Who are your most valuable attendees? Your most valuable attendees are the key driver of your event’s success or failure. They’re the people who buy the most tickets, bring the most people with them, or spend their paycheck at the merchandise table.

Understand who they are and you’ll unlock tremendous opportunity — and value — for your event.

If you’re using a diverse set of leading business-class technologies, getting to know your most valuable attendees is easier — and often more affordable — than ever today.

The first step towards saying “hello” to your most loyal event attendees begins with your ticketing and registration partner.

Your online ticketing or registration provider

If you’re selling tickets and registrations online, you’re likely collecting important information about your attendees.

Consult your event management platform to locate your attendee data. Once you have it, compare and contrast attendees who purchased a ticket or registered as soon as your event went on sale to those who waited until the last minute to attend. Did most of them attend a previous event? Was it an email or social media post that led to the sale?

The answers to these questions will help you identify your most valuable attendees and understand what motivates them to go to your event.

Events on Eventbrite can easily access the info they gathered from attendees in the Attendee Summary Report.

Your event technology should provide you with information about who is attending your event. To understand who’s interested, you’ll need to enlist the help of a web analytics platform like Google Analytics.

Web analytics

With the help of web analytics, you can learn a lot about the people visiting your event site — not just the people who attend your event.

Of the many tools available, Google Analytics is the most popular. Their free and easy-to-use tool can tell you the age, gender, and software preferences of your attendees.

You can also identify online channels and audience segments that drive the most attendance. That way you can allocate marketing dollars to the channels with the highest ROI.

Social media networks

The majority of social media networks will provide you with a robust set of tools that help understand your attendees. Twitter and Facebook, for example, provide income, education level, and other important details that help you paint a vivid picture of your attendees.

As you increase your followers on social media, the additional audience insights from these platforms will help you find the ideal customer, build your email list, and gain more insight into your most valuable attendees.

What’s more, social media networks can tell you when your attendees are online the most, their education level, and other important factors such as income level and relationship status — all of which can help you create a 360° view of them.

Facebook’s Audience Insights allows you to learn who your most valuable attendees are, as well as their self-reported interests.

Still, there’s only such much information you can gather from the tools mentioned so far. For everything else you want to know, you’ll need to ask your attendees directly.

Surveys

On top of gauging attendee satisfaction after your event ends, surveys can help you draw meaningful conclusions from your data.

Imagine, for example, a scenario in which your event mysteriously sold a large number of tickets on some idle Tuesday. After breathing a sigh of relief, you tell your team to reallocate budget to the promotion that drove the surge in sales, only to learn your analytics can’t attribute the source of it. So if it wasn’t an Instagram ad campaign or a sponsor mentioning your event on Facebook, who or what caused all those people to attend?

Well, with a post-event survey, you can ask your attendees directly.

Not sure what to ask? Take advantage of SurveyMonkey’s 300+ expert, pre-written survey templates — including three specifically for events — to get the information you need from attendees.

Reach more attendees

Now that you have a deep understanding of your attendees and identified the most valuable of them, your next task is to help them discover your event. Learn how to manage your attendee data and use it to promote your event more effectively in Future-Proof Tech for Large-Scale Events.