How to craft the perfect abandoned registration emails

Recently we published a post about how to keep customers from giving up part-way through registering for your events. If you haven’t read it – please do, because as my doctor never tires of telling me when we discuss my fondness for cake and early-evening negronis: prevention is generally better than cure.

But even if you do all the clever things we suggest in that post, some customers are still going to abandon your registration form. In fact, maybe as many as 70% of people who start filling in your online form will have second thoughts or get distracted before they hit the magic ‘confirm’ button. Ouch!

But it’s not what happens to us in life that matters. It’s what we choose to do about it.

Assuming you’ve followed the golden rule of online registration forms:

ALWAYS ask for the email address first!

then you’re in a position to try and coax that potential registrant back to your form to finish what they started.

Hopefully the event platform or marketing automation tool you’re using will make it easy to do this in a way that requires no actual work on your part – while maximising your chances of success.

Here’s what we’ve learned from looking at how different clients handle abandoned registration emails on AttendZen.

Three is the magic number

The first question to ask is: how many emails should I send to a customer who’s abandoned their registration? And the second is: when should I send them?

Among our clients, the most successful strategy is to send three emails along the following lines:

Email 1: Registration reminder (sent a few hours after form abandonment)
Email 2: Follow up (sent a few days later)
Email 3: Follow up 2 – with promotional offer / urgency (sent a few days after email two)

Without exception, all the organisers we asked about this say that a series of emails works much better than a single email for abandoned cart emails.

And this makes perfect sense when you consider the marketing challenge here.

People have abandoned your form (largely) for one of two reasons:

Distraction (they ran out of time / got called away / got stuck – and they mean to come back and finish);

Doubt (something spooked them such as the price, cancellation policy, qualifying criteria or just uncertainly about your overall event offer).

By using a sequence of mails, you’re more likely to prompt the customer to return to the form at a point when they have the time and inclination to complete.

And if they still have any doubts, a series of follow-up mails gives you the space to reinforce the event offer and try to nudge them over the line.

It can work something like this:

First email

The first mail should simply be a gentle reminder along the lines of ‘Hey! Did you forget something?’

The trick here is to keep it light, but also lead with a very concise, punchy reminder of why your event matters.

Remember, they were literally in your registration flow a couple of hours ago, so this is not the place to deploy time-limited offers (like discounts) or to lean on FOMO tactics like scarcity either. At this stage, you risk looking desperate – and that’s more likely to undermine confidence in the event.

We’re just concerned with two things:

1 Reminding them what your event does for them at the highest level (think: first line of your elevator pitch)
2 Making sure they know you saved all their existing form inputs so they can literally pick up where they left off – and in no way have to re-enter their information.

It’s a good idea to underscore this second point by making sure the CTA button says something like ‘FINISH MY REGISTRATION’ or ‘CONTINUE REGISTERING’.

Position this CTA in top third of your email. By definition, the recipient of these mails has already decided they’re a fit for your event. This means they’ve read your info, checked out the agenda etc. We don’t need to re-tell the whole story – just prompt them to take action!

Second email

Assuming the first reminder didn’t get the job done, it’s time to deliver some more specific information about the value your event provides to the attendee.

Again, this is still a reminder email so don’t re-iterate all the points from your marketing site or landing page. Keep it short.

If you can, this is a good mail to deliver compelling new information. Maybe you confirmed a new star speaker. Maybe a leading company is going to make a major announcement.

Otherwise, it’s a good idea to summarise (visually if you can) the 5 or so most important points of value the event promises to this particular individual.

Personalisation is key here. If your event brings in different categories of attendee like suppliers as well as OEMs), or aerospace as well as automotive, or commercial as well as research institutes – this is the email to get as specific as you can.

If your customer has abandoned the form because they have doubts about your event, you need to try to overcome those doubts with some at-a-glance highlights that make them reconsider.

As one of our clients said, ‘people don’t want to hear about our event – they want to hear what our event can do for them.’

We advise waiting for a couple days after the first reminder – otherwise you risk annoying people.

Third email

If they still haven’t clicked the magic button after another week or so, don’t lose heart just yet! But it could be time to try a different tactic.

Fear and greed, it has been said, are the two primal emotions that have propelled human civilization since the dawn of time. For email three there are broadly two ways you can go if want to move the needle.

The first is to play on the customer’s fear of missing out. Attendees of business events tend to prioritise networking over content – believing that they can probably get the content online at some point anyway, whereas meeting potential clients, partners, suppliers, employers etc, can only be achieved by being there.

So dial-up the messaging about who’s going to be in the room at your event. Mention companies, leaders, countries – anything you can to make the opportunity feel too-good-to-miss.

Again, personalisation is key. What does THIS individual stand to gain by joining your crowd? Who do THEY need to meet and build connections with? If the customer is a supplier, tell them about all the chances they’ll have to meet with OEMs. Make it as specific as the data in your CRM allows.

The second option of course is to offer some kind of incentive – hoping that this will nudge the customer over the line to complete their registration.

Most organisers do this via a time-limited discount code (‘register today and get 15% off’ etc).

This can work in some cases (and you know your market best) but simply offering money off doesn’t always move the needle for business events in the same way as it can for consumer purchases. Why? Because as another of our clients told me:

‘The problem with B2B events is that it’s not their money! It’s the company’s money. The individual registrant decides if they want to go, or not. Taking $50 off the price – or even $500 – isn’t a big incentive, unless they’re a freelance or small business. The company pays, and anyway, the registration is usually a smaller cost than the flights, hotel, time away from the office …’

So if you want to offer more value to seal the deal, consider an upgrade of some kind. Can you offer them a place at a special dinner or networking reception? Is there a VIP lounge? Are there any tours our other pre / post event activities you could throw in?

As our client put it:

‘Giving an attendee something cool is often a better motivator than offering a discount. I’d rather get invited to the cool kids’ table than be offered money off my ticket – when I don’t even get to keep the money!’

A word about tech

Your event technology should be capable of handling all this seamlessly.

At a minimum, it should let you:

• Fully brand your abandoned registration emails
• Allow you to segment and personalise the mails, including whole sections detailing registration benefits – based on conditional logic
• Automatically send each one at the time of your choosing based on triggers
• Be smart enough to know when a prospect takes action and registers in response to one of your earlier mails (and not continue to send that prospect any more follow-ups or prompts!)

And it goes without saying, your system needs to be capable of putting the customer right back into the form – where they left off, with all the information they already supplied in place – as soon as they click the CTA in your email.

Anything less than this is considered sub-par by today’s digitally savvy registrants.

Key takeaways

The most important tips we’ve learned when it comes to abandoned form emails are:

1 Remind readers of the registration benefits
2 Empower recipients with the information they need to move forward
3 Always use a descriptive CTA button
4 Show the CTA in the top third section of your email
5 Say what you mean in the subject line
6 Don't overcomplicate it!

Follow this advice and you’ll soon be watching your form conversion rates trending in the right direction.