Event Follow-Up Email Campaign System
After every event, attendee follow-up was ad hoc — some people got emails, some didn't, and replies vanished into individual inboxes. Warm leads went cold because nobody owned the follow-up.
Industry
Events and community-driven small business
Role
Systems consultant — workflow design, automation build, documentation
Impact
Follow-up went from partial to consistent and reviewable — every attendee gets a timed sequence, and the team works replies from one sheet instead of scattered inboxes.
01 - Problem
The problem
The team ran regular events and was good at the events themselves — the problem started the morning after. Attendee lists lived in whatever the registration tool exported, follow-up emails were written from scratch by whoever had time, and no one shared a view of who'd been contacted. Some attendees got a thank-you within a day; others heard nothing. When someone replied with real interest, the reply sat in one inbox and the lead quietly went cold.
The real issue was structure, not automation: no single definition of an 'attendee', no consistent place the data lived, no agreed follow-up sequence. So I worked those out with the team first — which segments matter (attended vs. no-show, engaged vs. quiet), what each email says, and who owns a reply. Only then did building the workflow automation make sense.
02 - System Flow
How the system moves
Event ends
attendee list lands in Sheets
Clean and dedupe
Make scenario normalizes records
Segment attendees
engagement tags pushed to Mailchimp
Timed sequence sends
Mailchimp automation, three emails
Engagement flows back
Make writes opens and clicks
Replies get flagged
routed to tracking sheet
Team reviews sheet
weekly pass, clear owners
03 - Build
What I built
Attendee intake and segmentation
Each event's export drops into a structured Google Sheet with fixed columns — name, email, event, attended or no-show, engagement notes. A Make scenario cleans and dedupes on email so repeat attendees aren't re-added, then pushes each person into Mailchimp with segment tags. The sheet structure came first; the automation only works because every event now produces the same shape of data.
Timed follow-up sequence in Mailchimp
A three-email Mailchimp automation: a thank-you within a day, a resources or recap email a few days later, and a soft next-step about a week out. Segments drive the content — attendees and no-shows get different first emails, and people who engage early get a more direct next step. The team edits copy per event from a short checklist I documented and never touches the automation logic.
Engagement tracking back into the sheet
Mailchimp activity flows back through Make into a tracking tab — opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and replies on each attendee's row, with an owner column for anything needing a human. This API integration turned the sheet into a lightweight reporting dashboard the team reviews weekly: who's warm, who replied, who's handled. I handed it over with a one-page runbook covering per-event setup and what to check if a scenario errors.
04 - Impact
Business impact
Every attendee now gets a follow-up within a day of the event, instead of whenever someone remembered — the gap from 'great event' to 'first email' used to run a week or more.
Follow-up prep that took an afternoon of copy-pasting names into drafts now takes a few minutes of reviewing the sheet and confirming the segments.
Replies and warm leads stopped falling through the cracks — they land in one tracking sheet with an owner column, not whoever's inbox caught them.
The team can compare events against each other — same sequence, same columns — turning post-event review from a gut-feel conversation into a quick look at one sheet.
05 - Edge Cases
What had to be handled
Attendees at multiple events match on email before anything sends, so they get the sequence once and their row is updated rather than duplicated.
Typo'd or bounced email addresses are flagged in a separate tab instead of failing silently, so the team can fix or discard them.
Anyone who unsubscribes mid-sequence is suppressed by Mailchimp and marked in the sheet, so no one follows up manually with someone who opted out.
No-shows are segmented separately and get a softer 'sorry we missed you' email rather than the post-event sequence, which would read as tone-deaf.
06 - Improvements
What I would improve next
Connect the tracking sheet to the team's CRM so warm replies create or update a contact automatically — the sheet was the right first step, but shouldn't be the system of record forever.
Add a reply-detection step in Make that drafts suggested responses for common reply types (slides, next event), so the team reviews and sends rather than writing from scratch.
Build per-event-type sequence variants — a workshop and a networking night deserve different follow-up, and right now one merge field carries the difference.
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