Trade Show Preparation Checklist – 5 weeks

This series of articles is called “Trade Show Preparation Checklist” and helps you, week after week, to prepare the most important aspects of your booth setup and event organization. We will review everything from booth decoration, promotion, samples, logistics, travel, staff training to leads management. Access your checklist week by week here.

What should I prepare 5 weeks before my event?

Your trade show will start in a little more than a month. It is time you remember your objectives and targets and give yourself the right tools to achieve these.

This week you should focus on getting youremail templates set.

Preparing a good email templates list

What is your single most important objective at trade shows? Generate new business.

To achieve that you will attract visitors to your booth, talk to them, identify & capture good leads, follow-up and convert them into new paying customers. Right?

But what is the biggest weakness for most companies? The follow-up stage! In average, !

But 7 days is way too long to catch-up with a buyer: after seeing thousands of products, hundreds of booths and tens of exhibitors, what are the chances he would remember you 7 days later?

That is the period of time during which the buyer is still aware of your existence and remembers most of what was discussed.

Unfortunately, dealing with the event, packing, seiing your own mailbox packed with unread emails, planning your return to the office and being exhausted by the show does not really help with handling a quick and efficient follow-up strategy.

So, what can you do about it?

Email templates!

Ahead of the show prepare a list of “buyer personas” or, more precisely, “visitor personas”. Try to map out the type of people you could meet in your booth and create a “standard email” for each of them. You would have one for simple visitors to thank them for their visits, one for cold leads looking for additional information, one for warm leads and another for hot leads.

Use dynamic fields in your email templates – things like [first_name] and [last_name] that get automatically replaced with the visitor’s information at sending.

Remember to add links to your website, blog and marketing collateral (brochures, flyers, catalogs, price lists even) when relevant. Prefer links to attached files: first because you could track downloads, second because you reduce the risk of ending up in a spambox.

Never send the email “as is”: it still requires a little customization before sending. However, having pre-written emails will not only save you hours (days!) of work, it will also considerably speed-up your follow-up process.

You can use myfairtool to setup your trade show email templates right now.

We wish you the best for your exhibition!

The Exhibitor.