How to Increase Attendee Retention with Positive User Experiences

Gulf Shores & Orange Beach

June 3, 2019

A positive user experience is one of the top priorities for today’s event planners. With budgets restricting education and travel, providing a well-rounded user experience can be the life or death of repeat attendance for subsequent events.

A well-rounded experience begins with the destination. Bleisure travel and workations are more popular than ever before, so offer your attendees the option for something more. The opportunity to extend a trip for leisure time with family is a winning decision. Select a destination such as Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, Alabama for the best of business and leisure travel. Activities like championship golf, charter fishing, beach attractions and world-class make the Alabama Gulf Coast appealing for all types of travelers.

Beyond a great destination, how are you making your attendees feel important? Personalize as much as possible, including referring to them by their first names in correspondence. Encourage your event staff and speakers to interact between sessions and during after-hours events. Offer top-notch customer service, including an onsite social media presence, making it easy for attendees to get information on sessions, schedule changes and activities. An onsite concierge can also score big points with your attendees. Focus on building relationships to improve loyalty. Reward loyalty through early registration privileges, as well as registration discounts.

Long sessions can be the death of a meeting. Energy can lag and attendees begin to zone out. Ensure a positive user experience via shorter sessions. Offer a time for them to discuss the session and ask the speaker questions in a post-session lounge, a comfortable and informal spot for networking and discussion. Provide additional networking areas with charging stations that offer a reprieve from hard conference chairs.

Communicate with your attendees properly before the event. Don’t let expectations go unmet by making promises you may not be able to keep. You may have attendees who choose to come to your event based on those promises; failing to provide what was announced won’t help with your attendance retention rate.