Unisfair

Bringing The Event To You

Some of the most important parts of business are making connections, following leads, and communicating with future prospects. Many companies participate in Expos, Conventions, Trade Shows, and many other eCommerce events for this reason. Today, business travel is on the decline and smaller companies are missing potentially valuable associations. However, many people are meeting and engaging with colleagues from around the world online.

Virtual events allow companies to connect in an online environment in a space that feels

similar to physical events. Attendees can watch online presentations and participate in live conferences without the hassle and costs of travel and scheduling.

Unisfair have been the pioneers of evolving virtual events and online venues for 10 years.

Joerg Rathenberg, VP of Marketing, Answers A Few Questions About Virtual Events & Unisfair

How do you define a “virtual event“?

A virtual event is a gathering of people sharing a common virtual environment on the internet to learn, interact, explore, and network. It gives attendees control over a rich and stimulating environment, hosted by a trusted organizer. Participants can navigate to different locations, engage with subject matter experts, and network with peers who share similar interests and objectives.

In your opinion, what are some of the best features Unisfair provides for virtual event sponsors and attendees?

We have evolved along with the market, and are focusing not just on events, but on virtual engagement solutions that enable our customers to embrace virtual environments for everything from lead generation and community building to training and recruiting.

Earlier this year, Unisfair announced V9, a game-changing new release of our web based platform. The Virtual Engagement Center is the always-on location where companies can create any number of virtual venues hosting any number of virtual events. This is fueling the industry to move from episodic virtual events to always-on virtual engagement. Customers, prospects, partners and employees can engage with vendors, peers and industry experts, wherever they are and whenever they want.

In addition, our Webcasting Studio enables our customers to produce and broadcast their own webcasts by plugging high-end professional video and audio gear directly into their computers and broadcast right from their offices – they can even use the built-in laptop cameras. This has a huge effect on bringing down the costs of virtual events, rather than using external production service.

How can small businesses get involved in large virtual events?

Unisfair has customers of all sizes, from small companies to large multinational corporations. A number of small companies use Unisfair successfully for lead generation and customer events. And Unisfair is leading the industry with its self service capabilities, which allow customers to create their environments without having to rely on 3rd party creative firms. This combined with the capability to produce and broadcast right from your desk makes it possible even for small companies to reach large audiences. Because of our subscription model, the monthly cost for hosting the platform is not very high. The cost per lead or attendee can be an order of magnitude lower than for physical events.

What can businesses who hope go virtual do before, during, and after events to ensure a beneficial experience?

Prior to the event, email marketing campaigns are the most effective vehicle to drive registration. Your house list will likely serve as an effective source of registration. Consider renting or purchasing highly targeted lists with additional names. Your conversion rates here will be lower, because this new audience may not be familiar with your company or product offering. Include an agenda as part of your email. Many people want to know the program in advance, so they can plan to attend the entire event or part of it. One of the best practices cited by our customers is to incentivize registration by offering free gift cards (e.g. iTunes, Starbucks) to early-bird registrants. This incentive should be prominently displayed on the registration page.

Leveraging social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube can help you create excitement and increase registration. Adding social media as part of your pre-event promotional strategy is popular and cost-effective – many of the tools are free.

Create an “Event Page” on your Facebook page, an “Event Invitation” in LinkedIn, and Tweet about your event regularly, before, during and after the event (don’t forget to create a Twitter #hash tag). Launch a pay-per-click Facebook ad for the event. You can also create short, promotional 20-30 second video clips and launch a YouTube ‘channel’ for your event. Also activate the social media tools within the virtual platform environment. This allows attendees to reach out and promote your event while it is taking place.

When the event is occurring, engage with attendees in a creative way. For example, hold surveys, polls, group chats and networking sessions to allow the exchange of ideas among attendees. This provides the ability to better assess their interest level in specific products, ideas or themes. Also, leverage advertising panels, logo banners, environment-wide announcements, and green-screen videos of “virtual hosts” to generate a feeling of ‘live’ excitement. Send reminders to all attendees driving them to scheduled webcasts, forums, or giveaways.

What advice would you give to a smaller business hoping to hold their own virtual event?

Although virtual events can be created in a shorter time frame, don’t underestimate the amount of preparation that goes into them. Virtual attendees have short attention spans and will quickly turn to other tasks if they are not captured by your content. On the other hand, a virtual event allows you to grow the number of registrants by 100% and more, compared to a physical event.

Here are several best practices to keep in mind:

• Create exciting and outstanding content
• Choose well-known keynote speakers that will draw attendees
• Be to the point – 20 minutes for each session is enough
• Start promoting your event at least 6 weeks prior to the live day
• Some events have high sign up rates on the live day, so don’t stop your promotional efforts
• Attendance rates are usually around 50%, so you need 2000 registrants if you want 1000 live attendees
• Train your booth staff before the event and provide them with FAQ’s in advance

Unisfair is growing fast and adding new events all the time. What do you think accounts for the success of Unisfair and virtual events?

One of our big assets is our excellent customer services and support team, which has the experience of hundreds of events per year, and routinely receives great reviews from our customers. Most of our team members have previously worked in the events business and know what it takes to run successful physical events, as well as virtual ones.

Clearly, the need to cut costs has driven more people to us as they look for more cost effective ways to generate demand and nurture prospects or train customers, partners and employees. Unisfair helps reduce event cost while reaching dramatically larger audiences without the need for travel.

Today however, marketing leaders understand that it’s not just about bringing people together in a more cost effective manner, it is about creating continuous virtual engagement – building lasting, more profitable relationships with their customers. As a result, Unisfair has evolved from the early adopter status to becoming widely used. In particular, marketers are seeing virtual engagement as a successful and proven component of the digital marketing mix.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts

I want to thank Joerg Rathenberg as well as Sarah Tonzi and Lisa Tartar (once again) for taking the time to help me out. Joerg gave thoughtful and detailed answers with a lot of valuable advice for all businesses. Many people I’ve interviewed usually speak a bit more abstractly about how to be successful but Joerg goes step by step and provides a direct and useful blueprint for both creating and participating in virtual events. I’m excited to see how these events grow and change and I look forward to the possibility of attending some myself.

Advanced UX: Getting Serious About User Experience

So here you are, the dedicated eCommerce operator, and after having invested a great deal of time into designing your online store, you notice that it still doesn’t look quite right. You can’t put your finger on it – after all, you designed a website that any consumer would want to visit, one that is open and honest and friendly, and still demonstrates to the customer why they should buy your products. If it feels like you have the general concepts of design down, but would like to get into the specifics, it may be time for some discussion about advanced user experience.

Psychology and User Experience Design
are by nature highly intertwined fields.

-Catriona Cornett

User experience experts know that connecting with your audience improves conversions. But one of the most difficult things about maintaining a storefront in the world of eCommerce is that the internet, by its nature, is an ever changing beast. After all, the world of the internet fifteen, ten, even five years ago is very different than the world of the internet today – not only because of drastically increased modem speeds, which allow websites to be designed with a lot more information, but also because common computer requirements like monitors have become bigger and better, allowing the clever eCommerce merchant to design a much more vibrant storefront than was previously possible. In order to keep conversions high, but costs low, eCommerce operators need to design compelling websites that don’t need to be updated often, striving for a sense of timelessness that can be easily adapted.

Towards that end, in this article we’re going to discuss:

• Simplicity
• Sliders (and Fly Out menus)
• Search

Simplicity:

As monitors have grown over the years, one of the things many website designers have overlooked is the switch from 4:3 and 5:4 aspect ratios to the more film-like 16:9 (those of you who understand fractions may be wondering how 4:3 is different from 16:9). The fact is, more than fifty percent of home computer owners have upgraded their monitors to wide-screen, a fact that an eCommerce website could use to eliminate one of the most common annoyances of the internet age – the scroll bar. While in many cases a scroll bar may be unavoidable (one of the major instances of this are in articles, or anything with a long list of comments), but if your goal is to get your storefront right up in front of the customer, designing for a rectangle instead of a square – and therefore avoiding the pillarbox look – can help make sure that nothing is hidden off page from the customer. And as we’ve discussed before, customers love the ability to take in as much information as possible at a glance.

Sliders (and Fly Out menus):

That being said, there is a constant war between presenting as much information as possible, and avoiding the clutter that comes when your website has more information than can be displayed on one page. Using fly out sidebars to replace the pillars that once dominated the sides of your website can allow you to present broad categories that slowly become more and more specific, allowing the customer to find exactly what they’re looking for, without losing that link to your main page. Sliders work in a similar fashion, allowing you to display a great deal of enticing information without having to cram the main page with pictures and details, especially when that space is better used making the page easier to navigate, instead of cluttered, since negative space is just as an important consideration of design as what you fill the pages with.

Search:

However, you can’t put everything into a slider or a fly out menu, or rather, you shouldn’t. An eternal list of drop down and fly out menus can become annoying in a completely different way than clutter, so there is a point of diminishing returns for your categories, before you just have to let them navigate to a new page. But there will always be a segment of consumers who know exactly what they want, and are only interested in checking your prices and comparing your deals against your competitors. For this sort of customer (whom it is every bit as important to keep happy as the browsers, maybe more so), your website needs the internet equivalent of an index – the search bar. Thankfully, you have many options for adding a search bar, all of which allow you to maintain website simplicity, without sacrificing product variety.

As you can see, despite the constant threat of Moore’s Law and it’s effects on computers, there are some ways you can adjust your website in order to remain timeless. Even if the technical aspects of these ideas change, a website that stays simple, avoids clutter, and allows people to search it will never go out of style, at least in its skeletal form. So get out there, and keep the people happy, so they keep coming back!