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Halloween, Bonfire night, Easter, Christmas, and awareness weeks. Every season presents new opportunities for themed events, and new possibilities to raise the bar for delivery and experience. If you’re serious about building anticipation, encouraging interaction and simplifying processes, Capture 1 DVP takes a look at how embracing digital marketing can add value to seasonal event experiences .     

 

 

Messaging apps offer a quick and easy mechanism to share event information and build excitement at every stage of the customer journey. In our role producing the Christmas Elf Adventure Challenge event, customers who purchased tickets received an automated confirmation email asking them to opt in to receive messaging notifications.

 

Once customers signed up, we sent out pre-event information via Messenger using push notifications to their phone, e.g. event reminders, parking and arrival information, catering details, and vouchers and special offers from partners. The messages were friendly and conversational, which people enjoyed.

 

Customer feedback was overwhelmingly positive:

 

“I liked getting the pre-event information on Messenger. I use my phone more than email and ticket emails usually go into my junk, then I struggle to find the information I need before the event. Having a notification on my phone was far more convenient.”

 

You can do the same thing on WhatsApp and Instagram Messenger now too providing even more channels and platforms to reach your customers in the most convenient way to them. 

 

And the critical thing is that you are providing them with information that helps them, that they want to know about in a way and through a channel that is convenient and familiar to them.

 

 

Cross-marketing builds brand awareness and loyalty. When recipients opt in to your message flow, via WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram, then organisers may also use push notifications to send information about related activities customers might find interesting. Each message has a call to action to increase social media followers and boost ticket sales for future events and activities. Examples from events we’ve produced include free fun videos for kids, activity packs and an audio story book.  

 

 

Keeping your audience engaged is a challenge, especially when your event is virtual and the audience is young children. You might think that personalisation is impossible for virtual events, when actually it can be straightforward.

 

We delivered a Christmas virtual Santa event using a Messenger chat bot to collect information for Santa. We messaged parents to request their children’s name/s and a special message for Santa to deliver. Messages were short and simple to respond to – a bit like chatting to a friend – which built trust and confidence with parents.  

 

The chat bot was connected to a back-end spreadsheet where each child’s details and message were linked to an order number, booking reference, event date and timeslot. The whole process was simple and smooth to administer. Our production team referenced the spreadsheet to ensure Santa had all the details he needed (via his secret earpiece!).

 

Here’s what one parent thought:

 

“It was such a smooth process. I liked that I didn’t have to click links and fill out a big form. Santa used all the details we supplied and the kids were blown away! They thought it was SO magical and special. They still talk about it now!”