How virtual and hybrid events can feed your CRM automatically?

Any marketing director can agree: measuring the precise impact of an event has never been easy, even achievable when it comes to sales and profitability generated by an event. Measuring those KPI’s has always been a hot topic in companies ... and in the event industry! 

I have two good news: it is now possible with the integration of marketing automation tools into digital event platforms, and it is much more powerful than traditional marketing automation since all participants are known and identified.  

So, back to the basics, what is marketing automation? To keep it simple, it is a set of technologies and methods that make it possible to: 

- deeply understand the behavior of the people visiting or interacting with your digital environment, mainly your website and emailings 

- transform this behavioral information into measurable objectives. If a visitor comes 3 times on the pricing page of your website, you could build a marketing automation scenario that would send an alert to you sales team indicating that among the 2,000 web visitors, this one is to be contacted/targeted. Marketing automation allows you to name and identify the Internet user, hence the proliferation of white papers to download for free in order to collect contact details and be able to reach them later for future marketing and sales promotion and activities. Yes, it's a bit 'big brother is watching you' but when it is well-used, it is useful to everyone.  

So what is the connection with a virtual event? Imagine an event gathering your clients, bringing together several conferences and topics in your virtual event platform. All your customers have received a personal invitation that they use to join the online event, marketing automation can then identify all visitors. Imagine now that you have integrated an online exhibition space into the event platform to showcase innovation and new products: at the end of the event, you will be able to collect the list of participants who visited this online area. Prospects-clientd who has come to check each innovation 1 time, 2 times, 3 times or more, allowing you to trigger targeted promotional actions.  

… With significant improvement in the marketing process: less spam thanks to targeting, better sales performance as you only reach out to prospects who have shown interest in your products and automated sales tracking in your CRM (connected to your marketing automation tool).