Yes, the one where everybody was busy queuing at every booth and going round collecting stamp on their booklet.
Well, you guessed it.
This is one of the easiest and fastest way to collect as many leads as you can within a short time frame, apart from giving out freebies.
Where else could you get a whole bunch of people patiently queuing up, performing whatever instructions you want them to do (like filling up survey forms) and giving you their personal particulars so willingly?
While not all the 4,000 over attendees are going to do around completing the booklet, a 10% rate would translate into at least 400 leads which you can follow up. Judging from the queues, I guess that would be much higher.
Isn't that what most companies do at exhibitions?
Scan visitors QR code on their badge to get their details, get them to fill up forms, drop their name cards, like their Facebook Page or follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram in exchange for free gifts or lucky draws.
Leads. Leads. Leads.
So that you can justify your investment in the exhibition and also follow up with these people and hopefully close sales.
True enough, a few days after the event, I started getting follow up emails from these exhibitors.
Some of them invited me to attend their free workshops, free trials or perform some assessments. All of them provided links to learn more about their products or services. One company sent three emails within two weeks for follow up.
One thanked me for stopping by their booth. One thanked me for joining them at their booth. One thanked me for visiting their booth.
Two said it was great meeting me at the event. One said "It was a delightful experience meeting me."
Of course, these are basic courtesy opening messages and serves as trigger for me to recall where we met.
I have a rather good memory and could still remember the faces of a few of the exhibitors.
But given the sheer number of attendees, I'm not quite sure how many of them I could remember if I'm in the exhibitors' shoes unless the person has an unique feature, dressing or behavior. Coupled with the fact that most of them were busy focusing on scanning the QR codes and stamping the booklets, they didn't even have the time to speak a sentence more. It's just like a production line and the inputs are the attendees (humans) and the outputs are the scanned codes and stamped booklets.
So I'm really puzzled by their opening greetings.
I wonder how that few minutes of queuing and two seconds to get my QR code scanned and my booklet stamped translate into "great meeting me" or "delightful experience" for them.