Send Individual Session Check In Follow Up Emails During An Event

If you are managing an in person event with lots of sessions, you might be checking the attendees in for each one. This will give you an understanding of not just how many people were there for the whole event, but how well attended each session was. This post will show how you can use an out of the box Marketing trigger to send individual session check in follow up emails.

This is the end result I am working towards. An email that can be sent towards the end of the session thanking the Contact for attending, and asking them to share feedback (or whatever else you want to say).

Create yourself an email first. Add whatever images you want and put your text/buttons etc where you need. In my example, I also want to put information about the session that was attended which is going to be useful for someone attending a lot of sessions to know which one it’s referring to. You can add whatever personalisation you want to, but for this I want to put the session title, session summary and the name of the person or people who presented the session.

For the title and summary, the mapping is very simple. After clicking the personalisation button, click New dynamic text, then choose an attribute and open up the triggers. Click on the marketing event check-in created trigger. From there, go in to the Marketing Event Check-in Reference, then click on Session registration, then Session. Finally, find the Session summary field (or whatever you want to add) and select that one. Now when someone has a Check-in record created, it will go via that record through to the related Session registration record, then through to the specific Session record that registration record is linked to, and show the correct summary for that particular session. Make sense? Do that for all of the fields you want.

Now, the speaker information is a little different because there could be more than one speaker for a session. This information is linked to a session via the Speaker Engagements table. So for this we will create a List. Map through in a similar way as above to build your list, but instead of picking a specific field when you get to the Session, click on Speaker Engagements. Now you can determine the order by, and set the max number of items to return (guessing you would only ever have a small number of possible presenters). Instead of clicking in to the Columns section, click on Advanced Options instead.

When you do that, you can then go from the Speaker Engagement (which is what the list is linked to) and click in to the Speaker table. So now I can access all of the fields from a Speaker record rather than just the Speaker Engagement.

So below you can see I created a List, linked that using the following path:

Marketing event check-in created trigger > Marketing Event Check-in Reference > Session registration > Session > Speaker Engagements

Then Adding the columns using the Advanced options I went from Speaker Engagements > Speaker.

Clicking Save & copy will then open up the code generator and give you what you need to display the speaker information. Copy the code and add it to the email. Notice earlier up you can see I put a hyphen between the name and the title, changed the colour and made it bold.

Ok now you have the email, let’s create the journey. It will be trigger based, using the Marketing Event Check-in trigger (same as the one used in the email). Once you pick that, it will ask if this is for a particular event so use that if needed. Leaving it empty means it will run for any event. What you will definitely need to do is add in the condition of Check-in type equals Session check-in. That way it will only run when someone is checked in for a Session rather than for the overall Event.

On the journey, there are a couple of ways you could do this. If you have created unique emails for each session, you could do attribute branching like this, so when someone is checked in, it looks to see which session it was.

You can do that by adding conditions on each of your branches that use the session to determine if someone should go down that branch. Setting up the Journey that allows people to repeat the Journey means they will go through it each time they are checked in for a Session.

To get the lookup like you see above, click on the part in blue when you map to the Session table, this will ALWAYS give you a lookup to set the condition to a specific record.

Now, if you have created your dynamic email and there is nothing different you need to email for each session, you can do without the attribute branch and just go direct to a Wait step. For this, we will wait until a time specified by a trigger.

We can then go through the Marketing event check-in created trigger, then the Marketing Event Check-in Reference, the Session registration and then to the Session and pick the End time. This means someone can be checked in but they won’t get the thank you email until the session has ended.

Then we can put in the email step. Job done!

Next time you check someone in to a session, they will get a lovely customised email showing details of the specific session they attended, right at the end of the session. Perfection.

Original Post http://meganvwalker.com/send-individual-session-check-in-follow-up-emails/