Howdy—Jacalyn here 👋

Hope everything’s going well on your end!

Full disclosure: I’m sending this email from a cottage in the woods, so don’t be shocked if you catch me in my Twilight vibes 😂

Anywhooooo, in this month’s issue, I’m sharing the tactics I used (and still do) to drive tangible biz results from events—even though I’m not an event marketer LOL.

We’re going to cover those tactics and how you can apply ‘em to your own work to help drive revenue from events.

I’ll walk you through how I’ve driven results from pre and post-event email activities, like:

🔥 $260k+ influenced pipeline at Copy.ai
🔥 100+ high-quality, workable MQLs at Lever
🔥 9 closed-won opps (valued at over $370k) while working in fintech

Plus, Brent Jensen from Together Platform is dropping some great tips throughout this issue from a growth marketing pov!

Let’s get going!

If we’re honest, post-event email marketing kinda sucks (actually, it’s sucked for a while)

Imagine organizing and pulling off an awesome event—only to have to execute an entirely separate, post-event play to convert folks 💩 

Sales really wants those leads, ya know?

You’ve got to drive some sort of tangible result from events, which usually means focusing on the lowest-hanging fruit there is: post-event follow-up and engagement.

But a lot of this follow-up sucks 😢 (Trust me, I’ve sent some garbage follow-up sequences in my day, lol).

I mean, think about it: when was the last time you attended an event where the follow up experience was too good to ignore?

For me, it comes down to 4 things:

• Consistent, never-ending value

• Relevancy

• Audience proof

• Human touch

I’m going to break all of this down below!

But I found this quick overview from Ashley Lewin sums it up nicely—when you ask someone for their email, whether it’s to register for an event or subscribe to a newsletter—honing in on why you’re asking and what your projected outcome is, is critical.

You’ve have to have a relevant, valid reason to engage once the event is over

The real value for most events audiences comes from what happens after your event is long over.

You should have a plan to:

• Offer a unique “what’s next” step

• Provide value that lasts far beyond the event

• Show people what that value looks/feels like (don’t just tell)

• Humanize the crap outta the experience

Let’s take a look at how you can do it.

Always have a “what’s next?” step in mind

I think of the “what’s next” step as a specific, highly relevant action that allows people to make an impact, or effect change, immediately.

For example, let’s say you’re running a webinar on customer journey management.

I’d tailor my follow-up to include things like:

• Pre-recorded video snippets from internal SMEs who manage customer journeys at my company.

• In those snippets, they can share advice, tactics, and actionable takeaways that people can implement today in their own customer journeys.

• Encourage people to watch the snippets, try the tips your team suggests, and respond to my email showcasing how they’re using the advice + what they’re doing with their own customer journeys.

Your “what’s next” step should also apply to your internal team 😮

At Together, Brent uses similar tactics to ensure event content (like recordings, snippets, etc) can be used across teams to nurture various segments.

Brent’s suggestions? 👇

• Curate segmented sequences that you send to registrants after the event.

• Share recordings with AEs so they can leverage them as outreach touchpoints with current opportunities.

• And don’t forget to share clips + webinar content with leads who didn’t signup (via an email nurture).

When defining what your next step action looks like, consider what the purpose of the next step is.

I.e. the purpose is to provide direction (help) for your audiences so they can go and do something right now that’s going to have a positive impact or outcome.

At Lever, we tested next steps like:

• Encouraging people to join segmented newsletters, where we shared customized tips, advice, and resources that were relevant to their jobs-to-be-done.

  • Example: Head of Talent audiences received different tips and resources than recruiters and hiring managers.

• Giving folks access to a free sandbox environment of our platform, so people could try out an alternative talent acquisition platform.

  • Example: based on lead scoring, we’d share sandbox access with warmer audiences that were solution or product aware.

• Sharing downloadable or web-based templates for common hiring and people management tasks, and asking people for their feedback.

  • Example: Folks in DEI recruiting roles would get templates for structured interview processes and questions.

All of this was done via email, where we planned our post-event sequence specifically around the kind of next steps we wanted event audiences to take, and how we’d engage them.

The purpose or goal of a next-step is to get your audience thinking of a more effective, innovative, or productive way of doing something they do everyday—and then doing it!.

Provide value that feels like a bottomless treasure trove

In the past, I worked in both fintech and HR tech—two industries that, even just up until a few years ago, weren’t the sexiest from a marketing perspective 😂

Despite that, a lot of people who attended our events were hungry for different ways to do things at work. They really wanted to shake s**t up.

We knew almost right away that, in order to not only capture but keep these people’s attention, we had to provide more value than they’d expect to get from events in these industries.

Here’s what we did to provide value that felt bottomless—in other words, never-ending and consistently good 👇

Segmentation

Always segment your follow-up lists.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the tools or expertise to perform deep segmentation; even basic segmenting works 😇 The goal is to try it and get consistently better at it.

In other words: segmentation should become habitual.

Brent likes to segment audiences based on buying stage—his take is that all content, like webinars and event cut-downs, should help people move closer to a buying decision 💡

At Sensibill and Lever, we would always segment post-event comms based on criteria like:

• Lead scoring

• Registrants vs. attendees

• Past interactions (included all interactions within the last 3-6 months)

• Opportunity stage (where each person was in our buying process)

• Opportunity status (open opp, closed-lost, cold/dead-opp, etc)

For example, we didn’t want to follow-up with someone who had attended a webinar the same way we would an open opp who’d already talked to our team, demo’d our product, or was closer to the finish line of a deal closing.

Another example is lost or cold opps; if you have data that shows lost or dead/cold opps are attending your webinars, then you probably want to follow up with them a little differently, too.

• You may want to send this audience new resources, share interesting product updates, or ask them how they’ve been since your team spoke to them last.

• Maybe you’d want to give them access to an updated version of your product through a trial or sandbox, with other pre-recorded walkthroughs of new features.

Another way of thinking about it is the abandoned-cart play in D2C 🤔

• Most B2C brands will set up segments of existing and potential customers in their database that never followed through with a purchase

  • You can apply a similar “play” for segmentation with follow-up for folks who didn’t attend, only attended half of the event, etc

• An abandoned cart-style play works well if segmentation isn’t something you’re diving into just yet, or you don’t necessarily have the help/tooling/expertise on your team for it

  • Example: an easy starting point would be to break out follow-up by attended vs. no-show audiences 🙂 

Dedicated resources

Having resources created specifically for an event that are custom to the audience is actually the lowest-hanging fruit there is.

Brent creates pre-event email sequences based on segmentation that leverage content and personalization so his team can:

• Drive conversions (like early demos/showcases of the product)

• Generate pre-event engagement

At Sensibill (a Canadian fintech company where I led content marketing), we would do 3 things for every event:

🏁The first email we’d send for an event would always include a “what’s what”—basically, a detailed overview of what people could expect from the event.

• Why they should register (and attend!)

• What they’d walk away with (tactics, advice, bonus materials, you name it)

• How the learnings from the event could be applied to their work

• Who they were going to learn from

• What would happen after the event (a preview of that “what’s next?” step 😉)

🏁 Right before the event, we’d share custom teaser content.

• Video snippets from the hosts that would get people excited to attend (not just signup for a replay or recording)

• Unexpected value—content like playbooks, templates, and other custom resources we’d share ahead of time (like 1-2 days before)

• Tips from internal SMEs related to the event topic

🏁 We used existing content to create tear-downs that could be shared both during and after the event.

• We’d repurpose blogs, pillar pages, and web pages to create hand outs and one-pagers

• Custom reports (like benchmark reports, snapshots, etc) would be shared as exclusive content before we published them more widely

Now, it might sound like a lot of work—but I was a team of one at Sensibill, and so was our DG lead.

If you're a smaller team (or team of one), repurpose content as much as you can to create custom content for events. Keep in mind that most audiences haven't read every pillar page, blog post, report, etc. that you're company puts out 😉

You can also leverage these resources for Sales outreach sequences, DG sequences, you name it. I took this approach with me to every role following Sensibill because, well, it worked 🤷‍♀️

It’s what helped us create a post-event nurture strategy that drove 9 closed-won opps (valued at over $370k)…directly from post-event comms.

Of course, you can adapt the dedicated resources play to whatever your audience’s needs are—here’s a preview of what that looks like as part of our post-event nurture looks like here at Copy.ai 👇

Show, don’t tell, using audience proof

These days, a lot of folks are either going to drop their emails to get a recording they can watch later, or attend events as a fly on the wall to (hopefully) get some killer tips and advice.

Either way, keeping people’s attention after the event is harder than ever.

In a nutshell, audience proof is any evidence from your event that shows:

• Attendees found the event valuable and insightful

• The audience was engaged throughout

• There were relatable topics, questions, and discussions

• The event itself was unmissable

Audience proof comes in many forms, and there are myriad ways to use it.

Let’s break down the kinds of audience proof I personally love, and how you can use each kind in your next event 🥰 

Here’s how you can use the proof 👀 

• Include screenshots, screen grabs, and audio clips in your follow-up to directly address what attendees were saying, asking, and discussing during the event.

• If your registration list includes folks in your target ICP who couldn’t attend, have Sales (or your team):

  • connect with them afterward on LinkedIn, and share relevant video or audio snippets from the event.

    • share screenshots of feedback from attendees.

• Use social posts and DMs from the event in promotional emails for future events, to incentivize people to attend the next one.

• Leverage the audience proof for any events where you’re seeking sponsorship, as a proof point for how engaging and valuable your events are.

It doesn’t hurt to have a folder or somewhere to store audience proof, so you can pull it as you need it! We have a Slack channel where I can drop screengrabs, for example.

The whole idea with audience proof is to have “evidence” that your events are not only worth attending, but have never-ending value for those that sign up. 

And that includes one crucial thing that most folks aren’t doing with their events…

Including a human touch

With the proliferation of AI tools (and some pretty feckless outreach, if we’re being real lol), it’s more important than ever to keep shit human.

And yeah, I know I work at an AI company, but being human still matters 😂 

I’ve found the key to keeping things human with activities like email—regardless of whether it’s an event follow-up or not—is to simply make your top priority helping people.

Tie your events into other comms

Most of us have multiple comms channels at our disposal—like a company newsletter—to engage people—and tying your events into these other channels is another low-hanging fruit that any of us can do (even today).

Here’s what we did at Lever to cross-promote events—not just for registration, but for replays and on-demand signups:

⚡️ Segmented our company newsletter—and only promoted relevant upcoming and on-demand events to relevant audiences with custom resources.

⚡️ Shared product-related webinar replays in-app—and segmented the audiences so that users could watch relevant, actionable replays that would help them achieve something in our product.

⚡️ Weaved webinars in demand gen sequences—and created teardown content from the webinars to use in those sequences.

Humanize non-event plays

One of my favourite use cases for post-event nurtures were the non-obvious tactics that forced us to test different approaches to engaging people from events.

For example, at Lever:

• We turned our company newsletter into a twice-weekly email that was written as a plain-text note from myself and my fellow DG manager (we took turns writing them!).

  • Each newsletter had an endnote about an upcoming event with a quirky CTA, like, “When you show up to one of our webinars, a fairy gets its wings (and my boss buys us coffee)”.

    • People loved the added humour!

• We asked our audiences to respond to us directly and share their feedback about a recent event they attended;

  • We wanted to know what they loved, what they didn’t, and ideas on how we could improve our next one.

Here are some other tips for driving results that might be handy! 👇

A few other tips for adding a human touch

In follow-up and other emails sequences, both here at Copy.ai and at Lever, we would segment our audience and share custom insights.

🚀 Use recordings and snippets in old outreach sequences—Sales folks (like BDRs) can use replays and snippets from events in their cold outreach.

 🚀 Include relevant time stamps—pick and choose the best tidbits from event recordings, and share ‘em in follow-up so people don’t have to watch 45 minutes of a webinar to get the key value props!

🚀 Share suggestions for quick takeaways—similar to your “what’s next?” step, you can share quick tips on how people can take learnings from the event and apply ‘em right away.

🚀 Highlight advice or tactics that weren’t noted during the event—for example, if a host mentioned something off-camera or after the event that was highly relevant, we’d include that as additional advice (and yes, this works for in-person event follow-up, too!).

🚀 Anyone leading an event was made accessible—in other words, we didn’t gate team members who were part of an event; audience members could DM us on LinkedIn, respond directly to emails, or chat with us during the event!

Jen Allen-Knuth has a similar take on this from a Sales perspective, that would also be pretty handy if you need ideas to help Sales do outreach post-event with prospects 👀

These are really, really easy ways to tie events into other channels that could just convert someone 😉 It’s one of the ways events have driven over $260k in pipeline here at Copy.ai.

A bonus hot tip: create a replicable sequence you can curate every time

Post event follow-up is going to be tedious no matter what.

I learned that lesson the hard way when trying to curate follow-up sequences at Lever for every individual event we’d host—as you can probably guess, it was hellish work 😂

So, my most helpful tip from this entire spiel is this: create an email sequence/drip template or flow that you can replicate every time.

🏁 Start with a basic email sequence that you can test and prove.

🏁 Build that sequence with the various touchpoints, engagements, and logic you need.

🏁 Once proven, save it as a templated flow/sequence in your CRM/ESP.

The idea here is to have an approach that you test, prove, and “recycle”.

Here are some ways you can then customize it 👇

• Use custom email copy, content, and CTAs

  • These should all be relevant to each event, the “what’s next” step, and the value you want to provide post-event.

• Segment based on engagement and activity

  • Like we talked about before, segment your sequences based on the activity and behaviours of people in your audience—even better if you can go beyond attended vs. no-show segmentation!

• Add or remove elements based on performance

  • You may need a 5-email sequence for one segment, and a 7-email sequence for another.

  • Similarly, you might find you want to test different resources, branching logic, or even CTAs and send-times for certain audiences based on what they’ve responded well to before.

At one point here at Copy.ai, we had sequence templates for various even themes that we would replicate and curate—like in the screenshot below.

Having a replicable template of a sequence to work off of makes it so much easier to hone in on what works, and create effective sequences for future events.

Just don’t make it harder on yourself by creating custom sequence flows every time!

Alrighty, folks—let’s wrap it all up, eh?

Whether you just want the TL;DR, or bravely made it all the way to the end of this Issue…I commend you 👏

Let’s recap what this sucker was all about:

• Every piece of event follow-up should provide a tangible, impactful “what’s-next” step for your audiences (no questions).

• Value is the name of the game—if your follow-up doesn’t provide real, consistent value for people, don’t bother sendin’ it!

• Leveraging audience proof is going to save your hide when it comes to driving future demand—and present conversions—from events 😉 

• Segment what and when you can (thank me later), because one-size-fits-all outreach is 🤢 (not to mention, really ineffective)

• Humanize follow-up; this means bringing in team members and building a rapport with your audiences!

And, if you take nothing else away from this rigmarole: create a sequence structure you can replicate, every time! Trust me—you’ll be glad you did this, later!

Now, you’re all set to go forth and create pre and post-event nurtures that drive real results for your business (and make you look GOOD).

😎 😎 😎 

I’ll be in touch next month with another issue of That Marketing Newsletter!

P.s. here’s what I’m drinking & reading this week

P.p.s. have feedback about this newsletter, ideas to share for future issues, or any gripes? I’m all ears—shoot me an email at [email protected] 👋