Ever wish you could afford an army to help organize your event — or perhaps even clone yourself? Spending less time on tedious, repetitive tasks and more time planning an awesome event is every organizer’s dream. Thanks to automation, that dream can be a reality.
How can automation help me hack my event?
On average, most event organizers use 11 to 16 different tech tools to do their jobs. Without automation, you’re forced to move data from one app to another or manually complete a series of tasks that could have been automated.
Imagine you’re sending your attendees an email to let them know about the keynote speaker. First, you’ll have to log into your ticketing platform and download your prospective attendee list. Then you’ll have to log into your email marketing provider, upload the list, and schedule the email. Repeating these steps every day or week adds up to hours of wasted time.
Fortunately, there are tons of solutions that connect your favorite tools so they can share information seamlessly. Here are a few free or low-cost ways to use automation to reduce your workload — no army needed.
Hack #1: Automatically add ticket buyers to email lists
The Hack: Automatically add ticket buyers to an email marketing list for event communications, newsletters, and promotional offers.
The Benefit: Make your emails even more timely, relevant, and effective — while ditching workflows that once took hours.
The Details: Too busy to keep updating your email marketing lists with the latest attendee data? Make your updates automatic! Connect your email and ticketing platforms to keep attendees up to date on your event, or automatically send an email to attendees based on check-in status.
Hack #2: Let spreadsheets update themselves
The Hack: Connect Google Sheets to your survey platform, CRM, ticketing platform, or even social media.
The Benefit: Stop logging into multiple tools and get real-time updates to event data instead.
The Details: This hack uses automation tools like Zapier or Fieldbook to automatically update Google Sheets. Compile food and beverage preferences from a survey, keep a record of Twitter mentions, or gather important event data from your ticketing platform.
Hack #3: Make your productivity tools extra productive
The Hack: Sync your project management tools like Trello, Basecamp, or SmartSheet to your email, calendar, or CRM.
The Benefit: Keep staff aligned with workflows that you can set and forget.
The Details: Project management tools keep you and your team in sync. If you’re using Trello, Basecamp, or SmartSheet, you can automatically create new tasks directly from your email, calendar, or CRM. Tools like Zapier create a task when you set up a new Google Calendar event or “star” an email in Gmail.
Hack #4: Be present on social media at all times — without staying up 24/7
The Hack: Manage many social media accounts in one place using low-cost technologies like Buffer or Hootsuite.
The Benefit: Schedule all your social media posts for the week, across all platforms.
The Details: Use technology to help you and your team stay on top of your social media marketing strategy. Tools like Buffer or Hootsuite let you schedule posts on all your favorite social media networks for free. Upgrade to a professional plan and you’ll get access to analytical data that lets you see what’s working (and what’s not).
Hack #5: Keep your event data up to date, everywhere
The Hack: Automatically sync your event data to the rest of the information in your attendee database.
The Benefit: Increase the accuracy and efficiency of your attendee data so you can identify your most loyal attendees. The best part? No more tedious file uploads!
The Details: Using one of the major CRM providers, such as Salesforce, Hubspot, or Raiser’s Edge? You can automatically feed ticket purchase data and more into your attendee database with third-party apps such as PieSync. And if you set up custom registration questions, you can easily access that information to identify your most valuable attendee demographics.
The most successful organizers automate tedious tasks so they can focus on the big picture. For more details on how automation can increase ticket sales and reduce operational costs, check out the recorded webinar.
