INSIGHTS

Success Story

IN-PERSON MEETING

Vitamin and Protein Supplement Vendor Transformed Their Tradeshow Data Capture Process to Boost Sales Conversions

Industry

Healthcare

Meeting Type

In-Person

Company

The Vitamin Shoppe

This account illustrates how American Meetings, Inc., (AMI) helped a leading vitamin and protein supplement vendor rethink their data capture process at tradeshows to boost sales conversions.

The Challenge

This internationally renowned brand is a regular presence at the world’s largest fitness expos. However, their strategy for converting tradeshow attendees into in-store clients had stagnated.

While collecting data on over 260,000 participants at its booths annually, this AMI client needed a sound strategy to increase sales with this significant marketing investment. It was critically important that tradeshow conversions to in-store direct sales were accurately measured to help this client better understand the ROI of their attendance at these tradeshows.

They called upon the services of AMI to help move these tradeshow leads into the sales column.

The Solution

AMI met with this client’s senior marketing team in charge of tradeshow strategy, the social media director, and the director of marketing for in-store sales. Together, this group brainstormed marketing triggers that would capture the attention of this potential client base.

With over 100 fitness expos across 65 markets, AMI needed to develop a plan that was systematic in its process to cater to a large, varied audience, but flexible enough for regional managers to customize at the local level to address different requirements.

The client worked with AMI to redesign the data capture process at these expos. This ensured that data was collected in real-time and shared with regional marketing managers instantly, showing results instantaneously. This allowed marketing teams to generate regional, promotional e-mail coupons for expo leads to take to their local store within 10 days of the expo.

To receive the coupon, event attendees had to answer three simple survey questions and provide their current contact information, which greatly improved the quality of the marketing data collected. Once customers had redeemed their expo coupons, AMI could analyze the uptake, which made it much easier to measure conversions from tradeshow attendees.

In addition, AMI worked with the social media director to expand the reach of the campaign by allowing attendees to share their expo coupons on social media. This helped the client reach a significantly wider base of similar customers who were not at the fitness expos.

The Outcome

This program significantly improved the quality of data collected at tradeshows, as attendees were happy to answer a quick survey for the “reward” of a coupon. This campaign reduced the marketing cost of updating bad data by 22%.

The coupon program itself was also a resounding success. 34% of survey respondents downloaded the in-store coupon sent to them by the regional marketing team, with 17% redeeming their coupons in-store. This gave the marketing team valuable insight into the conversion rate, as well as being able to quantify the ROI of their tradeshow investment.

This client’s program launched in 2012 and is still active today because of its vast success. In fact, owing to the success of this program and several other projects with this client, AMI has been awarded a multi-year master service agreement with this organization.

Statistics

22%

Reduction in the marketing cost of updating bad data

34%

Survey respondents downloaded their in-store coupon

17%

Survey respondents redeemed their coupon in-store

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