You know exactly who should be at your event. You haven't reached most of them yet. Outreach emails going to spam because the sending infrastructure isn't set up properly. Ticket funnel leaking at checkout. No ICP prospect list for the next edition. MercuryMinds builds pre-show outreach systems — ICP prospect list building, deliverability-optimised cold email infrastructure and ticket funnel CRO — so the right people are in the room before the doors open.
The Problem
"We're 10 weeks out from our industry conference. We've emailed our list three times. We're at 40% of our target attendance. We know exactly what company profile and job title we need in the room — but we've never built an outbound prospecting system. We don't have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator workflow. Our cold email bounces 22%. We don't know what's happening at the checkout."
The gap between who attends your event and who should attend your event is a pre-show outreach and ticket funnel problem. Most event teams have a warm list (past attendees, email subscribers) and a social media following — and little else. The right attendees who've never heard of your event, the ICP prospects who would benefit from attending but haven't been reached, the checkout abandoners who started registration and didn't complete it — these are all solvable problems. They require specific infrastructure: ICP list building, deliverability-optimised sending, LinkedIn outreach sequences and funnel analytics. MercuryMinds builds the system, not just the email templates.
Where Pre-Show Acquisition Fails
Only reaching people who already know the event
Sending to your existing list reaches people already familiar with your brand. Reaching the right ICP prospects who've never heard of your event requires outbound prospecting — a different system entirely from email marketing to existing subscribers.
Cold email going to spam before it's seen
Cold email infrastructure — dedicated sending domains, warm-up sequences, DKIM/DMARC/SPF configuration, bounce rate management — determines whether your outreach is seen or filtered. Sending from your main domain without this infrastructure damages deliverability across your entire email operation.
Ticket funnel leaking at multiple stages
The journey from "interested" to "registered and paid" has multiple drop-off points — landing page, pricing page, checkout flow and payment confirmation. Without funnel analytics, you don't know which stage is losing the most registrations.
Wrong attendees registering from broad targeting
Filling seats with any attendees rather than ICP-matched attendees produces a room that sponsors and exhibitors don't value — and reduces the quality of networking for the right attendees who do come, affecting retention for the next edition.
What We Build
Every system below is a live production deployment for event outreach, ICP prospecting and ticket funnel optimisation. Built to fill seats with the right attendees — not just any attendees.
Automated ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) prospect list construction for event outreach — built from your specific attendee persona definition (industry, company size, job title, geography, seniority level) using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, Clay and supplementary data enrichment. Output: a verified, deduplicated prospect list of companies and contacts who match your ICP and who are not already registered for the event. Sized to your outreach capacity per campaign window.
→ Verified ICP prospect list, deduplicated against existing registrants
Dedicated cold email sending infrastructure — separate sending domains (not your main domain), domain warm-up sequences, DKIM/DMARC/SPF configuration, bounce rate monitoring and automatic removal of hard bounces. Sending platform configured (Instantly, Lemlist, Smartlead or equivalent) with rotation across multiple sending accounts to manage sending volume without triggering spam filters. Protects your main domain's deliverability from cold sending reputation effects.
→ Dedicated sending domain, warm-up complete, deliverability-optimised infrastructure
Multi-touch cold email sequence targeting ICP prospects — initial email (event introduction, why this specific recipient should attend, social proof), follow-up 1 (different angle — speaker highlight or session preview), follow-up 2 (scarcity/deadline — early bird closing, limited places), follow-up 3 (breakup email). Personalised at company and job title level from ICP list data. Response handling workflow for interested prospects — direct to registration or hand-off to event sales team.
→ 4-touch sequence, personalised at ICP level, response routing
LinkedIn outreach sequence via Sales Navigator — connection request with personalised message, acceptance follow-up highlighting event value for this specific prospect's role and industry, content sharing (session highlights, speaker announcements), and direct registration link with early bird pricing. Coordinated with cold email so LinkedIn and email touches are sequenced rather than simultaneous. Suitable for senior ICP profiles where LinkedIn response rates exceed email.
→ LinkedIn sequence, coordinated with email, senior ICP targeting
Instrumented ticket purchase funnel — tracking drop-off at each stage (landing page → pricing page → registration form → checkout → payment confirmation). Identifies the highest-loss stage and specific friction points (form field that causes abandonment, pricing page element that loses comparison shoppers, checkout error that blocks payment). A/B testing framework for funnel improvements. Checkout abandonment recovery email triggered within 2 hours of abandonment.
→ Per-stage funnel analytics, A/B testing, abandonment recovery
Structured referral programme for registered attendees — unique referral links, tracked referral conversions, automatic reward delivery (discount code, cash credit, complimentary upgrade) on referral registration confirmation. Early bird pricing architecture with automated countdown and pricing tier transitions. Referral analytics showing which registered attendees generate the most referrals — identifying your highest-value community advocates for future programme investment.
→ Tracked referral links, auto-reward, early bird tier automation, advocate analytics
Full scope: 13 pre-show outreach use cases
Includes exhibitor-to-attendee referral programme, speaker social amplification, paid social retargeting infrastructure and group booking CRM workflow.
Finding the right attendees for an event requires defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for your attendee — the specific combination of industry, company size, job title, seniority level and geography that describes the attendee who gets the most value from your event and who delivers the most value to sponsors and exhibitors. From this ICP definition, a prospect list is built using LinkedIn Sales Navigator (filtered search by the ICP criteria), supplemented with Apollo or Clay for contact-level enrichment (finding email addresses and phone numbers for prospects who match), and deduplicated against your existing registrant and subscriber lists. The resulting prospect list is a verified set of people who match your ICP and haven't yet registered — the outreach target for the pre-show campaign. For events with 500+ target attendees, this typically means building a prospect list of 5,000–15,000 ICP contacts to achieve the registration conversion required at the expected response rates.
ICP prospecting for events is the process of identifying and building a contact list of individuals who match your Ideal Customer Profile for event attendance — people who work in the right industry, at the right company type and size, in the right role, at the right seniority level, in the right geography — and who haven't yet registered for or engaged with your event. Unlike buying a generic contact list, ICP prospecting builds a list specifically from your attendee persona definition using professional profile data sources (LinkedIn, Apollo, ZoomInfo, Clay) rather than general marketing databases. The output is a higher-response list because the targeting is more specific — a cold email to a prospect who matches your ICP exactly ("VP of Operations at a UK food manufacturer with 200–2,000 employees" attending a food industry operations conference) converts at a meaningfully higher rate than a broad industry email.
Yes — with the distinction that automating pre-show outreach email requires proper infrastructure, not just an email platform. The infrastructure requirements: a dedicated cold email sending domain (separate from your main event domain) to protect your main domain's deliverability, domain warm-up (a 3–6 week process of gradually increasing sending volume to establish sender reputation), DKIM, DMARC and SPF records correctly configured on the sending domain, and a sending platform (Instantly, Lemlist or Smartlead) with rotation across multiple sending accounts to manage daily sending volume within spam filter limits. Without this infrastructure, cold email automation sends your messages to spam before they're read — which is the most common failure mode in event pre-show outreach. MercuryMinds builds the infrastructure first and the email sequences second — the creative is secondary to the deliverability foundation.
Ticket funnel optimisation starts with instrumentation — measuring the exact drop-off rate at each stage of the purchase journey: how many people land on the event page (from any source), how many navigate to the pricing or registration page, how many start the registration form, how many reach checkout, and how many complete payment. Each transition has a drop-off percentage; the stage with the highest drop-off rate is the highest-value optimisation target. Common friction points: pricing page confusion (multiple ticket types not clearly differentiated), registration form length (too many required fields before the payment stage), checkout errors (payment method compatibility, mobile checkout not working), and price shock (no early bird pricing clearly visible, no comparison to competitor events). A/B testing changes to the highest-drop-off stage and measuring the impact on conversion through that stage is the systematic approach. Checkout abandonment recovery email — triggered automatically when someone starts registration and doesn't complete within 2 hours — typically recovers 8–15% of abandoned checkouts.
Related Events Services
Ready to Fill Seats With the Right People?
Tell us your target attendee count, your ICP definition (industry, job title, company size, geography), your current registration number, how many weeks until the event, whether your cold email infrastructure is set up, and what your current ticket funnel conversion rate is. We'll scope the gap.