I must admit, I’ve been selfishly looking forward to a slow January. Less holiday commitments, rushing around with an overgrown to-do list and promises to contribute holiday potluck dishes that start with “My Famous…”!&$% January has become a time of year to focus on self, a time to look at goals and get back to your average routine. Unfortunately, this also affects most attendees and their willingness to commit to getting out to events. Here are a couple of beginning of the year tips and tricks to secure early bird registration for your event.
There are a lot of ways to incentivize early bird registration, let’s take a second look at incentivizing in a way that is tailored to the objectives and goals of your desired attendee. Start by creating a list that represents your demographic including: Age, gender or lack of gender, social tendencies, habits, things they want to learn, are they educated. Separate this into three separate categories and rate them out of 100 percent. Please see example chart.
Once you have determined what your attendee cares about it’s much easier to narrow down how to attract them to commit to your event early. Often a drop in price is used, a buy one get one free or 50 percent off. In some cases, price might not be an issue for the attendee and a more customized approach is necessary. Here are a few of Plans teams favorite out of the box ideas:
Host a specialty event: Create a random drawing for early bird attendees to enter to win a chance to host a private ancillary event at the overall event. They can invite their own guestlist and have an opportunity to capture their audience powered by your larger event.
Earn event social currency: If attendees invite over 10 friends, those 10 friends register and pay for the event the influencing attendee receives special gifts, items and private access at your event to give away to friends that are attending.
Private meet and greet: All early bird attendees are invited to a private fireside chat with a special guest. Refreshments and a Q&A included for attendees.
Access to the content vault: All events earn a ton of information from registration. If your event can catalogue all the private access information and content, this could be an invaluable easter egg to your early bird attendees.
Private car service drawing: Invite influencers from social media channels to compete against one another to get attendees to use their early bird registration code, the influencer that registers the most attendees and the attendees that used the influencer registration code each receive private car service for one day of the event.