Setting Up a Post-Show Campaign

The post-show campaign is, by far, one of the most critical steps in determining your show booth’s success or failure. Following up with your newly acquired leads in a timely and relevant manner will make the show a roaring success. Failure to do so will result in an utter waste of your time and money because you will never realize the full potential of your efforts at the show.

Here is the basic flow of several successful post-show campaigns I have used in the past:

1. Set up the campaign before you leave for the show. This is the only way to ensure it can go out right after the show without sacrificing valuable days or weeks to set it up after the show.

2. Upload the show leads to your CRM system immediately after the show, preferably at the end of every day of the show.

3. On the first business day after the show, during the early morning hours of your new leads, send them an e-mail with the following components:

   1. Thank them for meeting you at the show.

   2. Remind them what giveaway you gave them.

   3. Give them another gift, like a highly relevant and useful whitepaper.

   4. Provide a link in the e-mail for downloading the whitepaper. The link should lead to a landing page.

   5. On the landing page, ask a few, but not too many, qualifying questions. These will help your sales team determine who they should call first. If you have a successful show and collected hundreds or thousands of leads, they cannot call everyone. By prioritizing the leads for your sales team, you will become the hero of the day.

   6. Once the leads respond to the qualifying questions, they get to download the whitepaper they want.

4. Rinse and repeat: send out the same campaign or a similar one several days after the first one, to those who did not provide their qualifying information in response to the first campaign.

5. Provide your sales team with the list of prioritized leads who responded to your campaign and presto - they now know exactly who to call first.

6. Take your leads to the next step by inviting them to a product demo, a free trial, a product download, or whatever you consider to be the next step in your buyer’s journey.

7. Include your new leads in a lead nurturing campaign, which will keep you at the top of their minds until they are ready to buy. This means sending them relevant and timely content once a week or so with subtle product promotions, so they can let you know when they are ready to take the next step.

8. For a step-by-step description and analysis of a post-show campaign just like the one I described by reading the post, How an Ugly E-mail Campaign Got Us a 58% Open Rate and a 48% Landing Page Conversion Rate.

Take Away Tips

Tip #1 – Your post-show campaign should help salespeople prioritize their calls.

Tip #2 – Use the post-show campaigns to take your leads to the next step in their buying journey.

Tip #3 – Send out your pos-show campaign in the early morning hours of the first business day after the show.

Tip #4 – In the post-show campaign, make sure to remind your leads where you met, what you gave them, and give them something additional before asking them for anything.

Tip #5 – Send out a second pos-show campaign, a few days after the first one, to get responses from those who did not respond to the first one.