At the beginning of the year, Covid-19 brought our lives to a sudden halt. With a pandemic in our midst, nearly everything we do around the globe had somehow been impacted or interrupted. In response to the pandemic, governments around the world enacted travel bans, social distancing measures, and laws banning social gatherings. During this time, the event industry has faced some major challenges. With an abundance of caution due to the health crisis, physical events have been called off, pushed back, or converted into a digital event. According to a survey by Event Marketer from April 2020, 87% of event marketers said they have canceled events and 66% have postponed events as a result of COVID-19. Since then, cases have grown exponentially, resulting in even more safety measures being put in place. How can Event Managers continue to have successful events and transform these constraints into new opportunities? There has been a push to adapt quicker than ever before. As mentioned on Bizzabo’s Event Outlook Report more than half (60%) of event professionals pivoted an event to virtual due to the impact of COVID-19. With the cancellation of many in-person events, demand for virtual events skyrocketed. Here are some of the realities for an event planner in 2020:
The pandemic has forced companies to rethink the distribution of their budgets. While business managers choose to err on the side of caution, event coordinators are still under pressure to deliver memorable experiences while working with stagnant or decreased budgets. Events as we knew them disappeared. Event planners changed the format of the events, and how they allocated their spending. Without in-person gatherings, there is no longer a need for a variety of expenses that can be a major drain on the budget. No more expensive fees for speakers to be at your event, they can simply take an hour of their time for the event and stay home! For virtual events, you can skip distributing the budget on venue bookings, chair and table rentals, food and beverage vendors, and decor, goodie bags, and more. The majority (93%) of event marketers plan to invest in virtual events moving forward. As events shift to digital, B2B Event Managers must prioritize solutions to ensure that the digital content is being distributed optimally and is high quality. Although the budget may be reduced, Event Marketers take on a new form of digital expenditure items, encouraging them to do better and reach more people with less.
Many companies are already using videoconferencing internally for meetings. Digital connectivity can also be used very easily for external events, and there is no shortage of tools. Event Managers can choose from ZOOM, Microsoft TeamsGotowebinar, Cisco, Livestorm, and more. All of these tools allow for live content, and the right one for your event will be based off your specific needs and budget. Once you have selected the platform, you can decide the format for your event to follow. There are a multitude of possibilities:
Choosing the right format and right facilitators are important to an engaging virtual event. Along with that, make sure that you have a strong Wi-Fi connection and the right equipment. For some a webcam is enough, for larger webinar events, HD camera and professional microphones might be ideal. Experiment with techniques to build engagement, such as discussions, Q&As, or even a live hangout before or after the event. Using the right tools and thinking about how to get creative with your digital event is necessary to engage your participants.
American adults spend over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading, or interacting with media. When nearly half an adult's day is spent consuming content, personalization is the best way to capture consumer attention. With the amount of advertising messages a consumer is exposed to a day, your B2B prospects no longer take time to analyze everything they receive. When promoting an event, the content must be strategically delivered over the right platform, to the right person, at the right time! Promoting on third-party media can be a good way to showcase your event, but can be rather expensive and lacks personalization. The most powerful tool for direct communication? 1 on 1 emails. Personal emails may serve a bigger purpose than you think. Are you using them to deliver a personalized message and maximize promotional capacity? This is where Letsignit comes in, the leading solution for email signature managers! Why you should use your email signatures to promote events:
Email reaches everyone, everywhere. On average,40 business emails are sent and 121 are received by an employee every day. If your company has 50 employees in total, that's 2,000 daily opportunities to promote your event for free. Best of all, 1 on 1 emails have an open rate close to 100%.
By using the email signature in your 1 on 1 emails, your employees become your greatest promoters without having to make any effort. With Letsignit, you can create beautifully designed banners as a subtle way to reach your target audience for events. Event Managers can plan accordingly to incorporate email signatures into the promotion of events throughout the year. Banners can even be attributed to certain employees or departments to have an ultra-targeted campaign. The possibilities are endless, and you are always guaranteed to get the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Do you understand what is at stake behind email signatures? Here are some tips you can follow if you were to use this new communication channel for your events:
Add several banners to keep your audience both informed and excited about the event. For example, once the date of the event is set, create a “save the date” banner that will remind your recipients of the day of your event with each email received. Insert a registration landing page behind this banner, which will also allow them to register. Then engage your audience by letting them know who the keynote speakers will be. For those who are not registered, this may encourage them to do so!
Your email signatures are a great place to distribute your recap blog, a satisfaction survey, a summary of the event with video, or a simply thank attendees.
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Letsignit is a solution that allows you to create unique promotional banners right in your email signature. This makes it easier for you when you are at the forefront of operational planning. Once you have programmed your banners, they will activate and promote the event without you having to put in any extra effort!
Go one step further and assign targeted banners to the appropriate groups while also tracking their click-through success from start to finish of the event. You will be able to track the audience that comes directly from your banners to the pages of your event. You can also see the number of clicks received by each signature and banner globally, as well as by collaborator. Statistics allow you to see the return on your marketing efforts.
Event Marketers – it’s time to rediscover the power of emails by implementing Letsignit in your marketing strategy. Use your email signature to promote your events and record their success. Between branding, employee advocacy, campaign management, Letsignit will undoubtedly be a powerful ally in the success of your event.
Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.
You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.
If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.
With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.
And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.
It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.
This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.
It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!
A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.
With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.
What is the user experience like for our employees?
In both cases:
In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.
With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.
Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:
Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
