In the period between two editions of your event, or even if you don’t have one scheduled yet, we recommend that you survey your attendees to discover their expectations. An off-peak period doesn’t mean you have to stop communicating. Take the opportunity to ask them questions about the expected developments for your events, which speakers and activities would encourage them to come, the additional services expected, etc. This article gives you the tools for easily carrying out surveys by email. Don’t wait any longer and take advantage of your next off-peak period to survey your attendees’ expectations.
Summary
- Why survey your attendees’ feelings?
- Send an intuitive and motivational form
- Segment your audiences
- 15 examples of questions to ask
- Improve with the help of your survey results
1. Why survey your attendees’ feelings?
Surveying your attendees has a dual objective: on one hand you’ll collect valuable data to help develop your events, and on the other you’ll maintain the link between your attendees and your event.
Attendees are the pillars of your events. They’re the ones behind all interactions at your event venue and who fund the development of your project. Ignoring their comments would mean pressing on in the dark.
2. Send an intuitive and motivational form
Use a form that’s easy to understand and fill out to encourage your attendees to participate in the survey. Send it by email with a highly visible button that links to a form with Typeform or Google Forms. These two tools are fun for both the survey’s creator and respondents.
Increase the number of respondents by introducing the survey in your email in a clear and friendly way. The more answers you get, the more material you’ll have for improving in the future. Here’s an example of a survey template to include in your email:
Hello everyone!
Thank you again for attending and supporting <event name>. We are in the process of preparing for our future <event type>, and we’re and reaching out to our most valuable attendees to find out how we can provide you with the best possible experience.
Below is a link to a quick survey (about 5 minutes). We’d really appreciate hearing how we can improve your experience at our next <event name>.
<CLICKABLE BUTTON>
See you soon,
The <event name> team
3. Segment your audiences
Who should you send your survey to? Decide based on your current needs. If you’re having trouble filling your events despite a large number of registrations on your online ticketing system, you may need to turn to those who register but ultimately give up on attending. If you’re struggling to market your VIP offering, survey those who’ve already purchased VIP tickets about their experience, and ask others what would encourage them to do the same.
This precise segmentation is available to all organisers through WeezTarget, our events-based CRM. With its advanced features, you can create groups of attendees by filtering those who attended a particular event or a single activity within it, or those who purchased one rate rather than another, etc. WeezTarget automatically syncs your Weezevent ticketing and access control data so you have the fewest time-consuming actions to carry out to segment your attendees and send targeted campaigns.
Here’s a tip from Thomas, our customer relations and path-to-purchase specialist, and Product Owner of WeezTarget:
“Send several very short questionnaires to highly segmented groups — for example, 18-25 year olds on one hand, and the audiences who spend the most on your online ticketing system on the other. This will allow you to quickly develop the event experience for two audiences in order to present them with new commercial offerings from your next edition onwards.”
4. 15 examples of questions to ask
Your survey should strike a balance between open-ended and closed-ended questions. Sometimes you’ll need to measure some data, but for other areas it’s better to let attendees speak freely. Here are some examples of open-ended and closed-ended questions to adapt according to the set-up of your events:
- How did you hear about our events?
- Why did you attend?
- Did you come alone?
- If not, how many of you were there?
- If not, did you come with friends, colleagues or family?
- What would encourage you to come with friends, colleagues or family?
- Would you attend our events again if we held them more often / less often / as often?
- Which artists or speakers would you like to see at the next edition?
Other questions may be relevant during the ongoing ‘Covid-19’ period:
- What would make you feel safer attending our events?
- What can we do to make you feel safe at our events?
- How many online events have you attended in the past 3 months? Which ones?
- Did you attend online events before the arrival of Covid-19?
- If we organised online events, what would make you want to attend?
Don’t forget to ask for socio-demographic information — age, gender, postcode, socio-professional category, etc. — in order to sort certain answers to the following questions:
- What means of transport did you take to our events?
- Would you like us to offer public transport solutions? Where would the collection points be?
- What arrangements would make you feel more comfortable in the bathrooms at our events?
5. Improve with the help of your survey results
Once you’ve obtained and sorted the responses, your mission is to develop your event: remove something here, add something there, strengthen this or reduce that … You can then send communication campaigns by presenting your changes through new commercial offerings. Your attendees need to see that you’ve listened to them, that you’re on their wavelength and that you want to provide an extraordinary event experience.
WeezTarget offers you a range of features specially designed for event organisers seeking to develop innovative marketing scenarios. Discover the solution by clicking on the button below:
Already using WeezTarget? Write to us here to let us know your thoughts on the solution.
