August 28, 2020

From Drinks to Deals: How to Host a Virtual Happy Hour (Sendoso using Sendoso)

By Meira McFarquhar

This post is part of a series where we share strategies, experiments, and honest results from running our own programs using Sendoso.

When it comes to putting together an incredible virtual event with high engagement and large turnout, Sendoso’s Senior Marketing Manager Sruthi Kumar is an expert. In fact, she wrote a whole blog sharing her expertise on how to throw one!

When in-person events moved quickly to online hangouts due to COVID19 measures, Sruthi and her team moved quickly too – and knew exactly what to do to stand out from the likely hundreds of other webinar invites sitting in people’s inboxes.

The team decided to throw a “Sip and Send” island-themed virtual happy hour with customers to share send ideas, network with peers, ask questions, and discuss best sending practices during an uncertain time. We decided to host the happy hour across the three time zones to ensure we reached as many participants as possible. To help drive attendance and make the happy hour more engaging, we used Address Confirmation to batch-send each registrant a custom handwritten note along with a “Jala Back” Cocktail Courier Kit (which consisted of vodka, pineapple, lime and jalapeno) and used Sendoso employees to act as “bartenders” to ensure conversation (and virtual drinks!) were flowing throughout.

Even though the goal was to have as many registrants as possible receive their cocktail kit one week prior to the event, we wanted to incentivize any late registrants to still join in on the fun, so for any last minute additions we sent a wine.com eGift.

The event was a hit! The Sendoso bartenders taught attendees how to mix the cocktails live, and then everyone enjoyed their drinks and discussed ideas, getting about as close to a traditional in-person happy hour as you can get.

Check out some of our customer reactions:

Here are some success metrics we saw from the campaign:

Cocktail Kit Send: 87% Response Rate
Wine.com Send for Late Registrants: 82% Response Rate
Total Response Rate of 85%
90% Win Rate of Opps that Attended

can bring that in-person feel to digital experiences.

Register here to attend our half-day virtual event Out of the Box: ABX Strategies for Marketing, Sales, and CX for more creative and unique ways to target key accounts.