October 2004
Marketing: What works now


E-mail might still be your best bet for retention, but attracting new customers will take a new mix of tools and messages.

By Martha Collins

Not so long ago, e-mail was celebrated as the magic bullet of marketing — a promotional tool that offers a quick, easy and inexpensive way to reach attendees and exhibitors. It enables more frequent communications and, with the trend toward companies taking longer than ever to decide whether to participate in an event, promotions can continue right up until show time.

Managers of high-tech shows were among the first to make the move to e-mail marketing as they developed databases and permission marketing programs to promote their shows to tech-savvy exhibitors and attendees. Others soon took the plunge. After all, when it takes little more time or money to send an e-mail message to thousands of recipients than it does to send it to hundreds, why wouldn’t everyone want to use it?

The problem, of course, is that everyone is using it.

With the onslaught of spam, e-mail marketing has lost its effectiveness, especially for acquiring new exhibitors and attendees. As e-mail volume has skyrocketed, e-mail response rates have dropped steadily. According to a recent study by direct marketer Harte-Hanks, for example, click-through rates for seminar invitation e-mails dropped from 1.0 percent in the second half of 2002 to 0.4 percent in the second half of 2003.

The new federal restrictions imposed on e-mail as a result of the anti-spam law that went into effect in January are also taking a toll. At the same time, companies seem to be constantly changing the rules about what e-mail they will accept.

With e-mail marketing failing to live up to its early promise, show managers are revising their marketing plans and adjusting their budgets to pay for more traditional forms of marketing, especially direct mail.

While 92 percent of show organizers use e-mail in their marketing mix and 84 percent report increasing use of e-mail marketing between 2002 and 2003, they still rank direct mail (used by 97 percent) and print advertising (used by 92 percent) above e-mail in terms of effectiveness, according to Surviving the Storm: Battling the Decline in Trade Show Attendance, the annual survey of attendance trends among major show organizers, conducted by the Frost Miller Group and Jacobs Jenner & Kent. (The report is available at www.frostmiller.com.)

“Client research indicates that the average attendee is only attending one show. And, according to the study, the most difficult challenge faced by show organizers in attracting attendees is increasing overall response rates,” says Bob James, Managing Director, Frost Miller Group, Bethesda, MD.

While some shows are increasing their reliance on e-mail, Surviving the Storm shows that the successful shows are stepping up other efforts, like direct mail, says James. The study also indicates that relationship marketing is on the rise among successful shows trying to differentiate themselves from competitors.

“While spam has destroyed the value of e-mail as a prospecting tool, it remains a valuable communications tool. It’s wonderful for relationship marketing, retention and driving up verified attendance — the difference between those who preregister for an event and those who actually attend,” says James. “For many shows these days, the vast amount of their e-mail marketing is to existing customers.” 

More direct mail
Shomex Productions, which produces 30 high-tech and diversity career fairs in 15 major markets, tracks the number of responses they get from each marketing media and factors in the cost to determine the return on investment (ROI) for each. As a result, they switched their focus from e-mail to direct mail promotions this year.

“We’re executing an exhibitor-based direct mail campaign for every one of our shows this year. Last year, we tried e-mail, direct mail, voice mail, telemarketing and fax marketing, and tracked each one. We found that direct mail has been the most productive and had the best ROI as an exhibitor marketing vehicle,” says Cristopher Levy, Vice President of Marketing for Santa Monica, CA-based Shomex. “We still incorporate e-mail, telemarketing and broadcast fax into our marketing mix, but they have nowhere near the success of direct mail.”

In addition to using its own extensive mailing lists, Shomex buys lists in each market based on targeted vertical sectors. For 2004, they’re doing at least one direct mailing for each show and, in some cases, an additional mailing to a vertical market.

“We usually do one mailing 90 days prior to the show. Now, on a test basis, we’re looking to maximize our ROI by mailing nine, six and three months out for one or two of our 2004 shows. We’re also testing different methods — small postcards, big postcards and letters,” says Levy, who has no feedback yet on these new promotions. 

 “The marketing mix is constantly changing and you can’t rest on what worked for the last show. You have to continually evaluate what works, what doesn’t and not be afraid to take risks. You get the best results by not always playing it safe,” says Levy.

Effective relationship marketing
Both e-mail and direct mail are good for communicating with existing exhibitors and attendees. The key is to give careful attention to the message, the mailing list and the needs of recipients. “Append as much demographic information as possible to the names in your database,” advises James.

The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the largest annual trade show in the country, has databases that include information on thousands of exhibitors and hundreds of thousands of attendees. They keep the databases up to date by sending an e-mail to everyone on the list with all of their registration information from the previous year and requesting an update. Then, staff members go through the databases to analyze who’s attending and why and use that information to target their marketing messages. CES measures the effectiveness of e-mail and direct mail via priority codes included in the messages that participants use when registering.

 “We do a lot of e-mail marketing to both attendees and exhibitors, and we realize there are some issues with firewalls and spam filters. So this year we’re not doing as much e-mail marketing as we did last year,” says Susan Littleton, Vice President of Marketing for the Arlington, VA-based Consumer Electronics Association and CES. “We cut back a bit on direct mail last year, but we’re bringing back a few of those pieces because we want to make sure that if we hit one of those spam filters, we’re reaching out to those people in another way.”

Exhibitors receive a monthly e-mail newsletter. “We don’t use a lot of copy. We draw them back to the Web site if they want more information. There’s more than one link per newsletter and per e-mail,” says Littleton. Four months out, CES sends a build-your-brand brochure, a direct mail piece that goes to all exhibitors. More direct mail will be added this year.

“Registration is free, so to keep attendees interested in coming to the show, we send targeted messages based on the product categories in which they’ve expressed an interest,” says Littleton. Last year, starting seven months out, most attendees received regular e-mail messages, as well as two direct mail pieces — a postcard and a brochure. This year, CES will still do the same amount of e-mail messaging, but with possibly as many as six direct mail pieces as a backup. (At press time, the program had not yet been finalized.)

CES is not increasing its marketing budget to do more direct mail. This is possible, in part, because direct mail lists are less expensive than e-mail lists. “Also, with e-mail marketing you often have to go through the company that owns the list, you can’t send the e-mail directly. So unless the recipient registers, we never get that name and e-mail address to add to our database,” says Littleton.

Driving up attendance
E-mail is especially effective for turning pre-registrants into attendees, according to Denise Paccione, President, Marketing Design Group, a San Diego-based advertising agency.

“The no-show rate is about 50 percent when there’s no registration fee,” says Paccione. So it’s important to continue to communicate the value of the event to the pre-registered attendee right up until the show.

“Once an attendee has completed the registration form, you know all sorts of information about them and you’ve gotten their permission to send e-mails. So, they’re prime candidates for content-rich communication. You can segment the database and send regular e-mails geared to an attendee’s particular interests,” she says.

For one show, Marketing Design Group created a monthly newsletter, then tailored versions for each of the show’s nine niche markets.

To attract the other potential attendees who had still not registered after receiving three direct mail hits and one e-mail hit, they used “e-movie,” a 30-second animated flash movie with a soundtrack. Advance registration was free, and the e-mail message accompanying the e-movie was: “You have two weeks to register before the deadline runs out and you have to pay $50 to register on site.” They sent 55,000 e-movie messages and got an 11 percent click-through rate.

“We’re usually selling a 3-D product and marketing it with a 2-D media,” says Paccione. “Motion and sound can better demonstrate the value of an event.”

When e-mail works best
Among show managers who do use e-mail to acquire attendees, one trend is to rely on affiliations and partnerships instead of renting e-mail lists. The e-gov shows, a series of events for federal, state and local government IT professionals, are a good example.

E-mail and relationship marketing are the keys to getting the e-gov message out. Show managers segment their e-mail marketing campaigns, writing targeted messages for prior attendees and broader messages for potential new attendees. They also send e-mails to “friends of e-gov,” a category that includes, among others, prior event speakers and members of the e-gov program advisory board. These “friends” then tailor the message to their specific government agency and send it to their internal e-mail lists.

“Since September 11 and the anthrax scare, it’s been challenging to get direct mail through the federal channels. We can include inserts in our magazine, Federal Computer Week, because it’s pre-approved for delivery to federal offices and it gets through the mailrooms more quickly,” says Michael Smoyer, General Manager, FCW Media Group, Falls Church, VA, parent company of e-gov. 

 “We’re big proponents of e-mail marketing, but I don’t think you can make a broad statement that e-mail or any marketing strategy is going to help all shows. The message is still more important than the marketing media used,” says Smoyer. “If an event is not solving a problem or meeting a need in the marketplace, it doesn’t matter what method you use to promote it.”