A couple of weeks ago Team VerticalResponse went on the road…all the way to the Marriott 2 blocks away! We had a wonderful attendance rate (95%) with some pretty amazing customers. We gave advice on everything from how to have the best welcome email you can all the way to how you can use email marketing with social media.

We heard some great feedback from our customers who know our product better than we do in some cases. And even better, our customers got to talk to each other about how they use VerticalResponse.

Start Marketing Your Event Early

We’ve written a pretty intense guide: Step by Step Guide: How to Pack the House for Your Event. You’re spending money to host your event, you want to get as many people there as you can.

Choose a Comfortable Venue

Here we try to pay attention to the details. We try to provide tables for people to write on at the event, water for them to drink, print outs of the materials we’re covering so people can write notes on them and a nice cool room so no one falls asleep! If you’re asking people to stay with you for a few hours, make them as comfortable as you can in the confines of your budget.

Your Content Has to Be Good

If you’re hosting a seminar or an event, we’ve learned the hard way that the content that you present has to meet the expectations you set. So this time we spent a ton of time telling people exactly what they were going to get out of the experience.

We also spent some time really thinking about actionable things that attendees could bring back and do to make their lives easier and their business better so checklists and bullets of “to-dos” are a great idea.

People Want to do Business with People

What we heard over and over again was that the content we were speaking about was good, and the attendees appreciated getting to see and meet the people behind the web pages that are VerticalResponse. It’s a tough thing for us to do because it can get costly but we’re going to make an attempt to do about 6 seminars this year.

One of our attendees from Fremont Parks & Rec, Esther deLory said:

“Your company has all the feel of a close family. I really learned a lot of exciting ideas today and I can’t wait to use them. We MUST get into social media now that I am beginning to understand some of the huge benefits. Great speakers today. Your folks really hit it out of the ballpark! VerticalResponse really delivered the goods during this economic downturn. We have actually been able to increase our sales. This is very unusual for Recreation Departments who are scaling back these days or even disappearing. We learn something new each time we send a newsletter out, which is monthly.”

Pay Attention to Feedback

We asked all of our attendees to fill out a form about what they liked and what they’d like to see in the future and collected them by hand as they walked out the door. We felt that it would be better to do this instead of sending them a survey afterwards. A greater percentage of people will usually fill them out right at the seminar. We also allowed for freeform comments. We’ll spend some time now pouring through the feedback that our customers gave us about the seminar so we can refine for future ones.

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