How we generated 454 leads for a major US retail event in four months

A major US retail event, held in late September. We sent the first email at the very end of May and kept sending until the event opened.

In that time the campaign produced 196 sponsorship leads and 258 delegate leads.

Keep reading to see how these leads track to event revenue.

Week one: laying the groundwork

In the first week we do the behind-the-scenes prep that lays the groundwork for what follows. We mapped the ideal customer profile, loaded the client's blocklist, and provisioned and warmed up the email infrastructure the campaign would send from.

It was also when we sorted out the lead handover. A campaign can produce a steady run of positive replies and still lose them if nobody on the client's side is ready to pick them up. So before the first send, every lead needs somewhere to land and someone waiting for it.

Most clients want leads synced into their CRM, usually HubSpot. This client didn't, so leads went across as a CSV file and a Google Sheet we kept updated.

At the end of the month the client brought on a dedicated SDR to work the incoming leads. The client was set on calling every lead as it came in, so we enriched each positive reply with a mobile number before it went across. Mobile number coverage is typically 80–90%, and sometimes higher, so there were plenty of numbers to dial.

June and July: test, then scale

Sending opened at about 1,000 emails a day. June was for testing whether the message fitted the market, and iterating on it until it did. Getting that right at 1,000 a day is cheap. Getting it wrong at 4,000 a day uses up the list.

Once the copy was holding up, volume climbed through July. By early August the campaign was sending roughly 3,400–4,100 emails a day.

The drop in mid-August is the second test for delegate copy. More on that later.

The sponsorship result

Sponsorship produced 196 leads. Every one of them went to the client's SDR, nearly all with a mobile number attached.

The client hasn't done its attribution yet, so we don't know how many of these converted. Not every client shares attribution with us, and they don't need to. What we can do is price the leads using the client's own numbers. Its core leads typically convert at 7.5–15%, and a sale is worth $20k. (That $20k is the absolute base. It assumes every sponsor buys a booth and no upgrade. Some will buy big-ticket items, and those can run into the hundreds of thousands. So every sponsorship figure in this piece is a floor.)

Mid-August: the switch

With the event in late September, mid-August was the point to stop selling sponsorship. We switched the sponsorship campaigns off and put everything into delegates.

The infrastructure was warm and had been sending 4,000 a day, so the obvious move was to carry that volume straight across. We did the opposite. Sending dropped to about 1,700–1,800 a day and stayed there for roughly three and a half weeks while we tested the delegate copy. We ran about 10 variants before one clearly won.

The reason is the same one that kept June at 1,000 a day. The market for an event like this is finite. There are only so many people who could sponsor it or attend it, and every one of them who reads a weak email is one fewer left for a good one. So the copy gets proven on part of the market before the rest of it hears from us.

Selling delegates without a salesperson

The delegate leads never went to the SDR. They were sold without a sales call.

Every reply went through our classifier first, and what happened next depended on what it found.

If the person was interested, they got a reply straight away with their discount code. After that came a five-step sequence, one email a day, so six emails in all. Every one of them carried the code and a link to sign up. The price and the way in were in front of them from the first reply, and no one had to wait for a salesperson to get back to them.

If they weren't interested, they went onto the blocklist the moment the reply was read.

The flow produced 258 delegate leads in six weeks. Tickets were $4,200 after the discount, and we modelled conversion at 10–20%.

September: full volume

From about 10 September, sending went up to 4,200–5,000 emails a day, the most the campaign sent at any point, and held there until the event.

By then the market had been hearing from us since the end of May. Everyone who had answered a delegate email with a no was already on the blocklist, added the moment the classifier read their reply. None of them were in that send.

Wrapping up

We've run dozens of these campaigns, across different events and different markets. The dates move and the numbers change, but the workflow stays the same. Get in touch to discover how we can make your show a success.