Year-Round Attendee Engagement? It's Possible With a Chatbot

Year-round attendee engagement is possible, and event chatbots can help event organizers make it happen. EventBots are our bread-and-butter, taking us inside hundreds of events each year with millions of guests submitting just as many inquiries. In the process, we've learned what guests are looking for, and how to drive year-round Successful Engagements — questions asked and correctly answered, notifications sent and promptly read, and user actions taken (clicks, purchases, tasks), can continue long after the event ends.

If we take a meta view of all that data, it becomes clear that event guests go on a journey: first they debate whether to come or not, then they need to be supported and entertained, then they leave and often don’t think about the event until next year.

We call this the Engagement Journey, and EventBots have a place in that journey. Sometimes the bot is supporting it, other times it’s moving it forward, but the fundamental goal is always to improve the quality of engagement at every stage of the relationship, not just during the event itself.

Read on to learn more about how you, as an event organizer, can use a chatbot to improve your attendee engagement year-round.

Five Reasons Why Chatbots Are the Ultimate Attendee Engagement Tool

First, let’s chat for a moment about why chatbots are great at engaging guests: 

1. They’re easy to use (especially the ones like ours that work through any cell phone’s text app).
2. A 42Chat EventBot creates immediate satisfaction for your guests by giving them a tool that instantly answers their questions. No digging through emails or an FAQ page. No hunting down one of your overworked event staff. Guests just send a text, phrased in whatever way feels most natural to them, and they get  95%+ Correct Response Rate, the percentage of chatbot replies that perfectly address attendee intent. 
3. Unlike some event staff, an EventBot never gets tired or snippy – it’s infinitely polite, perky or professional (whatever tone of voice aligns best with your brand). 
4. Guests love it when you give the bot a personality that resonates with them. For example, a sports league could give the bot the same name and image as their mascot and weave the best rallying slogans into responses.
5. It lets your staff better engage with guests. When they’re not getting asked the same questions over and over again, they have more time for delivering fun activities or helping the guests with unique needs.

Why Text Keeps the Conversation Going 

Now let’s break down the Engagement Journey. It has three distinct phases:

• The Registration phase starts when you open registration and ends when the event begins. 
• The Event phase is the active time immediately before, during and immediately after the event. 
• The Marketing phase is the long, often ignored, post event stretch up to the Registration phase. 

The reason for breaking down the Engagement Journey in this way is to highlight that you should be having conversations with your attendees in each phase, and the conversations in each phase should align with a guest’s headspace at the time. 

Registration is the time to deliver information, support, and hype-building messaging that convinces people to register. Once they’re registered, it’s time to deliver information, support, and activities that help them enjoy the event. Once the guests are gone, it’s common to breathe a sigh of relief and rest until planning ramps up for next year’s event. But we think it’s better for you and the guests to maintain the relationship you’ve just worked so hard to build.

The Potential of the Marketing Conversation for Your Bottom Line

One of the most valuable things about an EventBot is that once a guest interacts with the bot at your event, that relationship can continue over SMS. When attendees actively opt in and maintain a live two-way SMS relationship with you, they become Connected SMS Users. This means you can stay in touch with your audience in the months after your event. 

So what should you do with that opportunity? It’s critical to find the right balance between providing value and over-engaging (aka spamming). Right after the event, guests are open to relevant follow-up information like getting copies of the speakers’ slide decks or recap videos. In the months after that, value-add content like an exclusive interview with last year’s headliner or a merch discount will be well-received. Then, suddenly, you’re selling tickets for next year’s event. Your community is engaged with your brand and primed to buy those tickets. 

This is what makes the Engagement Journey so powerful: it can actually have a big impact on your bottom line by driving Successful Engagements, interactions that drive meaningful outcomes, defined as questions asked and correctly answered, notifications sent and promptly read, and action taken. 

Fostering High-Quality Engagement in a Disengaged World

Our EventBots include a year-long subscription option so you can foster and take advantage of the Engagement Journey. The positive impression left by your helpful EventBot before and during the event, combined with text’s association with close relationships and easily digestible hits of information, means your guests will actually look at text messages you send after the event. 

Our bots have a mind-blowing 98%+ Open Rate. In a world where people don’t read, there are few stats more powerful than that.

Frequently Asked Questions

Learn More About Leveling Up Your Attendee Engagement With a Chatbot

• This Surprising Tool Makes Creating Communities Around Events Easier
• Event Planning Tips: Three Key Conversations to Have With Attendees
• Three Bot-Based Audience Engagement Strategies Your Guests Will Love 
• A Post Event Marketing Playbook to Help You Sell Next Year's Tickets
• It's Time to Innovate Your Event Planning

For Even More Insights Into the Engagement Journey, Download Our Audience Engagement E-Book