How to lower the no-show of your events (Live and online!)

Rutger Bremer

No-show is one of the least popular surprises if it comes to events, both live and online. The money you have spent on catering and location are literally wasted. This blog tells you how you can keep no-show rates as low as possible.

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Entry fees (if possible)

Based on 25.000 B2B events that were organised with Momice in the past decade, we saw the following trends around no-show:

  • No-show Live events pre-corona 30%
  • No-show Online events: 50%

These numbers apply to 'free' events. The no-show rates of paid events are significantly lower: between 3 and 5%. on average. Charging an entry fee to your visitors therefore appears to be an effective strategy to prevent no-show. Unfortunately, this solution is not always possible — for internal events, PR events or partner events it is less suitable. 

Make sure your create FOMO

The number of registrations is a good indicator for the interest in your event. But does your audience actually show up? You can only find out on the day the event takes place. And yet, a thorough analysis of the target audience can provide useful information. What moves your audience, what are their ambitions and challenges? Knowing the answer to these questions will make it a lot easier to design a program that fits their needs. Read this blog on who to create a FOMO event.

Stay top-of-mind

However interesting your event, your target audience has other things on their minds. Especially if you invite them months in advance, regular communication is necessary to keep them engaged. Remind them of the reasons for attending the event, and become more and more specific about the program details: program, speakers, location, how to attend etc.

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Measure and analyse no-show

You did all you could to make your audience show up. After the event, you must be curious to see what the actual attendance (or no-show rate) turned out to be. For this, you need to keep track of who attended your event. There are ways to fully automate the attendee check-in (without Excel sheets and attendee lists). Scan the e-tickets of your attendees — for example with the Momice Check-in app or another application. In the case of online and hybrid events, you should also keep track of your (online) attendees. Using a personal live stream link, makes it easier to keep track of online viewers. Of course you need proper event software (like Momice Online) to do this. 

Momice_Online_Programma@2x

Start the conversation

No that you are gaining insights in your event statistics, it is smart to try and understand why the numbers are like this. You don't have to come up with the answers yourself — you can simply ask your absent registrations why they decided to skip the event. And of course ask the attendees for feedback. In other words, engage in a conversation with your audience. This is the only way to really find out how to improve your next events — and achieve lower no-show rates. 

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