Online registration gets a boost with e-mail marketing tools By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor
When attendees register online, you reap the benefits — call center costs drop, data accuracy improves, and attendees enjoy timely confirmations. Registration Application Service Providers (ASPs) offer e-mail marketing tools to drive registrations online by letting you:
• import contact data; • customize invitations from templates; • blast e-mail, fax and print messages; • segment lists by target audience; • personalize messages for each segment; • track click-throughs; and • follow up with those who haven’t registered.
Registration ASPs also improve communication and reduce no-shows by instantly confirming registrations and automating updates and reminders.“Using a registration ASP is about learning and taking action,” says Helen Loy,Vice President of Marketing for seeUthere in Santa Clara, CA. “You can get so bogged down in the grunt work that it’s hard to be proactive. These tools let you get a higher-level perspective.”
ASPs automate much of the attendance promotion process. A campaign begins with a broadcast e-mail. Prospects without e-mail receive a broadcast fax, and those without either contact avenue see a print promotion. All promotions direct attendees to the Web, but click-throughs on links embedded in e-mail messages let you track online registrations in real time, then fine-tune the campaign to target unresponsive segments.
This iterative process yields results. Martyn Lewis, President and CEO of Market-Partners Inc. in San Jose, CA, reports its registration rate increased 20 percent. Response to invitations for the multi-city sales seminar series doubled to 12.3 percent using seeUthere’s tools.
Online registration can also get a boost from incentives. San Francisco-based Acteva CEO Pankaj Gupta says one client e-mailed a free T-shirt offer and achieved a click-through rate of 40 percent, with a conversion rate of 25 percent.
Because lists can be segmented by virtually any criteria, you can drill down the data to target narrow sub-groups. “You can personalize the message so that certain groups pay attention,” says Jim Forberg, Vice President, Strategic Marketing, for b-there in Westport, CT. That’s why b-there created Web-based Flash movies called “b-vites” that clients can customize.
As you evaluate the tools available, keep the big picture in mind. “No matter how good the e-mail marketing component is, an ASP still has to be able to handle registration for a diverse variety of events,” says Rodman Marymor, CEO and Founder of Cardinal Communications in Berkeley, CA, which just released RegWeb Version 5.0. “If you can’t put your event in the system, you have nothing to market.”
Cathy Chatfield-Taylor covers technology solutions for business and industry. E-mail:cathy@cc-tunlimited.com.
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