A massive 50% of people who register for trade shows (and other free events) don’t show up. While this makes it incredibly frustrating to calculate how many actual trade show visitors will attend the event (never mind the wasted spend to market an event), it’s a fact of life that most trade show organisers have come to terms with.

In many ways, registration numbers have almost become a vanity metric. After all, your exhibitors and sponsors aren’t high fiving each other because of your registration numbers. They only care about two things: the quality and quantity of the people at your event.

So what if I told you that your visitor-to-registration ratio is unnecessarily low? That it’s your lack of an effective engagement strategy that’s causing your registrants to stay home on the day of your trade show?

Let’s take a look at this practically:

20,000 registrations – 50% attrition = 10,000 visitors

20,000 registrations – 40% attrition = 12,000 visitors

20,000 registrations – 30% attrition = 14,000 visitors

By ONLY reducing your event’s no-show attrition by 10% you are increasing your total visitor amount by a whopping 20%! What Event Director wouldn’t want to get their Marketing Manager promoted to Head of Marketing after achieving such growth.

There’s a way to reduce your attrition rate: it’s time to add another funnel to your registration funnel – and we call it the double funnel strategy.

I can hear you thinking “oh gosh, here we go!” so before we get into ‘double funnels’ and ‘red flags’, let’s reiterate why someone who was enticed to register wouldn’t actually attend your event.

Let’s face it, the journey to get them to register probably involved multiple emails, social media, digital advertising, web visits and probably more; all leading to a registration page (or should I say ‘pages’ with a CAPITAL ‘S’) that took them at least 5 minutes to complete.

At one point in time, they were pretty certain that they wanted to attend your trade show. Why else would they have invested so much time considering and then registering it.

So what happened?

• Their boss won’t let them out of the office for a day
• Work got extremely busy and they can’t take time off
• Someone else from the same company is going, no point both taking time off
• They’ve moved or changed jobs and the event is no longer relevant
• They’ve changed companies so the event is no longer relevant
• They end up booking a holiday that coincides with your event
• Family responsibilities
• Someone in their office tells them that they went the previous year and it’s not worth going
• The cost of getting to the event is difficult to justify
• Nearer the event, the travel time puts them off
• The weather is horrible and they decide they don’t want to bear the trip
• They forgot
• A friend or colleague that was going with them is no longer going
• At the time of registering it seems like a good idea, but they’ve changed their mind since then
• I’m sure there are more…

A lot of these reasons are simply out of your control, so attrition is just a fact of putting on free events. But wait, we’re ONLY aiming to re-convince 10% of these people to follow through on their registration and attend. That’ll give your Event Director that 20% growth that will probably get her a promotion.

Now that you’ve got a better idea of why your registrants are so flaky, check out part 2 to find out how you can reignite their interest in your trade show.

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