How To Increase Show Rate At Virtual Events

All set for your virtual event? Now do these things to ensure a great show rate and better virtual event attendance.

You have everything ready, from a great line-up of speakers to sponsors. You have finalized the date of your event, and your registration page is live.

Now, how do you ensure a more significant number of people show up to your virtual event?

Regardless of how exciting, all virtual events will experience their share of events with a poor “show rate.” People will register but not show up. Virtual event attendance is a major concern when compared to in-person events. 

Virtual events offer both opportunities and challenges when it comes to marketing. If you have a virtual event in the near future, then the below virtual event attendance tips will prove valuable. 

These strategies and actionable tips are the results of Aladdin’s knowledge and experience learned through working with event organizers.

Some of the tips are specific to improve virtual event attendance, and others are standard best practices for promoting your events. However, use them together to improve the show rate at your virtual events.

Strategies for increasing your virtual event attendance 

Follow the below tips and you’ll be on your way to increase the show rate at virtual events. 

First thing first! Work with your audience’s attention span, not against it

Take a step back! Before starting your virtual event promotion campaign, ensure your content and structure are digestible for a virtual audience. 

A virtual event is a great opportunity for both attendees and organizers and is appealing to a virtual audience until they find it is a 5 hours long event—how unappealing now? An event with no breaks, no networking opportunities, and no time for engagement is a big no for any audience. This type of structure may work well when your event is happening at a venue. But if your event is entirely virtual, then break it into smaller parts to meet your audience’s attention span. 

Host a paid virtual event

Believe it or not, people don’t value FREE events. Hosting a paid virtual event is, by far, the best way to increase the show rate at virtual events. Free virtual events are easy to ignore because attendees have invested nothing, which results in decreasing the perceived value. At the same time, attendees have nothing to lose by not showing up to the event. 

However, that is not the case when you have a paid event. There, attendees spend money for registration, making them value the event more. It makes them do their best to show up to ensure they receive value for what they have spent. For this reason, paid events always have a better show rate.  

Communicate early, communicate well

Use email marketing as your medium to communicate with your attendees effectively. Emails make one of the best ways for early and effective communication. 

Communication through emails is cost-effective, and if your virtual event software offers email marketing, it’s a great benefit. You would certainly want to have a platform that allows communication with attendees through email from within the platform. Aladdin B2B is a comprehensive virtual event platform where you can email your attendees from within the platform. You can send event reminders to your attendees. 

Send at least five reminders to your attendees at specific periods to get the most out of this feature. You can send a reminder one week before the event, three days before the event, one day before the event, 6 hours before the event, and then 10 minutes before the event.  

Another important thing you should do is to get your attendees to login into the platform a few days before the event to get the hang of the technology. When they have already logged into the tool, they’ll be more likely to show up at the event. 

Offer incentives to attendees

Offering an incentive to attendees to show up at the event works really well to increase your virtual event attendance. 

Make sure you not only give them strong reasons to attend the event but also let them know what great benefits they’ll miss out on. Our objective with this strategy should be to increase the perceived value of the event—by giving them an incentive and not by compelling them to make an investment. 

For example, offer them a discount for booking special activities. You can use event gamification. Use your creativity to come with incentives attendees can’t say no to. 

Create buzz

It’s your event, and you’re responsible for getting it viral and creating hype to attract potential participants and get them to show up at the event. You should hold your attendees’ interest. The more hype you create, the more people will show up. 

Post-registration campaign is critical to creating hype around your event. You should make your attendees feel you’re following up with them and want them to show up because huge benefits are awaiting them. 

You need to send periodic emails, run contests on social media, and run any other campaign you feel might raise interest and hype. Use as many tricks as you can to create some serious fear of missing out. This is a way to improve your virtual event attendance, and it works really well. 

Creating buzz or hype around your event is important because it is easier to forget about an online or virtual event. It’s even easier to ignore if the event is free.

Final words

Of course, despite your best efforts, you’ll always come across people who won’t show up at your event. They might be having some unfortunate circumstances or simply not be interested at all. What is important is that you reach out to such attendees and inquire about the reasons for not showing up to the event. If you have some recordings of the event, send them out to those attendees. This will help you strengthen your relationship with them, and they’ll be more likely to appear in subsequent events. 

Do you want to host a virtual event soon and seek a virtual event platform that can offer all the features to increase the show rate at your event? Speak to an expert at Aladdin B2B to know how we can enable this.