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Restrictions on mass gatherings and social distancing have become the new normal due to the unfortunate outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a survey, the pandemic outbreak has led to 87% event cancellations and 66% postponed events.
But thanks to the evolution of technology, customers can experience an almost-real yet virtual exhibition experience right from the comfort of their homes. In fact, nearly 60% of event professionals have pivoted towards an online event experience due to the impact of the pandemic.
All major event management companies, event exhibitors, and trade show organizers have adopted a digital-first approach to cope with the COVID-19 situation. Moving such fairs, exhibitions, and trade show to a digital platform have led to increased profits, improved customer acquisition, increased customer retention, and happy customers.
Online trade exhibitions and fairs are the possible future of the event marketing world. Even after the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic dwindles down, a complete virtual or at least a hybrid event strategy is the most probable future of the event management industry.
By hosting multiple vendor booths on a single platform and integrating live engagement with a video tour, exhibitors can create a near-real experience for their vendors and customers in the most cost-effective manner.
Engagement is the key to any event’s (offline or online) success. Through virtual events and conferences, attendee engagement can be maximized with the numerous technology and data-driven tools that are available today. By the use of such innovations, participants will be able to experience interactions and networking just like they would do in a face-to-face event.
In a real exhibition or event, customers get to choose from multiple vendors, interact with different booths, and engage with other participants in real-time. In the same way, using AI and real-time engagement, exhibitors can provide a humanized experience by organizing such virtual events.
In a real event, organizers can interact with customers and collect their information, which helps with lead generation. The same number of leads (or even more) can be generated through online events by initiating interactions through bots, collecting customer data through signups, voice chats, and video chats.
Organizing a virtual event can accommodate many more vendors and customers compared to organizing events in a limited physical space. Moreover, additional expenses such as the event venue cost, rentals, travel cost, and other accommodation costs can be entirely cut down through a virtual conference.
As mentioned before, engagement is the single most major factor contributing to an event’s success, followed by the number of leads generated and attendee retention.
Let’s look at how you can amplify your online trade exhibition and fair engagement, provide a world-class experience to your customers, and make the event a grand success.
Participants in events are looking for live face-to-face interactions to understand the brands’ value propositions and to get their queries qualified. Such a face-to-face interaction is the single most crucial aspect of any event and hence should not be missed out in case of virtual events as well.
Product demos are an important part of any sales pitch in events and fairs that help the customers understand the product well and make an informed buying decision. A real time high-resolution 1-1 video calls can be done to provide a virtual demo of physical products.
Here is how voice and video chat can increase online trade exhibition and fair engagement.
Such an authentic booth experience where multiple business prospects can be engaged effectively simultaneously from a single platform can transform any virtual fair’s customer experience. With such personalized 1-1 live video engagement, it can help build more credibility with the participants.
Real-time video engagements will enable more and more customers to interact with multiple virtual booths throughout the event. This will also lead to a rapid increase in customer event retention and customer satisfaction index.
Organizing a virtual fair with 100s of vendors and attendees may seem like a very tiresome and high-maintenance task.
But unlike the common notion, technological innovations have proven to be highly beneficial for online event companies for organizing such large scale events just like in any other field, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak.
Lead conversions, customer feedback, and customer engagement are some of the crucial metrics that need to be measured to gauge the performance of the virtual events and prepare for future marketing campaigns.
All important event metrics can be generated and viewed through separate analytics dashboards available for each of the vendors. The KPIs such as attendee engagement and the number of leads generated can even be exported to documents for further analysis and reference. Vendors can also view agent analytics through dashboards.
Here is how to measure virtual event performance effectively.
Such indicators can provide super-helpful insights for the event management companies, and the resultant data can be used for the betterment of future virtual events and exhibitions.
During the course of the virtual event, many participants will have questions and would need guidance in real-time about interacting with different virtual booths, just like in the case of an offline event.
In the case of virtual events, there are high chances of attendees feeling like they are lost or ignored. This can lead to customer churn and event failure.
Such live chat integration will lead to increased event-to-event customer retention and thus improve the overall profits for the organizer as well as the vendors.
Any companies wanting to host their booths in online fairs may face objections and raise questions about how to make their booths in ways that would appeal to their prospects. Or about how to attract the crowd using a virtual platform instead of an actual physical booth.
All such objections faced by businesses can be removed by online event companies through the means of branding and customization options. All the engagement options such as chatbots, chat windows, and video calls can be customized by adding the vendors’ brand logo, widgets, colors, and buttons.
By providing such branding options to vendor companies, event management companies can attract more vendors to host booths on their platforms, resulting in increased ticket sales, lead generation, social media mentions, media coverage, and end-user satisfaction.
Customer feedback is extremely vital for measuring the event success, improving attendee retention, and contributing to the event’s overall success. Without a proper platform to collect audience responses, vendors may find it difficult to measure metrics and organize their customer data.
To help with such scenarios, exhibitor platforms can provide options to collect audience feedback immediately after every vendor attendee interaction – be it live chat, video chat, voice chat, or AI bots.
All these feedback can be organized and presented to the vendor businesses in their respective portals to help them with metric measurements.
Online fair participants need to be attended to at various touchpoints during the events, such as initial inductions or guidance to get in touch with certain vendor booths. The initial induction process may involve collecting customer data such as their name, contact info, and preferences.
Such repetitive and predictive customer interactions can be unproductive, unorganized, and even lead to customers having to wait for a long time for their turn.
Here is how chatbots can help in these scenarios.
Most of the online interactions these days are preferred to be done on mobile devices, and the same is the case with online events as well. Although online events can be carried out smoothly on mobile browsers, nothing beats the performance and quality of native mobile apps.
Using Mobile SDKs and ChatAPIs, features such as live chat, 1-1 video calls, chatbots, and co-browsing can be integrated into mobile apps so that as to provide the best possible customer experience.
Although the COVID-19 outbreak has led to cancellations of hundreds of offline fairs and trade shows, the possibility of conducting an even more successful virtual event has opened up numerous opportunities for event management companies worldwide.
Virtual or hybrid (a mix of offline and online) event strategies are predicted to be the future of online events. Hence, the quicker the event organizers and exhibitors adapt to this model of organizing events, the more fruitful their future events will be.
Hence adapting to the new normal by conducting online fairs and increasing attendee engagement through technology integrations is the best decision that event management companies can make today.
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