Event season is winding down for many of our small business rural clients.  Many businesses hosts events.  We spend time planning, promoting, working the event and following up.  Several of our clients do a fantastic job collecting emails from attendees so they can stay in touch.

This week I attended an event in Houston for one of our clients.  They hosted an educational Show Animal Clinic at an agricultural barn at one of their local Independent School Districts.  We planned the event thoughtfully including an online sign up, informational email, and flyers.  Every School District Ag teacher was informed about the free educational event and encouraged to share it with their students.

More than 100 folks signed up/pre-registered for the event, and more than 200 folks attended.  Email marketing and Social Media work, we know this.  But what I want to talk about is how we captured 200 plus emails at the event without a pen or pencil!  Knowing we wanted to stay in touch with this group, we laid out a plan.  How can we collect the attendees name and email without having them write it down?

iCapture.  iCapture is a program with a downloadable application that we put on 3 tablets.  The program was linked to the clients Constant Contact email account.  A new mailing list was created to track the emails entered at the event.  We downloaded the application onto the tablets.  This took 30 minutes.  Three tablets were positioned on the registration table.  Attendees were asked to enter their first and last name, and email.  It took them less than a minute. The program automatically resets for the next person.  Not only did we collect the information, but we had a count of the folks that actually attended the event.  This event had wifi, which allowed the information to automatically upload to the clients email account.  Even if they didn’t have wifi, all we had to do was connect to the internet back at the store and the data would upload.  It’s quick and easy. Best of all, the customers entered their information, which means is 99% accurate.

iCapture is a great program to use at events to collect email information.  You can capture as much or little information as you like.  In this case the client wanted a name and email.  But you could ask for an address if you are inclined to send out mailings.

This is also a good tool to use in your store!  Any tablet will do, it doesn’t have to be an iPad.  Imagine having a tablet at the register where your customers can sign up for your FREE newsletter themselves.  They touch the screen and enter their information.

Talk to us about how to use this application at your store or upcoming events.  Our team can set it up for you and have you collecting clients emails in no time!