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When you’re organizing a hybrid event for the first time, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. There are hundreds of moving parts that you need to keep track of, last minute changes, and plenty of challenges you need to deal with. 

These key challenges include: 

• Managing the increased cost, complexity, and risk associated with different technologies and platforms. 
  

• Offering attendees bespoke experiences specific to their interests and roles. 
  

• Creating inclusive, engaging, and memorable event experiences for both in-person and virtual audiences. 

Enter integrations.

From ticketing to registration, software integrations offer automated solutions that can help you more efficiently manage every stage of the event lifecycle. When used together, virtual event platforms and powerful integrations can help your business save money and time, and create a smoother and seamless experience for your attendees.

In this article, we take you through several integrations you can use to address the challenges faced during hybrid events so you can conduct them successfully. Let’s get started!

1.Ticketing 

With a hybrid or virtual event, you no longer need to worry about scanning tickets at the entrance or reducing long lines at the check-in tables.Incorporating ticketing integrations can smoothen the registration process for your audience.

With an integrated ticketing system, your event guests can purchase tickets online and download or print the ticket in real-time. Such streamlined one-stop event shopping can encourage event participants to buy one or multiple event tickets. Here are two tools that offer ticketing integration and which you can use for your events: 

• Cvent is an effective tool that streamlines registration through its Express Ticketing Event solution, allowing you to customize the registration process and fields per your event’s needs. 
  

• In addition, Eventbrite offers an integrated ticketing solution for your virtual events with an easy promo code creation for improved marketing and sales strategy. 

Pro tip: When your audience performs registration using these tools on a ticketing platform, the registration can be automatically imported into Zuddl.We also offer a webhook API for ticketing, so you can use that to integrate with any ticketing platform for registrations.

2.A social media wall integration 

When you host a virtual/hybrid event, a social media display integration can help you make your events more interactive, appealing, and engaging. 

How? You can use a display screen to integrate your social media feeds, brand or event hashtags, which means that you can broadcast User Generated Content (UGC) like visuals of users using your products, customer reviews or testimonials, and ratings at your event. Attendees can then browse through your social media or use your event hashtags when posting on their social media to contribute to your virtual/hybrid event. 

Taggbox Display is a popular display integration tool that allows you to integrate social media with your hybrid and virtual events for a unique and interactive user experience. 

For this very reason, we have proudly partnered with Taggbox to offer a Zuddl x Taggbox Display integration which allows you to: 

• Amplify your brand awareness and virtual event’s reach by putting up a social media wall for real-time user interaction and encouraging participation. 
  

• Build a sense of sociability and community by displaying specific event hashtags. 
  
  

3.Email marketing 

According to Markletic, 76% of virtual event organizers consider emails their most critical marketing medium. Email marketing is an efficient way to promote your virtual event, gain a good number of registrations, and send event reminders to ensure maximum participation. 

However, performing this process manually can get tedious and time-consuming, often resulting in human errors. Human errors are common during drafting an email and cost a lot to your business. For example, including the wrong name of your guest can not only seem unprofessional but lower the chances of them showing up to your virtual events. 

It’s a good thing then that you can use email marketing integrations to send and deliver highly personalized and branded emails. A ticketing integration can also help smooth your email marketing process and make it more efficient and accurate.

Here are two ticket integration tools that can help you automate your email marketing strategy for your virtual or hybrid event: 

• Marketo offers an automated and highly scalable email marketing tool that lets you interact with your customers through their unique online behavior and drive maximum results with personalized emails. 

• Mailchimp is another example that offers marketing automation applications and tools to let you reach your customers with smarter and faster marketing and drive sales. 

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Pro tip: When your guests register for an event on Zuddl, we push them into an existing mail campaign within your email marketing tool. This takes away the trouble to add recipients manually or scratch your head over coordinating ticketing and marketing efforts.

4.Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Integrating your virtual or hybrid event platform with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can be the key to a successful event as CRM software facilitates the management and interactions with your event attendees. This is also why Gartner named CRM tools as the world’s biggest and largest software market. 

When a user registers for your virtual event, you can use the CRM to log their personal information (name, email, phone number, address), unique food or transport needs, and any other details. You can use this recorded data to interact with your guests on a personal level post-event for further promotion, marketing, or other campaigns. Instead of using outdated paper-based or email systems, you can leverage the CRM integration for event management.

Using CRM integration with your event management platform, you get a centralized view of all your attendee’s data, their engagement rate, and how long they attended your event for more operational accountability. 

You can use the following effective tools that offer CRM integration: 

• Salesforce offers a wide range of CRM categories that help you manage over 150,000 customers with a full range of functionalities and features at a scalable price per your business needs. 

• Hubspot offers a free and easy-to-use CRM software with features including pipeline management, reporting dashboard, deal tracking, and company insights. 

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By integrating these tools with your event management platform, you will be able to record and track your guest’s data with ease. 

Pro tip: One of the critical features of these tools is that all the attendee information like how much time they spent on your virtual/hybrid event, can be pushed back to augment CRM customer information. Through this information, you can lead better and personalized post-event campaigns with enhanced customer relationship building.

5.Accessibility

As an event organizer, you need to accommodate the needs of every abled and disabled event attendee.

Thanks to the ADA Act (Americans with Disabilities Act), organizers have options like closed captioning for hard of hearing and deaf people and audio recording for the visually impaired and blind people. Integrating these options or services with your virtual/hybrid events promotes a sense of inclusivity, making your events highly accessible to every present attendee. 

Here’s how you can create highly accessible virtual events: 

• Keeping 4:5:1 color contrast
  

• Including alt-text for all images 
  

• Providing audio description or transcript for all video content 
  

• Describing visual representations as crafts and charts
  

• Using clean and easily readable text fonts

Here are two effective integrations for accessible virtual/hybrid events:‍

1. Interprefy (multilingual audio capabilities)
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Thanks to Interprefy, clients can now turn on multilingual audio capabilities, which can be done at a stage level. Interprefy is a Zurich-based partner company that facilitates multilingual audio support by removing language barriers through cloud-based solutions which make real-time interpreting accessible from anywhere.The audio translation will be human-driven and not AI ( human translators will be translating the audio in real-time and not driven by an AI), and thus the lag will be approximately 5 seconds.

2. SyncWords (closed captioning capabilities)

Your attendees can now turn on closed captioning capabilities, which can be done at a stage level through the partner company, SyncWords, to facilitate closed captioning capabilities. 

SyncWords Live meets Section 508 Compliance, a primary tool to help hard-of-hearing and deaf attendees effectively engage in the events. Once turned on, the attendees can choose the preferable language in which they want to see the captions on stage.The closed captioning will be human-driven and not AI ( human captioners will be feeding in captions in real-time), and thus the lag will be only 2-3 seconds. 

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Conclusion 

From planning hybrid/virtual events to post-event lead retrieval, choosing the right event integration tools lets you efficiently connect, manage, and interact with your attendees from start to finish. 

It can be challenging to streamline the registration process without powerful integrations, keep your attendees engaged and involved, or effectively follow up with them through emails. Thus, making these tasks more tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. 

Integrations ensure that you can have an engaging and user-friendly registration process, deliver relevant marketing materials, and offer interactive and appealing experiences.

From creating a branded virtual event set up, tracking attendees to post-event recordings, Zuddl’s easy-to-use and highly customizable virtual event platform gives you complete control and flexibility to build your virtual event and deliver an immersive and engaging attendee experience. 

Book your demo today and leverage the benefits of the aforementioned powerful integrations to conduct memorable, interactive, and profitable virtual or hybrid events for your business. 

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Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.