straight seasons, the full-amenities shows total 107,000–118,000 net square feet, depending on which halls they’re in. Revenues for the Accessories show alone have risen from $2.8 million in 1998 to nearly $6.5 million. Together with FAME and Moda, revenues top $11 million.

 Next year, Accessories has booked the Javits’ lower level, with about 150,000 net square feet. To fill the space with qualified buyers, they’ll intensify their list management and attendance promotion.

 “Every workday we add new names to our database,” Jones says.