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Marketing an online event is a difficult sell, even in the best of times. The first couple of months of sales were slow, yet, over 250 people attended the Digital Dust Safety Conference. We had been scared, thinking maybe we’d misread our audience but on completion, we’re able to look back to see what contributed to our success.
Our goal is to give you a sense of how to market your own online event.
The largest part of our ticket sales were a result of direct selling where I was just emailing people that I knew from my space, people that had been involved in what we’re doing and asking them to come. But once December hit, we sold no tickets at all or very little tickets, just a handful, from our online marketing sales sequence.
We published a sales page that people could go look at the event and click to register right there but it was converting at a very low percentage. As we talked about in episode 44, we needed to get our sales sequence right.
I did a new strategy session in December. And we revamped the whole process with a fresh look for January 1st. We started a new eight-week marketing initiative to sell the conference.
We redid the whole sales page to something that converted much better, had some videos and things on there that are much better online marketing elements.
We had around 10,000 page views a month on the site. From there, we were able to track 124 ticket sales over this eight week period. This was from 2,443 sales page visits and 465 of these people clicked from the sales page through to the order page, entered their credit card information, and then just over a quarter of these people actually paid to attend the conference.
In terms of conversions, 19% of the people that clicked on the sales page were converting through to the order page and 26.5% were actually putting in their credit card details and buying a ticket. I should also note that some people were emailing us to request an invoice and we weren’t able to track those inside these numbers here. So, overall, this gives us a 5% conversion across all of the marketing channels for the sales page.
Then we divided up our marketing efforts between our newsletter, website capture, social media and working with partners for collaborative marketing.
To capture the attention of our website audience, we used a “hello bar” and an exit-intent pop-up.
The hello bar is the unobtrusive reminder at the top of the website that compels action. It’s generally just a narrow horizontal bar with a call to action. The hello bar sent people to a dedicated sales page so we could tell exactly how many people were converting in the sales sequence.
The exit intent pop-up is a small window that appears mid-screen when the software intuitively believes a website viewer is thinking of moving away from the site. The exit-intent popup is more aggressive. As we didn’t want to alienate our audience, we set it to appear once a week per person. In addition, we made sure the option to close the device, a large X, was obvious and easy.
The website capture was the second highest source of traffic and sales for the conference.
The hello bar in the eight week period had 19,800 impressions, and 206 people clicked through to the conference sales page, so about a 1% conversion for everyone that visited a webpage that had the hello bar on it to actually clicking through to the sales page.
The exit-intent popup had 6,500 impressions. Again, it wasn’t across all pages on the website. It’s only some of the higher traffic ones. Resulted in 243 clicks through the sale page, so about a 3.8% conversion from people seeing the exit-intent popup to clicking through the sales page.
In terms of the overall conversions then, we made 17 sales from the website capture sequences, from both of them, which results in a 5.8% conversion from people visiting the sales page to actually buying a ticket. Again, this is quite good.
We tried to use ActiveCampaign for the exit-intent popup at first, but we couldn’t make it work without actually adding the people that were clicking through to an email list. We didn’t want to do that. We just wanted people to go directly through to a page on another website essentially. There were some other workarounds, but at the end of the day, we ended up using Sumo, which is a little bit pricey, but it was actually well worth it because we made over $4,000 in sales from the website capture over this eight-week period.
Our event marketing included branded social images featuring the Digital Dust Safety Conference logo and images of our speakers as well as branded videos.
We didn’t do paid advertising directly to promote the conference. We did it a little bit, but only as tests. If you take the 17 sales we made from the hello bar and the exit intent popup and divide that by the number of impressions that were there and also the price that we made from people buying, you end up with about 14 cents was the revenue we made off every impression on the hello bar and the exit intent. We did run a couple of Facebook ads in that period too, just articles on our website. We found that it was actually a bit cheaper than 14 cents per click for people to come through the website.
To estimate, we’ll say it was only 10 cents per click, then we could have actually ran advertising from Facebook to the website at 10 cents per click and then at 14 cents per click been making or been making 14 cents per click. So, we would have making four cents for each person we sent through. While we didn’t do a large paid advertising campaign, but it does look like there’s a lot of room here to do this with the type of conference.
LinkedIn is where our audience is.
Sharing videos on LinkedIn was our highest converting and highest traffic generating social media channel. As we routinely send traffic back to our website and that audience is being snared in our website capture, I wanted to try something different, something that I thought might work well for the conference and us to get used to as well.
I filmed six videos focused on specific presentations that were going on at the conference. In each video, the lead in was a question our audience might ask, many of which came from our pre-event survey. Then I mentioned the speaker or speakers that would be talking about that question, showed their pictures and then just talked about what a participant could expect from the presentation.
My workflow was to create a short script, shoot and record the video. I worked with a very cost-effective video editor that I found on Upwork via a friend’s recommendation. The editor placed the video in a templated frame and added captions for approximately $40 for six videos.
Over the eight-week period, we had these six videos playing through our LinkedIn profile and through my personal profile on LinkedIn. They received 6,500 impressions, which resulted in 142 sales page visits, and three sales, three tickets were bought for the conference. So this was a conversion rate from impressions to people actually clicking through the sales page of about 2.2%. The people that viewed the sales page is a 2% conversion through to actually buying a ticket.
While our conversion rate was lower, LinkedIn videos succeeded in attracting a cooler audience.
The people that were coming through LinkedIn weren’t as familiar with our work. They weren’t as warm as the newsletter or the website leads and had a lower conversion rate of those people, but still a decent number at 2%. These are smaller numbers so there’s a lot more uncertainty in actually calculating them. One more sale or one less sale has a pretty big influence on the percentages. But it was demonstrating that this is actually a viable channel for promoting the conference as well.
The last market channel that we used for the conference was external sharing – press releases as well as ads and articles written about the conference on partnering sites
To foster these connections, we did media partnerships where we actually gave them free tickets to the event and also gave them a spot inside the event’s homepage where we could show their logo as well for that day if they did some advertising for us. This was what I thought was going to be the big out of left field thing to drive a whole ton of sales. I thought this was how we were going to get from 250 to 1,000 sales by doing media partnerships with people that weren’t directly with the same audience that we have but have other audiences that might be interested.
External sharing and partnerships turned out to be a big bust when it came to ticket sales.
We had 54 sales page visits through several of these different external sharing options. Six people viewed the order page and not one sale.
When you look back at how much traffic we’re driving through our own sources, it just wasn’t the same. And that’s kind of the interesting thing about one, understanding that you need to be in control of your own space, own your own website and be able to drive your own traffic or else it’s going to be quite difficult, two, not to really count on others.
This also demonstrated to us that DustSafetyScience is one of the biggest traffic generators in our space. Although we didn’t actually generate any sales from our external sharing efforts, we did build relationships with some companies that we wouldn’t have otherwise been talking with.
If we did something similar again, we’d be very targeted. It’s not an avenue one can trust to be your main source of people coming through and registering for the conference. It’s really better focused on the source you can control, your newsletter, capturing people from your website and to a lesser extent, your social media profiles like LinkedIn videos.
Learn from our successes and our struggles so that you don’t have to relive them when you’re marketing your own events.
One of my biggest takeaways is to focus on what you can control. By looking at your own audiences – those on your newsletter or visiting your site and social profiles – you’ll be able to create projections and smart guesses of your outcome. If you have 1,000 people on your newsletter and you can get 100 people or maybe 50 people clicking through a week and you have a sales page that converts to 2%, well that’s going to be one sale every week from sending through your newsletter. You got to get an idea of what those numbers mean for your event.
To recap our Marketing Your Online Conference series thus far:
- In episode 44 of the GradBlogger podcast, we cover getting your sales sequence right.
- In episode 45, we talked about how to market your newsletter.
- In episode 58, we covered a review of the newsletter marketing analytics
Stay tuned for future episodes as we continue the series with episodes reviewing event organization and more. If you have a question about event marketing, feel free to share it in the comments section or reach out to us directly.
