How Lessonly Drives 60% Virtual Event Attendance with eGifts During COVID-19

This piece is brought to you by Lessonly Director of Strategic Marketing, Katie Brunette. Lessonly is a powerfully simple training software that helps over 3 million teammates learn, practice, and Do Better Work.

Current events have completely changed how we think about ourselves, our customers, and our industry.

As a training software company that prides itself on helping customers do their best work, we brainstormed day and night about how we could support our customers during this time while bringing them the bright and inviting Lessonly experiences we’re known for.

And that’s when it hit us: It’s not a time to sell, it’s a time to be there.

In light of current events, we pivoted our strategy to be more relevant and provide value on what our prospects and customers need right now. That means being a thought leader, giving our customers and prospects remote-work resources, and providing experiences that are as close to business as usual as possible.

Katie “virtually” sat down to tell us her story. Check it out below!

Virtual Conversations via Llama Lunches

We launched an interactive virtual event series where we condensed attendance into just 40-person discussion groups called “Llama Lunches” (our mascot is a Llama named Ollie!). We invited everyone in our community. Customers came together with prospect champions from SDR and AE accounts. And for each event, every guest received an eGift card for lunch from a food delivery service like GrubHub and chowed down during the session we covered topics like sales enablement, customer service enablement, and remote work.

By engaging with prospects and customers on a smaller scale and sending them a lunch eGift card the day before, we generated an average attendance rate of 55% across the 12 events we’ve done over the last two weeks alone (ON24 reports that anywhere from 35% to 45% is a strong attendance rate).

We’re continuing with this strategy in May, where our virtual events will discuss best practices for anyone in our community experiencing furloughs and layoffs due to the pandemic. We’ll also bring in compassion experts, career coaches, and financial planners.

Caring with eGift Cards

We love to surprise and delight our customers, a.k.a the “Lessonly Llamas.” We’ve leaned on tools like Sendoso Choice to help us deliver awesome eGift card experiences, like our work-from-home eGift care package. With the option to choose from Amazon, Target, UberEats, or Hulu, the purpose is to make the customer’s remote work experience more enjoyable. And it’s working: Of the 33 Sendoso Choice eGifts we sent in the past month, we saw a 55% usage rate.

We also utilized eGift cards to drive attendance for our recent virtual “coffee connection” with our CEO. All of our customers were invited, but we capped attendance at 100 registrants offered an eGift card to the first 50 registrants. We sent the Starbucks eGifts a day before by embedding gift links in one-to-one emails from reps. That touch helped us drive an amazing 60% attendance rate!

Community Through LlamaNation

Finally, we want our customers to know they’re not alone right now. Whether they’re the only person in their department or the only employee in a particular role, we’re keeping our customers connected with their peers. We’ve accelerated our plan to launch a customer community (currently slated for June) to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of distance learning and remote training. We’re grouping the “Llamabassadors” (can you tell how much we love our brand?) in our community by region so that in the future they can still create an in-person community once we’re able to do that again.

Online-to-Offline: Looking Ahead

While people will certainly be more receptive to virtual meetings and experiences post-COVID-19, it will be interesting to see how marketers and sales professionals find a balance between virtual and physical experiences. My guess is that it will only make those physical experiences like direct mail feel even more personal, and give you the feeling of a hug and bright spot in your day.

So while we can’t give out real hugs right now, we can still give comfort to our customers and prospects by being that trusted resource they can turn to during this difficult time. And if that turns into a conversation about working with us down the road, great, but we are primarily happy to just create connection and camaraderie at a time when it’s hard to find.

Wishing you health and connection in the coming months!

Request a demo below to find out how Sendoso can help your team drive virtual event attendance, engagement, and revenue.