Amplifying Your Email Campaign with a Trade Show: A Success Story

Jan 2
23:14

2024

Stuart Urwin

Stuart Urwin

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This article narrates a successful instance of combining an email campaign with a trade show participation, resulting in a 14.8% success rate for a client. The strategy involved a targeted approach, event-specific planning, a valuable offer, timely execution, manageable follow-up, an incentive to respond, credibility demonstration, and an effective sales letter.

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The Trade Show: A Global Gathering of Information Users

The International Online Show,Amplifying Your Email Campaign with a Trade Show: A Success Story Articles a B2B event held in December, is a global hub for online information and internet-related businesses. The event features meetings, seminars, and an exhibition that brings together major information suppliers from around the world, including online hosts, major publishers, software houses, and a few Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The show attracts approximately 20,000 information users, including professionals, librarians, end users, consultants, academics, and students from all over the world. It's an event where exhibitors are eager to showcase their latest products, meet customers, and explore potential new deals.

The decision to attend the show was strategic, as it provided an opportunity to meet several companies in one location, saving on the cost and time of multiple trips to different parts of Europe and the USA.

The Email Campaign: A Targeted Approach

The first step was to send out an email to 54 companies that were identified as potential partners interested in representation in Scandinavia. The response was impressive, with 8 organizations expressing interest in meeting at the show. This represented a response rate of 14.8%, which is considered highly successful in such campaigns.

These meetings resulted in offers of representation agreements, which the client is currently following up on.

The Success Factors: A Combination of Strategic Elements

Several factors contributed to the success of this campaign:

  • Targeted Approach: The campaign was highly targeted, focusing on 54 companies from the USA and other parts of Europe that were not represented in Scandinavia.
  • Event-Specific: The campaign was tied to a specific event, the International Online Show, where a number of relevant prospects were expected to attend.
  • Valuable Offer: The campaign targeted companies interested in selling online information services to the business and academic sectors, where the client had a wide range of existing contacts.
  • Timely Execution: The campaign was launched a week before the show, when exhibitors were fully focused on their show objectives.
  • Manageable Follow-Up: The number of companies approached was manageable, resulting in a number of successful responses that could be followed up during the 3-day duration of the show.
  • Incentive to Respond: The two-step approach, an email followed by a meeting at a venue they were already planning to attend, made it easier for them to agree to a meeting.
  • Credibility Demonstration: The subsequent meeting provided an opportunity to demonstrate credibility and confidence in the client's ability to deliver the desired result - new business from Scandinavian customers.
  • Effective Sales Letter: The sales letter was a powerful invitation from an organization with access to a customer base that each of the companies would like to reach, without them having to devote expensive resources to starting from scratch.

The sales letter can be viewed here.

This combination of trade show and email campaign is highly recommended. With careful planning, this strategy can be adapted to suit various business circumstances.