We recently helped a client using HubSpot in the solar/energy space run a couple of live “info night” events promoting solar batteries.
The client described these events as hugely successful, saying that as their Australian HubSpot Partners we achieved more in 2 nights than their previous marketing agency achieved in 2 years.
They sold out of their initial allocation of stock within a few hours and had to get more from their supplier to meet the demand generated by these events.
Below I’ll give you some quick background on the events, plus the key takeaways we discovered in helping to promote them.
About the events:
Each of these solar batteries retails for around $15,000 and the goal was to sell 50 of these units in the couple of weeks following the events (this goal was easily exceeded).
We decided the main channel for promoting the events would be email marketing because they had an email list of around 10,000 people.
We could also turn to Facebook’s “Event” feature, linking back to our registration page, boosted by paid ads if email wasn’t getting us the numbers we needed.
Space was limited and the goal was to get about 60 people to the main event in Melbourne, and about 30 people to the corresponding event being held at the business’s regional branch. So we wanted about double that many registrations because we knew only about half would turn up, especially in the middle of winter!
What we learnt from promoting these events using HubSpot Marketing
You don’t need a huge number of people in order to sell a huge amount
As you can see, we had less than 100 attendees all up, yet were able to sell around $300K worth of stock because it wasn’t just attendees who purchased. It was also people who couldn’t attend, but asked for a quote via email and phone, and then went on to buy.
There are multiple side benefits to running an event
As mentioned above, just telling people about the event and why they should care generated lots of interest in the product and led to sales. Plus, we ended up adding new people to the email list in HubSpot by promoting the event via FB “Events” (see below).
Be helpful and make the event about educating, not selling
People don’t want to be sold to, they DO want information that’s going to help them make an informed buying decision, and they’ll reward you for providing it. For these events we had various speakers from our client’s company, as well as from the vendor companies, explaining the government rebates and other incentives, as well as an extensive Q&A session.
Having a large email list makes it much easier to fill an event
This client has around 10,000 marketing contacts in HubSpot and this was their main source of attendees. Email is just such a versatile “owned” medium and a healthy, engaged list is the one thing pretty much every business should be working on building constantly because you can draw on it for things like this.
You need to send multiple invite emails – don’t worry about annoying people. If you want people to come to your event, you need to send at least 3 emails in the lead up. But…
Give people a “mini-opt-out”
for whatever reason, most people won’t be interested in your event. Because we want to send multiple emails, we want to give people a chance to opt out from this specific promotion, without completely unsubscribing. This works very well (I’ve been using it on our emails lately too), and most email tools like HubSpot will allow you to add a link that says “if you don’t want to hear about this specific promotion, click here”, then you create an exclusion list of people who clicked that link, and use it for the future invitations.
Try using different angles for the event emails
Instead of just having a variation of “you’re invited” in the subject line every time, change it up and do an email or two that has an educational focus. In this case we did one that said “Why now might be the right time to invest in a Tesla Powerwall” – tell the story, present your argument, then end with the event invite as if it’s an afterthought.
Only about 40% of people who register for a free event will actually show up
This can be improved by calling all the attendees a day or two before the event to confirm their RSVP and warm them up a bit. In this case our client only called the rural attendees because the numbers were shaky. This ended up getting around a 60% show up rate, which is a more than the 40% show up rate we were expecting, for just a couple of hours required to call the 50 or so registrants.
We were able to do this because we created the event form using HubSpot’s form tool, and made phone number a required field. We could then create a Segment (List) of people who had registered so the sales team could call them easily.
Have a reason why now is the right time to take action
In this case, the government rebates on batteries are going up at the end of the month, and various power companies are running promotions, which made this event timely, so it was easy to give a reason why this is important NOW.
Give your audience multiple options for how they can attend
If you know your audience lives in multiple geographic locations, consider running concurrent events at different locations, e.g. in different cities or towns. In this example we did a country event on the Tuesday night and the city equivalent on the Wednesday. What would also be really interesting is running a hybrid event where people can join online as well and watch via a live stream.
Use technology like HubSpot to manage the registrations and marketing all in one
Because this client is using HubSpot, we were able to create segmented lists to exclude people outside of Victoria based on IP address, and to exclude people who already registered so they didn’t get more invitation emails, plus we could easily create the registration pages and post-event resource pages using HubSpot and share these with just our attendees.
3 “streams” of emails to promote the event
1 stream for the actual invitations (at least 2-3 emails including a “last chance to register”), 1 reminder stream for people who have registered – e.g. “today’s the day!” with parking info and any other instructions, and a post-event follow up stream where you share resources such as a recording of the event, the offer from the event, etc., for people who couldn’t attend or who didn’t buy on the night.
ALL of these streams need multiple emails. If you only send one then you’re missing out because only about 20-40% of people will open any given email, but there’s a small overlap, so sending three emails means you’ll actually reach more than half your list overall.
Use scarcity (in an ethical way)
FOMO has always been one of the most powerful motivators of human behaviour. Luckily, live events have scarcity built in because you can truthfully say that spaces are limited and that this is a one-off event. Make sure you drive these points home prominently in your invitation emails and registration page.
You don’t need a fancy registration page
We built a very quick registration page using HubSpot that had some bullet points and a form. Don’t over-complicate this – your email has done the hard work getting them there, all you need to do is capture the main details you need so you know who’s coming.
Facebook Ads are an effective way to bolster numbers
One of the events was in a rural area, and the numbers there were lower than the city event, so we created an Event on FB linked to the company page and simply boosted it to be shown to people in the local area with an interest in the product and related topics. This got about 6 more registrations for a couple hundred bucks over 4 days and didn’t take long to set up.
Record the event and repurpose the content
Our client hired a videographer to film and edit the event, and we ended up with an hour long video of the various speakers and Q&A session. We can now use this video in multiple places such as sending to the entire email list, posting on YouTube, as an on demand webinar to further grow the email list, and chopped up into snippets we can use on social. HubSpot’s “Content Hub” makes this easy because you can give it one piece of content and it creates multiple other content pieces from it, like social posts, articles, short videos, etc.
So those are the main takeaways of helping to promote a live event that sold $300K in stock using HubSpot’s marketing tools.
A live event is a great way to get your most engaged prospects all in one place for an extended period, and build the relationship + answer questions/address objections they may have about your product or service.
I’d love to hear your feedback. Have you experimented with live events in your marketing? What’s worked well for you? And if not, what’s stopped you from giving it a go?
If you want some help getting your HubSpot marketing campaigns firing, apply for a free initial session here.