You’ve hit your KPIs for sign-ups and attendance at your virtual event. But the real challenge begins now: keeping your audience engaged throughout. The big question isn’t just how to keep them from logging off early—it’s how to transform that engagement into long-term loyalty, buzz, and revenue.
If you're running multiple events, the stakes are even higher—what happens in one event can directly impact future ones. You must keep your current audience captivated and ensure they’ll be your brand ambassadors, returning for more and bringing friends.
And let's not forget your event sponsors. They're expecting a return on their investment—was it worth it for them?
There’s a lot at stake, so let’s dive into how you can keep your audience…and your sponsors…happy and willing to return in the future.
Increasing engagement at virtual live events
The popularity of digital experiences in sports, media, and entertainment has dramatically expanded audience expectations. Interactive features like live polls, Q&A sessions, watch parties, chat rooms, and fan zones are no longer nice-to-haves—they’re essential. Like physical events, attendees want to network with peers, interact with sponsors, and feel immersed in the experience. But how can you provide all this in a virtual setting while keeping engagement high and avoiding audience fatigue?
Common engagement challenges
Engagement can be tricky. You can’t see your audience’s faces, and not everyone is willing to participate in a chat. And if your virtual event is global, you must consider location and culture and how that affects the audience’s comfort level with engagement. You may have already integrated various engagement tools like quizzes, fan zones, live chats, and compelling content, but how do you effectively manage all these interactions without overwhelming your audience or team? And more importantly, how do you ensure your audience interacts with your engagement tools?
What if I told you there’s a way to increase engagement effortlessly and incentivize participation with rewards like tokens, discount coupons, gifts, or exclusive product drops? Best of all, you can do it without burdening your engineering team, so they can stay focused on the roadmap.
Be ready for the unexpected
Planning for live events, especially virtual ones, involves anticipating various scenarios and being prepared for the unexpected. It’s a classic "if this, then that" exercise. But even with meticulous planning, there are always surprises. In virtual events, you’re juggling multiple roles—host, moderator, and audience member—all at once. There’s no way to simulate a live event, and audience reactions can be unpredictable.
Now, imagine if that unpredictability didn’t matter. With the right tools, you can set decision rules that automatically adjust the experience based on audience behavior. If something unexpected happens, you can react instantly.
Track, adjust, and optimize in real-time
So, you’ve planned everything out. Your engagement strategy is seamless. Nope! It doesn’t end there. How do you know it’s working? You need data and real-time metrics showing what’s happening as the event unfolds.
But that involves additional resources…teams and time you may not have readily available.
Illuminate for live events
Now imagine this:
You set up real-time dashboards tracking audience engagement—polls, chats, or quizzes.
You’ve got decision rules in place: if engagement drops (no reactions, no questions, minimal chat), trigger a new activity or reward to boost interaction.
You’re watching the metrics roll in, seeing exactly how your audience responds to each feature.
Something’s not working? No problem. You can tweak your strategy on the fly, adjusting decision rules in real-time to boost engagement.
It might sound complex, but it’s entirely possible. That future is here.
PubNub Illuminate is the real-time decisioning and analytics solution that empowers event organizers to effortlessly create decision rules that trigger actions during virtual events while also providing real-time feedback on how those actions are performing.
With Illuminate, you can orchestrate and adjust your virtual event’s engagement features in real-time, track metrics on any activity, and fine-tune your event for maximum engagement. Actions like setting up rules to reward attendees for participation, monitoring for potential disruptions like spamming, and even offering incentives to those who stay for the entire event can now happen when those actions occur.
Ready to take your virtual events to the next level? Explore PubNub Illuminate now and see how you can easily supercharge engagement. Sign up for a free account or log into the PubNub Admin Portal to start today.
