The National Retail Federation’s BIG show, one of the oldest and largest, dates back more than a century. It is NRF’s flagship event and attracts 33,000+ attendees, every top brand in the market and the largest and most innovative retail venders. The challenge – how to entice attendees to register earlier and grow the numbers even larger. The National Retail Federation enlisted Bluetext’s expertise to create a sophisticated digital outreach campaign that included a disciplined cadence of email targeting, social media and paid media to encourage sign-up and participation.

Bluetext began with a thorough analysis of NRF’s data from past shows, including registration abandonments and audience segmentation, to understand opportunities to reach target attendees with the strong messaging and improvements in the process. Bluetext reviewed past marketing efforts and outreach platforms to understand which tactics had performed the best.

Leveraging insights from our analysis, Bluetext designed and executed an email strategy with compelling creative, messages that resonate with target audiences, and a social media component that would engage new and returning attendees.

Bluetext developed a social media strategy that mixed organic posts on LinkedIn, boosted posts on Facebook, and sponsored tweets to extend the reach of the email campaign to new target audiences.

Using a combination of AdRoll and SendRoll, Bluetext employed retargeting tactics to remind key audiences to complete their registrations and secure earlier conversations for the BIG show.

Optimization was a central focus of the strategy. Bluetext provided regular benchmark reporting and was able to revise tactics based on split-testing and real-time analytics, adding agility and flexibility to the campaign execution and improving results.