Event mobile apps are a great way to level up your in-person events, but with every opportunity comes the chance to fall short.
Much of the event app market is dominated by so-called ‘container apps’, which host your app within a larger platform. These container apps are generally owned and branded by the developer and require several stages of registration to gain access.
By using these container apps, rather than an app specifically tailored to your business and event, you can seriously impact engagement, even harm your brand as a whole.
Here are 3 ways that using the wrong event app can hurt your business and what you can do about it.
Branding
Developing a strong brand is essential in business, especially if your competition has effective corporate messaging. Once your brand is established, the next challenge is hanging onto it, which requires consistency.
When hosting an event, using an app is a great way to increase your brand awareness, but only when done correctly. Some container app providers will include their own branding in an app or platform, rather than your own, either charging a premium to delete it or refusing to remove it altogether. This means your platform can showcase their branding, but no your own.
By partnering with an event app provider like All In The Loop, which specialises in customisation, you can ensure every aspect of your event app is tailored to your brand. This will not only protect your integrity, but increase and improve brand awareness amongst your attendees and their network.
Convenience
When attending an event and in day-to-day life, people generally do not like to waste their time filling out information, creating accounts or searching for unknown apps.
81% of people abandon online forms if they are too long, whilst disinterested attendees can lose focus on a dull task within 7 seconds. Hence, container apps can be self-defeating for events, requiring participants to download an app they do not recognise, hand over personal information, search through a list for your specific event, then hand over even more information for access.
To promote app adoption at your event, you need a user-friendly, stand-alone solution. The right event solutions specialist will create a distinct event app, without second or third-party forms to fill in upon registration. In fact, All In The Loop even allows for custom registration, to further streamline the process and personalise any forms or to meet your requirements.
Analytics
In the digital age, knowledge truly seems to be power, so gathering information about your attendees can be vital to boost retention and increase demand. A recent survey from File Channels asked sales professionals what the most important resource for sales is; more than half of respondents said ‘having access to analytics’ helped them the most.
Some event apps will gather analytics to an extent, depending on the type of event. However, as some providers host your event app within their container app, this allows them to gather analytics about your attendees without you ever seeing the data. In fact, some of these developers will even charge an additional fee for you to view your own event analytics.
However, a mobile event app from All In The Loop will automatically gather a wide range of analytics, from attendee activity to booths visited and average viewing times. As your event app is a distinct entity, all event data will belong to you. This means you can use the analytics however you see fit – you can even sell them to boost revenue.
