Thrice in a Row: Callbox Boosts Event Attendance Rates for CRM Market Leader
The Client
The Client is the Asia-Pacific unit of a USA-based cloud computing company that provides CRM solutions to business and enterprise customers. Its main product line is its suite of on-demand, cloud-based CRM platform available to users on a subscription basis. The Client also offers a number of other cloud-enabled tools for customer service and support as well as for sales team collaboration.
The Challenge
With its reputation as a key mover in the CRM software space, the Client regularly organizes a number of annual conferences and events aimed at customers, vendors, developers, IT professionals, and industry thought leaders throughout various locations around the world. These are typically high-profile events that generate attendance figures that average in the thousands, as well as receive considerable media coverage particularly from the tech press.
While many of the Client’s conferences fulfill both branding and PR objectives, there is also a more tangible marketing (and overall business) goal that underlies most of the company’s events: to attract more people into its far-reaching ecosystem.
Among the events lined up for the year are three sets of conferences scheduled for January, April, and July. All three events are set to take place in Hong Kong and Singapore, showcasing insights on Asian business innovation and customer experience.
The three events’ target audience consists primarily of decision-makers who deal with marketing technology in some way at small- to medium-sized Hong Kong- and Singapore-based companies. The target attendees mostly come from technology-intensive industries such as manufacturing, financial services, professional services, retail, and healthcare.
Although it already possesses considerable brand equity and can easily leverage its extensive network of connections in the region, the Client determined that it needed to outsource part of the event registration activities in order to meet two key objectives:
- to ensure that relevant attendees from the specified verticals are identified and targeted
- to maximize registration and attendance rates through prompt outreach and follow-up
The Client chose Callbox after evaluating a list of event marketing companies, pointing out that Callbox’s substantial experience in the Hong Kong and Singapore markets was a clear differentiator.
The Callbox Solution
Callbox’s Call-to-Invite package was a good fit to help the Client meet its event marketing objectives for a number of reasons.
- Since the Client wanted to ramp up registrations a month prior to each event, it allowed the Client to obtain immediate response from its target attendees and gain additional information to help improve preparations.
- Call-to-invite campaigns provided a way to quickly and accurately qualify likely attendees based on the parameters set by the Client, especially given the tight timetables associated with the events.
- This also enabled multiple outreach opportunities, such as follow-up and confirmation calls.
The call-to-invite campaigns included the following main activities:
- Callbox put together the list of target attendees to be contacted based on the Client’s specifications, as well as prepared the campaign’s call scripts. These were reviewed and approved by the Client.
- Contacts who expressed interest to attend the event and completed the registration via the registration link were tagged as qualified attendees (RSVP). These were forwarded to the Client’s team on a daily basis.
- In addition to outbound phone-based qualification, Callbox also helped other interested prospects complete the registration process by assisting them through the submission procedure. Agents also managed the information send-outs for prospects who want to first receive the invites.
Results
Each of the three call-to-invite campaigns ran for 22 days and was launched a month prior to the respective event. Hong Kong and Singapore prospects were simultaneously contacted in all three campaigns. The below table summarizes the results from each campaign:
Taken together, the three call-to-invite campaigns were able to produce a total of 353 confirmed RSVPs for the three sets of events. Using a benchmark conversion rate of 11% to 20% (based on industry averages), the Client can potentially generate between 39 to 71 new customers from attendees at the three events that registered via the call-to-invite campaigns.