They read the agenda. They check the speakers. They come back four, five, nine times. Then they leave. Marketing and CX leaders from Informa joined Bridged and Event Tech Live to show where the registration journey leaks, and what they are changing to fix it.
Watch the full webinar
- Freya SmaleSenior Director of Marketing, Informa Connect
- Giuliano ArucciCX Director, Informa
- Maanas MedirattaCo-founder, Bridged
- Adam ParryFounder and Director, Event Tech Live (host)
Traffic is not the problem. Organisers can see the visits, the return visits and the pages viewed. The problem is what happens between the first visit and the form.
The panel called it a relevance gap. Event websites broadcast what the event is. Visitors arrive with a question about whether it is worth their time, and most leave without an answer.
Seven leaks between the first visit and a registration
Each leak maps to a section below. Select one to jump to it.
Leak point, numbered as in the list below
Seven reasons visitors leave without registering
Each one comes with the fix the panel is using, and the number it moves.
1. Your website describes the event. Your visitor came with a question.
Event sites are organised the way the organiser thinks: agenda, speakers, sponsors. Visitors don’t look for information that way. Each audience segment arrives with a different question, and a broadcast page answers none of them. Maanas calls this intent blindness.
As marketers, we tend to position our website with our business structure or our event structure. But people don’t necessarily search for information that way.
Freya Smale, Informa Connect
The fix: answer the question each visitor actually has, in real time, for the segment they belong to.
2. You ask for a registration before the visitor is ready to give one
When registration opens, the default is a big button, a strong CTA and retargeting on every visitor. But a visit is not a buying signal. Someone reading one speaker bio is still discovering. Readiness shows up as a pattern: repeat visits, time on the agenda, several speakers on one theme, a look at pricing.
Readiness isn’t necessarily time on site. It’s a pattern of behaviour. Every visit to your website is that visitor trying to speak to the website and get an answer.
Freya Smale, Informa Connect
The fix: ask before you sell. A first-time visitor gets asked what brought them. A ready visitor gets asked what is stopping them.
3. 95% of your visitors are anonymous, and you let them leave that way
Few people convert on a first visit. Converters now make roughly twice as many visits before they register. If you can’t reach a visitor between those visits, every return depends on luck, and on whatever an AI search tool told them in the meantime.
The first thing for the unknown is to make them known as soon as possible. It can be the first or second visit.
Giuliano Arucci, Informa
The fix: end the first or second visit with an email address, earned through a real value exchange such as relevant content or a place in the community. Discount spins fade fast.
4. Your form isn’t too long. It is shown too early.
The usual fix for form drop-off is to cut questions. Giuliano’s team at Informa kept every question, moved the form to a later point in the journey, and conversion went up. And if you already know something about a visitor from another event or a webinar, it should already be filled in. That only works when your systems share data.
We kept the same number of questions and we increased the conversion rate. It’s which question you ask, and at what moment in the journey.
Giuliano Arucci, Informa
The fix: time the form to intent, and prefill everything you already know.
5. You can see where they drop off, but not why
Analytics shows where a visitor started, where they went and where they left. It doesn’t show the reason. The visitors who start registering and stop have shown the most intent of anyone, and each one stops for a different reason. The event may not look relevant. The timing may be wrong. They may not have sign-off yet.
Did they not have permission from their boss just yet to charge the corporate card? Or did the registration journey itself really put them off?
Freya Smale, Informa Connect
When the blocker is sign-off, the answer can be automated. At AI Summit New York, a visitor who is interested but unsure receives a convince-your-boss letter straight to their inbox, ready to forward.
The fix: ask at the moment of drop-off, and record the answer even when no registration follows.
6. You wait for them to come back
Most organisers have a channel gap. They wait for a known visitor to return to the website, while the emails and ads that bring them back are often disconnected from what they saw last time. Visitors who have opted in can be reached on the channels they actually use. Phone numbers also outlive email addresses: people change jobs far more often than numbers.
Organisers can no longer claim the brute force advantage of the longest or biggest email list. It’s really about relevance.
Maanas Mediratta, Bridged
The fix: carry the conversation across web, email, WhatsApp, SMS and voice, with consent, instead of waiting for the next visit.
7. You personalise for everyone, or for no one
One-to-one personalisation sounds impossible at the scale of a large show, so most teams serve one page to all. Giuliano’s answer is to build the audience strategy first. Most events need five or six journeys, not thousands. At Network X, Informa Connect’s Experience Builder asks for job title, company type and interests, then serves the most relevant sessions, speakers and sponsors. Time on site and conversion both rose among visitors who used it.
No two people walk a show floor the same way. No two people attend every single session the same. So why would the website be the same for those two people?
Freya Smale, Informa Connect
The fix: personalise by segment, then let each visitor tell you which segment they are in.
One thing each panellist would change first
Write the audience strategy
Who you want at the event, what you already know from last edition, and the five or six journeys that follow from it. Personalisation gets easy after that.
Visit your site as a visitor
Pick one segment. Ask yourself: if I knew nothing about this event, how quickly could I see what is in it for me?
Start with last year’s attendees
Give them a reason to come back that goes beyond the event being on again. Be a conversation, not a broadcast channel.
Keep the audience you already paid for
Bridged re-engages last year’s attendees and your known database with a reason to return, on the channels they already use. Every number is read against your last edition, in a low-risk validation on your next event.
Quotes are lightly edited from the webinar recording for readability.
