How can you use Lyyti's communication tool to keep your event participants interested? When should you reach out to your participants and what do they need to hear? How can you automatize your event communication and what does that even mean? 

A couple of examples: 

I get an email. "Hi Maria! I sent you a survey a couple of weeks ago but I haven't received your answers yet. Our training session is nearing and I hope for your input!" Yikes, you got me! I'll answer the survey straight away. 

My phone wakes me up. "Good morning Maria! The sun is shining and the gates open in an hour. Your workshop starts at..." I love it! I grab the sun block and head off towards a fun day!

I'm at my house, applying mascara. It's 19.05 and my phone is vibrating. "Maria! You're not here, we're about to raise a toast any minute!" The text message gets me moving, in a moment I'm in a taxi, applying the last of my mascara, on my way to the event that started at 19.00.

What do all these scenarios have in common?

What were these messages like? Why did they work? How is it possible that I received them exactly at the right moment? I'll let you off the hook and tell you straight away. The messages were: 

• personal
• correctly targeted
• well timed
• and yet automated

Ta-dah! Welcome to the not-so-mystical world of event communications! 

What are we sending and to whom? 

Stop and think for a moment; what do you wish to convey with your message? Is the purpose of the message to get the party started, or to remind participants of something they might otherwise forget? To make sure the participants show up to your event, or to get them curious? Who is your target audience? When is it relevant? And what kind of story will serve the interests of the receiver and the the event organizer?  

How and when? 

When you know what your message is, you can harness the automatization and let it do all the work. The event automatization will help your events with what marketing automatizations will do to your sales. The right person gets the right information at the right time - without the organizer drowning in a sea of post-its and calendar reminders about message scheduling. 

Schedule your reminder messages to those who haven't responded within a certain time, remind your participants of the best parts of your event that they can look forward to and commit to your event even more. Personalize your messages according to the choices they've made and schedule the messages to leave at exactly the right time so that your participants feel that they're being looked after. Your survey link with your warm gratitude can be scheduled to be sent right after your event to the people who were actually present, thus measuring your event and the impact it's made. Schedule another survey in a couple of months to see if your impact was temporary or if it's lasted, or if there's been other kinds of long term changes.

With the automatization your event communication will be a private path, serving your participant, and at it's best will lead them to you and your services. 

A nifty infographic on timing your messages correctly can be downloaded here! 

Our recommendations for event communication in a nutshell: 

1. Email or Invitation: short and sweet, piques the interest of the participants, makes them want to visit the registration page
2. Registration page: you don't need to add absolutely every piece of information about your event here, just enough to make them want to register as quickly as they can to ensure a spot in your event! 
3. Thank you-page and confirmation: The thank you-page, together with the registration page are visited once, and then gone, so make sure that no important information is stored only there. Your confirmation message is the most important message your participant receives, so make sure it tells them everything they need to know, from dress code to door code (QR-code?) to whom they should call if their taxi has a flat tire. 
4. Reminders: These messages are to make sure your participants remember to show up to your event, so that your no show is as small as possible. Remind them by email a couple of days before, sms them a day and a couple of hours before, "Hi there *first name*, the coffee is hot, the sodas are cold and we can't wait to see you in a  moment! Welcome!" 

But like, in practice, how do I automatize things? 

In all simplicity, you write your message, you select the correct audience for your message, use the personalizations found in the message tool, and click on the Schedule message in the lower right corner of your message. Select the date and time for your message to be sent and voilá, you're done! Your message will be sent on the time of your choosing to only the correct participants :) 

Filtration of the participants to find the perfect audience for your message can look like this: 

Scheduling a message can look like this: