Many Associations and Companies are challenged with keeping their communities involved and engaged after their marquee event. Keeping content fresh and valuable for the entire community is a never ending process, and engagement overall drops precipitously. This is where a good loyalty program can help to encourage, recognize, and reward attendee engagement with the intent of raising engagement overall, just like your favorite Airline or Hotel Rewards program.
Validar has learned a ton from some very smart event marketers on how to best leverage gamification to drive attendee behavior that they desire. We’ve also seen some excellent use cases of brands effectively leveraging gamification for extended events.
Here are some tips to consider for event programs that have multiple activations per year, in different formats such as small intimate events, webinars, or hybrid events with content and sponsored assets hosted for an extended period of time.
1) Create a program with benefits that resonate with your community.
Have you ever purposely flown one airline for the MVP benefits, or additional miles? Your loyalty program should be structured in a similar fashion. Those that engage at a high level should earn benefits that resonate with the entire community! If done well, your end of season events could earn community member benefits that warrant attention!
2) Reward activity that is important to you.
This is easy when you’re an Airline or Hotel. Buy a ticket, or stay and earn points! With events, you can be more creative, whether it be rewarding attendee to event, attendee to session, attendee to exhibitor, attendee to attendee, or attendee to session evaluation activity. We’ve seen some extraordinary results of brands increasing KPI’s such as the following:
- Session evaluation response rates
- Average sessions attended per attendee
- Attendee to Exhibitor visit percentage
- Average number of exhibitors visited per attendee.
A loyalty program focused on encouraging behavior that aligns with your program intent can be very useful!
3) Promote your loyalty recognition to the entire community!
Let the entire community see your recognition and rewards! This is a great tool to help raise engagement across the entire community. At each event, recognize those that have earned it, and encourage others to emulate.
4) Keep your digital assets (session and sponsor content) active!
Many brands have learned the value of recording event content and hosting it over time for community members to consume. Many platforms host sponsorship assets as well such as digital booths, product related content, videos etc. By active, we mean reward your community members if they consume this content, or engage with digital sponsor assets.
Validar has an engagement platform called EventScore that was enhanced during the Pandemic. EventScore is fully integrated with a corporate gifting platform called Loop & Tie. Gifts can be curated by type and distributed on a point threshold basis just like an Arcade Prize Counter, or random drawings.
Let us know if you’re interested in learning more about how EventScore can help you increase engagement activity for a single event, or your entire community event series.
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