If you're ready to start your first live event, follow these 6 tried and true best practices to ensure a successful first event.
1. Link the Event Page to Navigation Bar
We recommend adding an "Events" section to your top navigation or footer so visitors can easily find your events from the homepage. While an Event page is automatically created for you when you create your first event, you do need to link it to your website.
If you're a Shopify store, read this article on how to add the event page to your navigation bar. If your site is not on Shopify, please contact your website administrator to add a page.
2. Start Advertising the Event at Least 1 Week in Advance
To ensure high attendance, we recommend you start marketing your event at least 1 week in advance. This will give you some time to promote across various channels (see No. 3 - 5), give your customers time to check their schedules and RSVP. We even have tools to make it easy (especially No. 3)
3. Turn on Onsite Pop-ups and Small Banner
Onsite Pop-ups and Smart Banners encourage customers on your site to RSVP to your live event, and can help increase attendance. Pop-ups present to customers as the graphic chosen for your next upcoming live event, and appear when a customer's mouse exits the window on desktop or after 15 seconds on mobile. Small banners appear in the lower left hand corner of your website, and prompt customers to RSVP to an upcoming event. Turn these features on once in the Loup platform, and they will work for all future events.
4. Create Social Sharing Links
You can create sharable links to promote events across your preferred marketing channels. Creating different links for each marketing channel gives you the ability to track traffic and attribute revenue to different channels (organic social, influencer, email) so you can see which promotion method is driving the most engagement.
5. Use Email to Drive RSVPs
Ah, email – it always delivers! Loup has nine types of emails that either help drive RSVPs pre-event or help drive revenue post-event. These emails can be customized for all your events or on an event-by-event basis.
If you're a Klaviyo user, you can use our Klaviyo integration to use existing templates for your email marketing campaigns.
6. Broadcast to Other Platforms with Multi-streaming Links
With Loup, you can simultaneously stream on your website and any social platforms, including Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook. Importantly, any influencers contracted to host onsite live events can also simultaneously livestream to their own socials (IG/Tiktok/FB/etc), which is a powerful way to tap into a new pool of customers. Encourage customers to come to your website to join the conversation in real time, and by offering exclusive onsite discounts.
If you expect your social channels will bring folks directly to your site to comment during your Live Event, consider contacting your Customer Experience Manager or submit a support request to turn on the ability to comment without logging in. Otherwise when a new site visitor tries to participate in the chat, it will prompt them to create an account.