The Power of Pre-Event Nurturing: Turning Registrants into Engaged Attendees 

They registered. What’s next? The moment a user clicks confirm on your event registration form is just the start of a very important journey. The hidden obstacle for event organizers is closing the gap from “registered” to “attended.” That’s a challenge amplified by sobering studies showing that up to 50 percent of registered participants (especially for free events) fail to show. This loss is something that often goes underappreciated as organizers look back on and wonder about missed opportunity. Sure, it’s great to have lots of registrations to be excited about, but registrations don’t guarantee attendees. This is where pre-event nurturing fits nicely as an intentional, strategic, and necessary solution. Pre-event nurturing is a deliberate process to take your registrants from when they register to when the event starts, turning passive registrations into excited and committed attendees. This blog would discuss actionable tips to optimize the entire journey of the attendee so that your outreach efforts and investment has meaningful engagement with attendees and a full house. 

The Strategic Payoff of Pre-Event Nurturing 

Pre-event nurturing is much more than sending out some reminder emails; it is a strategic investment that significantly enhances attendee retention and has a noticeable impact on reducing no-shows. The strategic value of pre-event nurturing is multi-dimensional and will help reinforce your relationship with an audience even before the event begins.  

By consistently delivering value and maintaining communication, you achieve several key objectives: 

• Builds Excitement and Anticipation: Pre-event nurturing strategy builds excitement, anticipation, and curiosity in your registrants that focuses their attention on what they can expect from the upcoming event.  This process ensures that when they are thinking of all the things they must tend to, thinking about your event is a priority. 
• Delivers Essential Information Gradually: Rather than dropping a giant information bomb on registrants, nurturing gives you the space to deliver important information over time, which includes logistical information, hits from the agenda, and access information to the platform, all in a digestible and actionable manner. 
• Reinforces Event Value Proposition: Repeated messaging reinforces what registrants will experience because of attending; you’ll remind registrants why they signed up, and reinforce the value they can achieve through attending, while helping to squash potential buyer’s remorse or boredom. 
• Addresses Attendee Questions Proactively: While most registrants will have the same questions about your event, if you think ahead and provide answers before they ask (e.g. within an FAQ, or directly to registrants), you’ll minimize friction and make it less likely that they’ll forget about the event or get overwhelmed at the last minute, leading to drop off. 
• Humanizes the Attendee Journey for Better Connection: Personal touches and engaging content, positions your attendees to feel seen and valued, creating a personal bond with your brand and this event, which emotionally invested in makes them more likely to attend. 

Crafting Engaging Email Sequences: The Drip Campaign Playbook 

Email will always be at the centre of your event communication strategy, but it needs to be done right. A well-planned drip campaign for event registrants helps to ensure that the right message is being delivered at the right time to the right audience, while taking the registrant from registration to attendance. 

Here’s a typical playbook for your pre-event email sequences: 

• Welcome & Confirmation (Immediate): This email goes out as soon as they register, so provides immediate reassurance (I made it, and my spot is secured), confirms their spot and ideally provides access links and next steps, it’s essentially your first impression. 
• Audience Segmentation for Personalization: Don’t treat each registrant the same. Use registration data to segment the audience segments (ex. first-time attendees vs. returnees, industry, job role, expressed interests). Segmenting the email list based on registration data allows you to create better content, and really enhance the personalization impact, at a greater scale. 
• Value-Add & Content Teasers (Days/Weeks Out): Email content, as you get closer to the event, can include sneak previews, in timely news about the industry, links to blog posts that provided value, and, build hype that solidifies the attendee’s value in being there. 
• Speaker & Agenda Spotlights (Weeks Out): Highlight the key draws. Introduce featured speakers, and highlight specific subject areas of focus within sessions, and elaborate on why attendees can’t miss certain things on the scheduled agenda. 
• Logistics & How-to-Access (Closer to Event): Reinforce their last practical details. Provide all the access instruction for the event platform, instructions for access, instructions for wireless, the venue map, provincial/state or local contact support details. Clarity in this category diminishes the chances of no-show. 
• Last-Chance Reminders (24-48 Hours Before): Final, last call! Provide the access link, and a brief reminder of why they cannot miss the event, along with a “Join” call to action/button. This will likely be the most actionable email in terms of conversion. 

With this focused effort, you also ensure that all pre-event email sequencing identifies the emphasis on personalization. Utilize merge fields, dynamic content blocks, and segmented messages languish the fact that all the emails were for that specific email recipient. 

Beyond the Inbox: Expanding Your Pre-Event Content Strategy 

Email messaging is particularly strong and of course is the best marketing you will have overall for your event. Additionally, this can all be leveraged with a multichannel engagement strategy, which has the potential to amplify the reach and create a higher engagement level for your event. Individuals have different ways of consuming information, so think about diversifying your touch points from just the inbox; like bringing in WhatsApp, SMS, or event apps. 

• Social Media Engagement: Social is a powerful tool to create pre-event buzz. Utilize your social channels to create event-specific groups (think LinkedIn or Facebook), countdown campaigns, polls on topics relevant to the event content, and encourage attendees to use the hashtag you created. 
• Short Video Snippets: Video is one of the most engaging mediums. Create quick welcome clips from organizers or speakers, short walk-through videos of your platform, or teasers of the event for distribution in your email, social, and event website. 
• Curated Resource Hubs: Build a resource section or learning area on your website or platform for registrants to easily access (FAQs, downloadable guides like “How to Maximize Your Experience of [Event Name]”, speaker bios, and sponsor information) as a centralized resource for pre-event content. 
• Personalized Push Notifications: If your event is app-supported, use your push notifications to share timely and relevant updates straight to your attendee’s devices, which work nicely for last-minute reminders, change notices for sessions, or highlights. 

Start the Conversation Before the Event Even Begins 

One of the best things about the pre-event nurturing process is being able to begin building community even before the event officially starts. Community building at the pre-event stage means attendees start forging connections not only through event content, but with each other, which builds excitement, and has a significant impact on participation. 

• Dedicated Online Forums/Chat Groups: Offer exclusive online avenues for your registrants to engage, introduce themselves, and discuss content pertinent to your event goal. 
• Meet-and-Greets/Icebreaker Sessions: Host informal online meet-and-greet sessions. Allow attendees to briefly introduce themselves to the group, with optional conversation starters. These are low-pressure, informal events that would be great as pre-event networking opportunities.  
• Encouraging Pre-Event Networking: Actively encourage your registrants to utilize and promote features of your online event platform which allow them to find each other’s profiles, a message each other, and even create 1:1 meetings before even starting your event.  
• Moderated Discussions on Event Themes: Start the targeting discussions about the primary content themes of your event within the platforms you are using. Provide open-ended, thought-provoking questions to evoke participants’ thinking and allow for the free exchange of content interaction and engagement across the participants 
• “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) Sessions with Speakers: Due to the ambiguity of the online experience and your speaker’s time, take advantage of this time leading to your event to host several informal, quick Q&A sessions with your key speakers or panellists. This adds to anticipation, provides an opportunity for registrants to engage directly with the expert speakers, and provides further pre-event content. 

The Power of Personalization in Pre-Event Nurturing 

Great pre-event nurturing consists of more than just sending impersonal, generic blasts; at the core of your pre-event nurturing should involve giving each registrant a sense that the event is designed specifically for them. This level of tailoring directly impacts relevance and dramatically boosts attendee engagement. 

• Content Tailoring: Use any detail supplied to you at registration (such as industry, job role, self-declared interests) to ensure that you present only the most appropriate content and session recommendations. For instance, if someone expresses interest in “AI in healthcare,” make sure they are not inundated with details about a “blockchain finance” track. 
• Dynamic Content: Create emails, personalized dashboards or event app feeds that contain dynamic content for events that changes based on known interests. This could be recommended sessions or recommended people to network with or sponsors that align with their profile. 
• Behaviour-Triggered Communication: Develop automated messaging based on attendees’ specific behaviours or lack thereof. For instance, if a registrant has not built their agenda yet, they might receive a helpful nudge from you with personalized recommendations. If they visited a specific speaker’s profile, you could send them a notification when that speaker’s session goes live. 
• Personalized Agenda Recommendations: Based on their stated interests or even their past attendance history, auto-populate or recommend a best-fit agenda. Think of how easy you just made the planning for the attendee. 

Let’s imagine an attendee, Sarah, registers for a tech conference. Within that registration form she provided, she indicated an interest in “SaaS marketing” and “AI in business.” In this scenario, Sarah is much happier than if you simply sent generic emails. Her experience should also include an email that highlights sessions pertaining the topics of her interest, a personalized agenda recommendation and recommendations for AI Marketing software exhibitors. Later, if she heads to the “SaaS Growth” lounge, the platform can send push notifications to inform her of relevant on-demand content that she might like to view. This more advanced level of tailored pre-event communication greatly improves a person’s experience and commitment to attending. 

How Samaaro Streamlines Your Pre-Event Nurturing Efforts 

Using such advanced nurturing processes prior to an event may seem overwhelming, but with the right event tech partner, you can make it easy. Samaaro’s integrated tech and systems are designed to streamline and improve your efforts that can directly contribute to decreasing no-shows and increasing engagement. 

• Automated Email Sequences & Triggers: Samaaro allows you to create complicated drip email campaigns for event registrants with automated sequences and trigger-based sending, ensuring that your emails are timely, interesting, and relevant. 
• Personalized Registration Forms & Data Capture: Samaaro’s registration forms allow you to capture granular data from day one, which is then used to facilitate all other personalization activities. 
• Built-in Community Features: Samaaro has a full-featured community experience pre-event, with integrated chat, networking, and discussion board capabilities, letting registrants create dedicated spaces for discussions leading up to the event. 
• Robust Content Hosting: Samaaro allows you to deliver several types of pre-event content, from welcome videos to downloadable PDFs, from directly within the page so that attendees can access it all easily. 
• Comprehensive Analytics on Pre-Event Engagement: Understand how your nurtures are performing, including open rates, click-throughs, content consumption and networking activity prior to the event. 
• Real-world Impact: Clients using Samaaro’s pre-event workflows, have documented 30% increases in attendance. This validates the actual value of developing a powerful nurturing strategy with great event tech to support it. 

Convert Registrants into Truly Engaged Attendees 

The “registrant” to “engaged attendee” journey is critical to overall event success and far too often, underestimated. In a time when digital noise is continuing to escalate and other competing demands are increasing, merely “signing up” for an event isn’t enough to guarantee attendance anymore. But you can turn all that into a positive, if you combine a great pre-event nurturing strategy with event technology.  

With personalized emails, reaching out to registrants via multiple channels with pre-event content, and a community experience pre-event, you can increase attendees’ commitment to showing up, understand the unique value of attending your event, get connected to other attendees, and ultimately reduce no-shows! If nurtured correctly, you will build real excitement about your event, accelerate the maximization of the effort of the attendees’ journey, and help them to show up the way you want them to, excited, prepared, and ready to engage!  

Don’t just get registrants, get excited attendees. Allow Samaaro to help close the gap between registration and real participation, to make your next event a resounding achievement.