Hosting events is a great way to reach a lot of prospects at once and can be an effective sales channel, but that only works if enough people show up. That's difficult if you don't already have a large brand presence or network. To increase attendees, send invitations the way you'd run sales outbound: identify the audience for the event, draft messages to them individually, and run a campaign to send each person their own invitation.
Build the invite list like a prospect list
Start with volume and invite more people than you need. Registration rates might be low, and some people who register won't show up.
Build the list the way you'd build a prospect list: filtered to the event's topic rather than your general ICP. Sliq's Founder-Led Sales Workshop, for example, is more relevant to early-stage founders rather than GTM leaders at mid-market companies.
If your event has limited capacity, rank the list from strongest to weakest fit. You can send invitations gradually, just like an email campaign, so inviting the strongest fits first lets you open the event up to the rest of the list only if you still have room.
Make the invite worth opening
Send the invitation from a real person's mailbox or from your LinkedIn profile rather than a no-reply address. That way the invitation opens a communication channel you can keep using.
Lead with the highest-value part of the event in your message. If there's a hands-on workshop or a Q&A with a compelling speaker, that belongs near the top of the message, not at the bottom.
Hi [name],
I came across your work at [company] and wanted to personally invite you to a panel we're hosting: "[event title]" on [date] in [city].
Confirmed speakers:
[Name], [title] at [company]
[Name], [title] at [company]
[One line on why this panel is interesting — the tension, the debate, the thing people disagree about.]
[Date, time, location.] You can register here.
Sync your CRM with the event registrations
This is the part most people do by hand. You invited 300 people; some registered, some replied, and some declined. Reconciling which is which means going back and forth comparing your inbox against event registrations.
Luma is popular event software with APIs available (we promise this isn't sponsored!), which makes it straightforward to connect to Sliq. An agent can pull the full guest list for an event, match those guests against everyone it invited, and update each person's status automatically.
One of our users ran the following workflow end-to-end to invite prospects to a recent panel they hosted:
Each day Sliq pulled net-new people from their prospect list, sorted them by how well they fit, and emailed the highest ranked prospects first.
Sliq sent each person a personalized invite sent via founder's own mailbox.
Finally Sliq pulled the event's guest list from Luma and matched the guests against everyone it had emailed, flipping each row in their Google Sheets tracker from Invited to Registered or to Responded for anyone who replied to their invitation message.
Continue outreach after the event
Once the event is over, you can turn those RSVPs into pipeline by following up with individuals in your ICP (including the people who didn't make it).
That's the other half of this play: how to follow up with people who attended
In order to easily run outreach after the event, make sure the event registration form asked for attendees’ email address and/or a LinkedIn URL. Those two fields helps you reach people afterwards.
Automate this process
Sliq can source your invite list, send a personalized invite to each person from your mailbox, and update your records with every invitee's status. You approve the invitation message; Sliq handles the sourcing, the sending, and the tracking. Once the event is done, the same agent can run the follow-ups.
If you don't use Luma, upload or paste your invite list and the campaign runs the same way — you just won't get the automatic registration sync. Click here to set it up.
Got an outreach problem? Hit reply and tell us. We’d love to help you!