Each quarter I attend a national meet up for Entrepreneurs in the UK. 

It’s for an organisation I’ve been part of for over 4 years and is something I always look forward to.

It’s an opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues in similar situations (running your own business can be lonely at times!) as well as to pick up some tips and guiadance on what’s currently going on in the marketing arena and what should I be looking at to enhance what I’m currently doing.

It’s also a motivational “kick in the pants”.  Being surrounded by the energy and passion that so many entrepreneurs bring into the room, it’s hard not to be pulled along and take in the energy yourself.

I ended up having to stop halfway home at a service station and spend 30 minutes jotting down notes and ideas that had been bubbling away as soon as I got in the car to travel home!

One interesting thing that came out of the event was that as soon as I had returned home, I received an email from the organisers asking me to give some feedback – which I thought was really smart.

It was the first time that I’d received one of these emails and it had a simple link to a survey monkey short survey where I could say what I liked and what I didn’t like – and also book for the next event!

I thought this was very clever and it’s something that everyone who is running events should look at doing – and not just to get feedback and advice on the event – they are great at segmenting customers too.

…and you can set it all up very easily via MailChimp if you want.

Here’s the steps I’d take in setting up a post event response mechanism:

1. Create a group in MailChimp that all attendees can be added to.  This means you can segment and communicate directly with them (and only them). You can either manually set up this group, or do it automatically via a form they fill in (their registration).
2. Add a field to the database for the date of the event. By creating a date field you can automatically set up an event automation which is triggered around that date.  I use it to send reminders prior to the event, as well as post event feedback requests. It also sends post-event “reinforcement” emails, which remind attendees that it’s all well and good to attend a course, but are you actually implementing what you learnt?
3. You can either create a short survey in Survey monkey (which is pretty intuitive and easy to set up), or you can use your form software (which I believe is key in all aspects of working with emails) and do your own quick survey. I prefer using my own forms because I can then, where appropriate, feed the information back into my MailChimp database and segment it further. For example, if I’ve got lots of attendees, it may be hard to capture a key piece of segmentation information from them, such as whether they are interested in service A or service B, which were both talked about at the session. This can then be fed into MailChimp and used to target relevant communications. Of course, you probably want the feedback information to come direct to you – no need for MailChimp to store that level of detail – so you can set up the email in the form software.
4. You can also set up with your event feedback form to capture testimonial text – if they think the event was really good, you’ll want to use the information to market further events. This is something I do with my training courses. At the bottom of the feedback page is a box that says “if you’re feeling really positive about the event, we’d love you to write something we could use as a testimonial”.

Just because the event is over, doesn’t mean that your work in maximising the value you can generate from it is over as well.

Post event feedback can help you improve future events, generate positive testimonials to sell those events, and reinforce the benefits of the event.

With clever use of MailChimp and forms, you’re missing a trick if you think the event is over once the attendee’s leave the room.

If you’re interested in how you could use this for your business, drop me a line and I can help you develop a comprehensive post event communication process.

…and if you’re in need of MailChimp training, we’re running a kickstart MailChimp training course very soon – click here to learn more, and an advanced “SuperCharge” MailChimp course as well, where you’ll realise how important forms are to success when it comes to email marketing.