Why it pays to improve your Exhibitor Onboarding Experience

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. However, how you treat someone once they’ve signed on the dotted line and moved from a potential customer to an actual customer says a lot about your business. If you’re all friendly and helpful when you’re trying to win someone’s business, but switch your approach once they’re on board, it’s not a great look. But I’m afraid to say it’s something we often see.

At Eventflow, we’ve seen the exhibition industry from both sides of the fence. We work with event organisers, but we’ve also been exhibitors ourselves. We’ve been in the situation where once we committed to exhibiting, the friendly emails from salespeople suddenly stopped. We received no information about how to plan for the event (We had to email the organiser weeks later to request access to the exhibitor manual to find out what we needed to do). Our only contact was when the organiser wanted to chase us for payment!

Surely there must be a better way. In this article, we’ll examine the importance of onboarding, including how it helps you as an organiser as much as your exhibitors. We’ll also show you how Eventflow allows you to set up an onboarding process that boosts your customer experience and keeps them coming back for more. Let’s get started.

What is exhibitor onboarding?

First, let’s clarify what we mean by exhibitor onboarding. 

Exhibitor onboarding is what happens after your exhibitors have placed their order and committed to exhibiting. In theory, it’s where you, as an event organiser, guide your new customer through everything they need to do in order to get the most benefit from their commitment. Components of exhibitor onboarding might include:

• Sharing essential event-specific information
• Reminders of deadlines for tasks such as power requirements, submitting forms etc.
• How to contact the event team if they need extra help

The purpose of onboarding should be to reassure your new customers that they’ve made the right decision by exhibiting at your event, and that you have their best interests at heart by making their lives easier. When done right, onboarding can be a powerful tool to boost customer experience, with all the benefits that follow on from that.

Benefits of a thorough exhibitor onboarding process

If you can implement a thorough, customer-centric onboarding process for your exhibitors, you gain significant benefits for your customers and also your business. Great onboarding:

• Reduces customer queries – If you give your exhibitors all the information they need when they sign up, they’re less likely to call you asking questions. As well as helping them plan more efficiently, it’s less work for your customer service team
• Boosts retention - If customers like your stress-free onboarding process, they’re more likely to return to your event year after year. They may also recommend you to their network, bringing in easy referrals
• Better engagement - If you can be proactive in your onboarding, it creates a good feeling between you and your exhibitors. That means when you need them (to complete forms, submit designs etc.), they’re more likely to do it on time

The watchword here is customer experience. If you can make exhibiting at your event a pleasant, easy, stress-free process, your customers will buy more from you, renew their contracts and tell their peers. A small amount of work now could have a huge impact on your bottom line in the future.

The Eventflow difference

When you choose Eventflow as your digital exhibitor manual solution, you get to give your exhibitors the onboarding experience they deserve. 

Quite simply, an Eventflow exhibitor manual is a single source of truth guiding your customer through the whole process, keeping them in the loop and taking all those manual tasks out of your hands. 

Here are just three of the ways Eventflow enhances your customer onboarding:

• Welcome emails - As soon as an exhibitor places their order with you, they’re automatically sent a welcome email explaining their next steps, fully branded with your event logo and colours
• Step-by-step guides - When your new customer first logs into your exhibitor manual, they’re walked through the app so they know exactly how to use it and how to access the information they need
• Reminders - Your exhibitors are told straight away when their deadlines are for forms, payments or anything else. When it’s close to deadline time, the app sends automated weekly deadline reminder emails to make sure they’re up to date

All of these features (and more) ensure your exhibitors are never left in the dark. As a result, your customers get a seamless experience in the run-up to your event. Furthermore, your team gets everything they need without the need to chase repeatedly.

Find out more from Eventflow

Eventflow is here to help you deliver the best onboarding experience possible to your exhibitors. However, Eventflow is about so much more than simply onboarding. It’s an end-to-end digital event manual solution:

• A single source of event information from start to finish
• Easy to navigate with everything your exhibitors need in one place
• Always up-to-date – Make instant changes to your event manual
• Digital forms – Say goodbye to printed PDFs
• Fully brandable – Your exhibitors will only see your event branding in the manual, as well as email, images and video

Are you ready to get started with Eventflow? Contact us today for a branded demo.