Category Archives: Barcode Equipment

Many businesses who display at trade shows neglect the process of following up afterwards. Perhaps a savvy salesperson at the business will have a knack for crafting successful, personalized follow-up emails to the prospects he or she is responsible for following up with. While it is true that a successful follow-up email will be more successful than a form email, it is not enough in and of itself to ensure a successful follow-up campaign. To derive maximum benefit from the investment of time and resources a trade show requires, it is vital that the follow-up email be sent in the context of an entire follow-up campaign; ideally, the follow-up campaign is given just as much priority as the trade show prep and presentation. Many would argue that the trade show follow-up should be given even more attention than the prep work and the live trade show experience. Following up with leads that you acquire at a trade show is even closer to the point-of-sale than the trade show itself. Here are some aspects to consider in crafting a successful trade show follow-up campaign.

Trade Show Equipment

The preparation before the trade show, the actual trade show and the post-trade show follow ups with leads should not be thought of as individual projects; rather, they should be considered as a trade show system. Each part of the system is dependent on the others to work properly. The process of following up really begins before the trade show by making sure you have the right equipment. Many businesses exhibiting at trade shows use a tradeshow badge scanner to collect, store and transfer the contact information of the prospects they interact with at the show. These badge scanners are more advanced than ever before, and having all of the necessary data in one place streamlines the process of following up.

Follow Up Quickly

He who hesitates is lost. The early bird catches the worm. There are countless adages that support the strategy of following up, especially with the leads you accumulate at a trade show, as quickly as possible. The follow-up campaign should be ready to implement the moment the show is over; however, it is important not to sacrifice quality at the altar of speed. Once you transfer your leads from the trade show equipment into your company’s email system, it should only take a day or so to send out your follow-up correspondence. Many businesses mistakenly wait a few weeks, but when it comes to trade show prospects it is better to strike while the iron is hot.

Qualify Leads

The process of qualifying leads is ongoing. Perhaps you have a system of qualifying leads prior to sending out follow-up emails; however, it is important to remember that this qualification is fluid. Including several options in your follow-up email can help you further qualify leads based on the level of interest indicated by their response.

Customize Messaging

All messaging that is part of a follow-up campaign, including emails, phone calls and all other communication, should be customized to the lead. One trick to remember for effective customization is simply to be as specific as possible. Include the name of the specific show, the specific products/services you marketed at the show, the specific name and contact information of your representative at the show and a specific call to action.

Be Goal Oriented

Many people do everything right in the follow-up process without knowing why they are doing it. Long term, this can lead to frustration when things aren’t working out the way you planned. This potential frustration is the reason why it is so important to lay out the goals of your follow-up campaign beforehand. With specific goals, it is possible to apply metrics and A/B testing in order to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign and make the necessary adjustments.

A lot of time and energy goes into preparing and executing a successful trade show. In order to make sure you’re investing your valuable time and energy in such a way that provides a return on your investment in the form of business growth, it is important to remember to follow up with sales leads after a trade show. For many people, following up is an afterthought. They invest all of their trade show time and energy into the trade show itself, spending hours on prepping presentations and money on trade show equipment like displays and tradeshow scanners to track of the leads they accumulate. A failure to devote resources to following up after a trade show, however, can ruin the investment made in the trade show itself.

For example, what good is a tradeshow scanner if you don’t have a proper strategy to follow up with the leads it records and stores? It is necessary to make your trade show follow-up strategy a priority in order to maximize the show’s positive effects on your business. The crux of following up with leads after a trade show is an effective email. Everyone understands the importance of making a good first impression at a trade show; alternatively, here are a few tips that can get you thinking about how to craft those crucial emails to leads collected at a trade show.

Personalize The Follow-Up Email

Many people send out a form follow-up email to all the leads they generate at a trade show; this is a tempting mistake. With so many leads, perhaps more than a business has ever had before; the possibility of contacting them all with a single click has a certain appeal. Casting a wide net like this, while it may seem efficient at the time, is a common mistake businesses make when it comes to following up after trade shows. The general rule with these emails is that you get out of each email what you put into it. The minimal effort required of a mass form letter yields minimal results. Think about it: your leads most likely saw many businesses with similar products and services to your own, especially if you displayed at an industry trade show. Your follow-up email, just like your trade show presentation, needs to stand out from the crowd. One way to do this is through personalization. There are many ways to personalize follow-up emails. Of course, one way is to include personal contact information that you received at the show related to the company name, the name of the representative you met with, their title, etc. Another way to personalize the email is to qualify the leads you receive by certain factors like company size, interest in your product, ordering timeline and others. This allows you to tailor your email to their specific needs, and increases the likelihood of a response.

Give Reminders

Another way to separate yourself from the pack through a follow-up email is by reminding the prospect what you went over at the trade show. Solipsism is the enemy of an effective post-trade show mindset. While you might think your business’s presentation, products and services are unforgettable, the reality is that there were many other businesses at the trade show thinking the same thing. Remember this and include some of the information you went over at the trade show, and maybe even some pictures of your products and your trade show set-up, in your follow-up email.

Be Specific

Your follow-up email should probably include a call to action. This call to action need not be a hard sell, but it needs to be specific and goal-oriented. Specificity means avoiding language like, “for more information.” Instead, include in your email a specific, actionable step the lead can take, such as watching a video. An email could include several possible actionable steps based on their interest level; these requests may also be personalized based on how you qualified/interacted with the prospect at the trade show. A follow-up email may seem simple, but a closer look reveals a complex skill that can be mastered for maximum business growth.

Since their inception, barcodes have mostly been associated with the cashiers of the supermarket and retail industries. Nowadays, however, barcodes are finding themselves to be increasingly prevalent in and relevant to a larger and more diverse group of industries than ever before. There are several factors behind the rise of the barcode. For one, barcode technology has increased dramatically in recent years with the increased development and accessibility of three-dimensional barcodes and QR codes. Another reason for the more widespread use of barcodes is the incorporation of cloud-based platforms into more and more industries. The cloud-based platforms make it easier to transfer, store, work with and send the data that can be accumulated with barcodes and barcode scanners. In fact, the increasing ease of working with data could be considered the biggest development in the business world of the past decade; as a result, businesses are understandably placing more of a premium on collecting valuable data—barcodes and barcode scanners are still among the most effective ways businesses can do this. Exactly which industries are being affected by the rise of barcodes? There are too many to discuss in a short post; however, here is a list of a few industries that are now leaning on barcodes and the data they provide. If you own or are involved in a business in one of the following industries but do not yet incorporate barcodes into your practice, consider a barcode scanner rental from a reputable barcode equipment company.

Sports & Entertainment

Barcodes have been traditionally associated with transactions. In few industries are there more transactions, and a more diverse array of transactions, than in the sports, entertainment and events industry. Putting on a sports or entertainment event involves a lot of moving parts; prior to barcode data that could be effectively tracked, when a venue or organization had a problem with an event it was difficult to track down the source of the problem. Now, nearly every facet of a sports game or event is kept track of with barcodes, from concessions to security to technical equipment. When the game or event is over and the controlling organization doesn’t see the overall profit they expected, they can now rely on the data produced by barcodes and barcode scanners to identify the problem and implement a solution.

Healthcare

Barcodes have always been associated with inventory tracking, and there is perhaps no industry where inventory tracking is as important as it is in healthcare. In the healthcare industry, the availability of equipment is a major contributing factor in the delivery of timely, effective treatment. Additionally, many healthcare facilities are facing an increasing number of patients that place a heavy burden on the capacity of the staff and facility. To remedy this, many healthcare facilities are providing patients with barcoded wristbands. Simply scanning the wristband ensures that healthcare practitioners and their powerful computers and data systems have access to all the information they need about the patient and their condition in order to provide the best care possible as quickly as possible.

Education

Education might seem like an unlikely field for barcodes to be used in. A closer look, though, reveals barcodes to be very useful for school. For many schools, their textbooks have been outfitted with barcodes for much longer than they have had the technology adequate to use them. More and more schools are making the technological investment in the software and hardware necessary to scan textbook barcodes and use automated systems to more cost-effectively track inventory. Beyond textbooks, as more schools provide students with computers and iPads, keeping track of assets is becoming more of a priority for those in the education sector.

The area of business that many casual observers associate with a trade show is sales. People think of trade shows as a sort of market, where businesses go to sell products to interested consumers. These same people logically assume that the business skills needed to thrive at trade shows are all related to the art and science of selling. It isn’t just casual onlookers who fall victim to this sales-driven mindset when it comes to trade shows. Even participating businesses get caught up in the potential sales involved in a trade show. These businesses spend all of their time and resources, prior to the trade show, honing their sales pitches. During the trade show, they focus primarily on closing sales and become discouraged if they are not moving product. When the dust has settled and the show is over, these businesses base the success of their trade show on their sales only. To be sure, sales are a potentially important aspect of trade shows. It should be noted, however, that trade shows are at least as much of a showcase of the business area of marketing as they are of sales.

Increasingly, individuals and businesses are coming to view trade shows as the valuable marketing opportunities that they are and have always been. These folks understand that, even if the sales don’t happen, a trade show can still be a success from a marketing perspective; in the long run, they further acknowledge, trade show marketing may have a greater, more sustainable impact on their bottom line. This all begs the question, what contributes to successful trade show marketing? Here is a look at a few contributing factors.

Branding

The primary reason trade shows are marketing opportunities is that trade shows are opportunities to convey and develop your brand. Thus, it can behoove a business to think less about making sales, a short-term gain, and more about how the trade show can leave the interested customers and industry professionals at a trade show with a favorable impression and an increased awareness of their brand. This brand development is what will ultimately yield long-term business growth. Because trade shows are industry-specific, decisions about how to present your brand in the context of the industry and your competitors are more important than usual. One helpful trade show marketing tip would be to think of your brand not only in the largest possible sense, but also your brand for that specific day. How are your aesthetics and presentation perceived in the moment by potential customers? This may be more productive than a sales-oriented mindset.

Equipment

Of course, there is trade show equipment that can contribute to your marketing success. Think about how your audio-visual equipment, decorations, music, promotional giveaways, etc. all can contribute to the perception of your brand both inside and outside of the convention center. Distributing items such as t-shirts or pens with your company’s name and logo can be an effective way of developing your brand, depending on your target market.

Follow Up

Your marketing efforts on the day of the trade show will have little impact if you do not successfully follow up with the leads you generate during the show. The pace at which your competitors are able to track, store, retrieve, export and follow up on the customer data they acquire at a trade show has never been faster. Your business needs to keep pace accordingly, and there is equipment that can help you do so. A tradeshow scanner will help you scan the barcoded badges and business cards of tradeshow attendees and can quickly connect to a computer with the right software to turn your tradeshow leads into sales further down the road.

Trade shows are an important part of successfully growing a business, particularly at the early stages. They can be an opportunity to interact with people who have a particular interest, either personally or professionally, in some aspect of your industry. Because you can be sure the people who attend a trade show have this prerequisite interest in your market or your niche within a larger market, the people you meet there should be automatically highly valued as potential customers. Whereas so much of traditional marketing involves finding these interested customers, a trade show does this work for you. Trade shows are also interesting marketing opportunities because of the emphasis they place on face-to-face interaction. Increasingly, more and more of a company’s marketing is done online. Many retail businesses conduct the entirety of their commerce online. As a result, many believe a traditional business skills like in-person networking, public speaking and body language have become less important. At a trade show, this is not the case. A trade show is an opportunity to interact face-to-face with prospective customers and industry professionals. While these old school skills are needed, there is new technology available to supplement these skills; recent innovations have automated some aspects of trade shows. Most of the tech involved in trade shows has to do with keeping track of all the people you meet. Because trade shows are so popular and the attendees so focused on getting business done, it can be difficult to keep track of everything. This is a good problem to have, and automation may be the solution.

Badge Scanners

The tradeshow badge scanner is an important recent development in trade show technology. Many people choose to purchase these scanners, while others rent them on an as-needed basis for single use at a particular trade show. Attendees at trade shows are often equipped with barcoded badges; the barcodes in these badges are associated with information about the trade show attendee, such as certain contact information or information about the company they work for. As you can imagine, remembering all of this information—especially for hundreds of people—is impossible for even the best memories among us. That’s where a badge scanner that can quickly scan these barcoded badges comes in handy. If attendees don’t have badges, these scanners may still be useful for trade shows and for business professionals in general. Many people are now embedding barcodes onto their business cards. If you’re interested in purchasing or renting a barcode scanner, make sure it will work with business cards as well.

Lead Retrieval

The purpose of a badge scanner is to collect the information of a prospective customer or an attendee at a trade show and store their information so that it may be used later for business purposes. The act of going back and getting this information is referred to as lead retrieval and it is a process that has been made easier by automation. Older versions of barcode scanners and lead retrieval technology often took days or weeks to actually display the leads that were captured at a trade show. Now, an efficient lead retrieval system will instantly display the leads you have gathered. This makes it possible to follow up with the leads and grow your business more efficiently.

Automated Syncing

Another efficiency in trade show technology involves syncing these leads with your customer relationship management software. As mentioned above, following up with leads quickly is a priority; however, it is also a priority to follow up with leads in an organized fashion. Many people communicate with their customers in ways that are proven to be effective using customer relationship management (CRM) software. Often, these are cloud-based systems like Salesforce. For businesses utilizing these platforms, efficient use of trade show data needs to be quickly incorporated into the platform. Many trade show scanners can automatically collect, store and sync the lead data from trade shows. What used to take pen and paper, personalized follow-up calls and emails and considerable brain power can now be done automatically.

Trade shows have always been a big factor in the success of many businesses. They are so important, in fact, that people have spent a lot of time deconstructing the science of what goes into a successful trade show. For vendors and the event hosts, trade show success has been measured by simple metrics. For vendors, the amount of sales generated at a trade show was always thought to be the most important factor. For the industry or event space, number of attendees has always been the number they look to as an indicator. As trade shows have been analyzed, however, it has been determined that these might not be the best long term indicators of a trade show’s success. These quantitative factors may not be the only measures of the quality of a trade show. For example, how does a business measure how effectively it communicated the message of its brand at the trade show? One way that vendors and hosts are finding to measure the long-term effectiveness of the event is by tracking the leads that are generated. These leads can lead to long-term sales that dwarf the figures accumulated at the actual event. Companies are providing the events and the individuals themselves with tools, like a tradeshow badge scanner, that allows this long term success to be tracked by scanning the badges or bar codes of attendees and potential customers.

Of course, the more people in attendance, the more leads can be tracked. For that reason, attendance is still a crucial factor in an event’s success. Here are a few industry trade shows that are generating a lot of attendance and thus a lot of sales and leads for the show’s attendees.

CES

CES is the name given to the major technology industry trade show. It is hosted annually, in early January in Las Vegas by the Consumer Technology Association. Held over the course of several days, CES is an international trade show that combines all aspects of consumer technology. There are over 3,000 exhibitors at this trade show and it is attended by roughly a hundred thousand people. Among the tech industries and products that are on display at CES are video games, video and audio products and even drones. The CES trade show is truly the place to go for the very latest advances in an industry that is known for its rapid pace of innovation.

Atlanta International Gift & Home Furnishings Market

The Atlanta International Gift & Home Furnishings Market is held annually. As its title conveys, it is held in Atlanta and is a showcase for the latest trends and products in the gift and home furnishings sector. Last year, it had over 2,000 exhibitors and registered an attendance figure of nearly 90,000. The event is hosted by AmericasMart Atlanta. Among those who attend the event are buyers from small, medium and large retailers, designers, event planners, buying groups and media members and bloggers covering the home furnishings and gift industries.