Meaningful Moments and Accurate Data: The Event Lead Capture Software That Helps Emerald Publishing Shine

Whether it’s your own customer conference or you’re attending trade shows, so many opportunities can arise from these events. It’s a chance to meet new customers and engage with your existing ones. You can establish loyalty and evolve from a simple transaction into a meaningful, long-lasting relationship. That’s the main reason my colleagues and I attend industry events, so we can build a deeper connection with our customers—both existing and new.

Industry Events: The Bedrock of Emerald’s Lead Generation

Emerald Publishing was founded in 1967 by academics to champion new ideas that would advance the link between research and practice. More than 50 years on, we are a global business, publishing over 300 journals, 3000 books and 1500 case studies.

As one of Emerald’s vice presidents of business development, I work closely with our European clients. Since libraries are a major part of our client base, I personally attend dozens of library events around Europe every year. We attended more than 120 library conferences last year alone.

Anyone who has worked an event knows how hectic it can be: running around, interacting with countless people. I need to make the most of these events, so I stay meticulously organized and structured throughout the conference experience, so no opportunities slip through the cracks.

Since these events are so valuable, I need to maximize both qualitative and quantitative engagement. Unfortunately, when it came to capturing new customer information at the events, our process wasn’t as well structured as the rest of our planning.  

The Old Way: Deciphering Customer Handwriting on Paper Forms

Our previous methods for handling lead capture were inefficient. We had paper entry forms that required potential customers to handwrite their contact details. If you’ve ever tried to read someone else’s handwriting when they were hunched over, rushed, and distracted, you know that their writing can be impossibly illegible. We had a tough time reading the entry forms, which meant crucial contact details and information would simply be lost. 

Once we’d passed the hurdle of simply capturing their information, next came processing it. It was a completely separate beast to bring all these sheets of paper back to the office and manually type the information into our database before we could even begin to follow up. And data entry is the last thing anyone wants to do after a long conference and a long journey home.

At the end of a conference, we would pack the application forms into one of the marketing boxes to be shipped back to the office, with all of the analogue data management, it could be up to two weeks before the potential customer would be contacted by our sales or marketing team. By then, the warm lead would often go cold.

Clean, Clear, and Compliant Data

That’s when the marketing team came to me with a solution: Akkroo, an Integrate Company. It’s an event lead management software for B2B exhibitors like us. Akkroo immediately digitized and revolutionized our entire lead collection and follow-up processes with customers.

Akkroo’s interface is easy to read and features such as expanding the screen size, make it more accessible for all customers. And it’s so much easier now to get the customer to accurately input their contact information and details. 

With Akkroo, customers can take charge and type in their information—and it’s legible, accurate, and so much faster to simply hand them the tablet or smartphone. The whole process only takes them about 30 seconds. The data gets collected and saved to our database instantly.

Customers are also able to read and sign off on our GDPR policy from their first interaction with us. For any European company that communicates with customers, you know how important that GDPR opt-in is. Akkroo has made the GDPR process radically simpler.

Clean and compliant information isn’t the only benefit of Akkroo. Our warm event leads heat up within minutes because they instantly receive a follow-up email based on the information they enter into the system. So if they request information on a particular product, they receive marketing materials on that product almost instantly. It's there. It's quick. And it's delivered as promised.

Building Momentum, Relationships, and Business ROI

So far Akkroo has been working really well for us. It is a valuable tool in any situation where an organization is looking to capture information. It saves time. It ensures accuracy if you’re in a multifaceted, client-facing role where lead generation is a key performance metric. Taking out the tablet and smartphone to capture customer leads helps me to make the absolute most of my time at each event. 

Akkroo has been such a low key, highly valuable tool. It’s so simple that I almost don’t even think about it anymore—it’s just become part of our event process. And, with our data collection covered so well, I can focus on building relationships with the customers in person, which ultimately helps Emerald Publishing to shine.

Akkroo was acquired by Integrate in April 2019. This case study was originally produced before this date. Learn more.