Beer events bring a challenge for brewers, because the people who visit the event try a lot of things, and meet many, many people. Unless you do something to keep in-touch with the people who try your beer, you're leaving it to chance that they will remember you when they want to visit a taproom. This post talks about strategies to stay in-touch with the people who visit these beer events.

You're Only As Good as Your List

This is my mantra with marketing. I believe that no matter what business you're in, that you're only as good as your contact list. This list comes in many forms - an email subscriber list, a Twitter following, Facebook likes, and Untappd likes. If you have a healthy list, it gets a lot easier to fill your taproom.

A beer festival is an excellent time to grow your contact list - you just need to give them a reason to want to be on your list, and then promote it at these events alongside your beer. This post is focused on building an email list, because it is the most flexible method of list building and still offers the most flexibility long-term.

What's in it For Me?

In some form, this is what your customers will ask when faced with an opportunity to get added to your list. You need to give a compelling offer or they won't sign up. A basic "sign up to keep up with our updates" is not going to motivate too many people to give away their information, because this benefit is not interesting enough.

Once you have your offer for signing up, create an extra, extended offer, only available if people sign up during the event. This creates a sense of scarcity for the benefit, and nudges people to sign up now, instead of later. It can be a little inconvenient to sign up in the middle of a beer festival. Scarcity gives your customers a little nudge to do it right away.

If you already have a benefit for email subscribers, you can offer this as an extra benefit, but I recommend that you also offer a temporary bonus that is only available to the beer festival go-ers.

Develop Your Offer

Before you can offer an exclusive event bonus, you will want to establish a basic offer to add the bonus to. This offer can reside permanently on your website, and will run continuously, regardless of if you're at an event or not. I have compiled a 20-point list of irresistible brewery offerings that will help you grow your list. You can get that here.

To develop a great email list offering, you need to give away something that you don't give away to anyone else. Exclusivity and scarcity are your best friend. People will jump at the chance to try a small-batch or limited-run brew. Keep this offering at little or no up-front cost to you. Offering swag bags with glassware, vinyl stickers, and coasters is certainly tempting, but the issue with this strategy is the swag bag does not offer a long-term benefit to stay on the list. Without that long-term benefit, you won't retain the email list for long-term, and end up spending a lot of money for relatively small gains. Make the actual email itself valuable, and you'll grow a healthy list that will consistently get great open rates, and low unsubscribe rates.

Develop Your Exclusive Event Bonus

There is a lot to do at beer festivals, so it can be difficult to hold a person's attention long enough to get them to sign up. The purpose of the bonus offer is to overcome short attention span, and to get people to sign up to the list right now. Since you have an enticing long-term benefit for people to stay on your email list, all you need to do is get them to sign up while at the festival.

This is where you can do things like branded glassware, vinyl stickers, and bottle opener keychains. These take-home items help you stick out after the event, because your branding will be on the items. If you do something like vinyl stickers, it also lets your diehard customers promote your brewery. Of course, the bonus doesn't have to be swag. It could also be an exclusive invitation to an event at your brewery. These exclusive invitations give people a scheduled reason to go to your brewery after the event, and that alone is a powerful thing.

Execute!

On the day of the event, set up a sign-up sheet on your table, and place a sign that directs people to it. Strategically place your sheet so that when people fill it out, they won't get in the way of the line of people who want to sample your beer. Make sure someone is managing this process directly - don't try to juggle the mailing list and the the beer taps at the same time! Both your tap and the email list require full attention to keep everything running smoothly. People hate to wait at beer festivals, so make sure you have the resources on-hand to get this done quickly.

Conclusion

This is a ton of work, but I believe that the cost of not implementing these strategies at beer events will cost you a lot more than time in the long run. As more breweries continue to join the market, it will only continue to get harder to stand out amongst your peers.

My 20-point list of email offer ideas will help you grow your email list faster. You can get that here.