Conference incentives: How B2B event marketers drive attendance and pipeline

Events are one of the highest-ROI channels in B2B marketing. 72% of marketers say events are their most effective marketing channel, and companies using event-led growth are 140% more likely to hit 50%+ company growth. But how can you boost the chances that your event generates enough attendance, engagement, and pipeline to justify the spend?

Let incentives do the heavy lifting, that’s how.

See how B2B marketers use digital rewards before, during, and after conferences. You’ll drive registrations, boost booth traffic, and accelerate post-event conversions, all while sticking to a reasonable budget.

What is an event incentive?

An event incentive is any reward that motivates people to attend or participate in your event and associated activities. These incentives can include anything from a game or lottery prize to a gift card or dinner voucher. 

Conference incentives are not the same as swag. Branded pens, tote bags, and t-shirts are a form of marketing, but they don't drive behavior the same way targeted rewards do. 

Swag is given indiscriminately; incentives are tied to a specific action, like registering before a deadline, stopping by your booth, booking a demo, or completing a post-event survey. That means you can connect incentives to measurable outcomes rather than just brand impressions.

Marketing incentives that drive action

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What are the different types of event incentives?

There are a number of different incentives you can offer event and webinar attendees, and some are more apt than others depending on your goals. For example, if you’re looking to increase attendance at a sponsored happy hour event, it may make sense to offer Uber credits to cover each participant’s ride to and from the venue. 

This is something we’ve done at Tremendous to promote events and decrease no-show rates. It’s a welcome added convenience that gives potential attendees one less thing to worry about. 

Meanwhile, if you want to drive qualified prospects to your booth, consider offering a visible reward, like a gift card or raffle entry, for anyone who stops by and books a demo.

This tactic works well throughout the conference day. A booth incentive creates a concrete reason to stop, and the interaction gives your team a chance to qualify the lead and book a follow-up.

However you decide to use incentives, the type of reward you choose matters.

Gifts and vouchers 

These are great for getting people in the door or encouraging them to engage at your booth or sessions. Offer a gift card to those who fill out a survey or sign up for a demo, or give every attendee a lunch voucher just for showing up. 

Gift cards are the dominant format driving that performance: they're flexible, globally redeemable, and actually wanted. The IRF's 2025 Industry Outlook found gift cards account for at least 43% of all incentives used in North America. Both North American (65%) and European (77%) organizations expect event gifting budgets to grow this year.

Gifts and vouchers can be physical or digital, and you don’t need to spend much to get your attendees’ attention. Even $10-$25 for coffee or lunch will suffice. If you use Tremendous to send it, recipients can choose how they want to redeem their reward. These gifts will be useful for anyone, just about anywhere, even if there’s no Starbucks nearby. 

Games, contests, and lotteries 

These encourage engagement at your booth and throughout the conference floor. A trivia question about your product or industry with a $10 prize gives people a reason to stop and interact. A raffle entry for anyone who books a demo drives sustained traffic to your booth throughout the day. This kind of structure lets your team get creative while generating foot traffic, qualified conversations, and demo sign-ups.

Access and discounts

Examples are special pricing or access to exclusive content. Both can make guests feel like they’re getting something unique and limited, and it won’t break the bank for you.

A good incentive strategy stacks multiple types of incentives. Offering a gift card for a demo booking, for example, and ending with an exclusive referral reward offer can influence attendee behavior during and after your event. 

Are event incentives actually effective?

Three behavioral principles say incentives work:

Reciprocity makes upfront incentives especially powerful. When you give something before asking for anything in return, recipients feel a natural pull to respond. 

A 2021 study by Bretschi, Schaurer, and Dillman confirmed that prepaid incentives are more effective at influencing behavior than promised incentives. They establish trust and trigger a hard-wired social instinct to reciprocate. 

This is why a gift card sent ahead of an event can drive higher registration rates than the same gift card promised after attendance.

Positive reinforcement

This principle shapes behavior during your event. Operant conditioning (B.F. Skinner's framework for how rewards shape behavior) holds that actions followed by a positive outcome are more likely to be repeated. 

When attendees are rewarded for specific actions (stopping by your booth, answering a question, booking a time with your team) they're more likely to repeat those actions and stay engaged.

Urgency

Urgency drives early commitments. Marketing researchers call this the mere urgency effect. People tend to act on time-sensitive offers even when the underlying task isn't a priority. Time-limited incentives, like early-bird discounts and registration bonuses with deadlines, push decision-making forward. They convert fence-sitters into confirmed attendees.

Reciprocity, positive reinforcement, and urgency are what drive the effectiveness of pre-conference, during-conference, and post-conference incentives.

Pre-conference incentives

The goal of pre-conference incentives is to increase registrations, reduce no-shows, and get the right people in the room. Reciprocity is the mechanism: give first, and your prospects are more likely to commit.

Registration incentives are the most common application. Offer a gift card, prepaid card, or digital reward to anyone who registers by a specific date. The incentive doesn't need to be large, but it needs to be delivered before the event, not promised afterward.

VIP access incentives work well when you want to attract senior decision-makers. Exclusive briefings, analyst access, or invitation-only dinners before the event fully kicks off create scarcity without requiring a large per-head budget. The perceived value often exceeds the actual cost.

A few principles to keep in mind:

• Deliver the incentive before the event, not as a post-attendance promise

• Set a registration deadline to create urgency around the offer

• Match the reward value to the ask: a $15 coffee card for a 30-minute demo is appropriate; a $100 card for a quick booth visit isn't

During-conference incentives

Once attendees are at your event, incentives shift from driving attendance to driving specific behaviors. Think booth visits, demo bookings, product interactions, and data capture.

Positive reinforcement is the underlying mechanism here. When a specific action (scanning a badge, booking a demo, or answering a question) leads to an immediate reward, attendees are more likely to repeat that action and more likely to remember your brand favorably.

Booth incentives are the most direct application. A prize like a gift card, a raffle entry, or a digital reward sent on the spot gives people a concrete reason to stop and engage with your team. The key is tying the incentive to a qualifying action, rather than handing it to anyone who walks by. That keeps your leads qualified and your booth staff conversations focused.

Demo incentives are one of the highest-value applications at a conference. Offer a $50–$75 digital gift card to any qualified prospect who sits through a 15-minute demo. You're buying time with someone who would otherwise scroll past your booth. 

The conversion math typically works in your favor. When Tremendous tested gift card incentives for demo bookings on LinkedIn, the results were clear: response rates more than doubled and cost per lead dropped by 81%. The same principle applies on the conference floor: incentives turn passive foot traffic into active conversations.

Contest and raffle structures work when you want to drive sustained booth traffic throughout the day rather than a single conversion event. Run a drawing every two hours, and require a badge scan or business card to enter. This creates a reason for prospects to return after their first visit, and it keeps your team's pipeline conversations active all day.

Post-conference incentives

Event teams know that post-conference follow-up is where tons of B2B event ROI is realized or lost. 92% of event teams planned to improve post-event attendee follow-up in 2024, and 77% plan to engage attendees year-round

The problem is that by day three after a conference, your prospects have returned to their normal workload and your follow-up email is competing with dozens of others from other exhibitors. Incentives differentiate you during that window.

Post-event survey incentives are a straightforward way to recover data and pipeline signal. Offer a digital gift card to any attendee who completes a five-question feedback survey. You get structured lead-qualification data; they get a reward for three minutes of their time. 

77% of B2B buyers are more likely to engage when offered personalized experiences. A survey is the fastest way to get the data you need to personalize the follow-up.

Demo-conversion incentives accelerate the deals that started at the event. If a prospect visited your booth but didn't book a full demo, a targeted follow-up can change that. "Thanks for stopping by. Here's a gift card; we'd love 20 minutes to show you [specific feature]."

Referral incentives extend your event's reach beyond the attendee list. Offer a digital reward to attendees who refer a colleague or customer who books a demo or attends a future event. This is particularly effective for community-driven companies or products with strong word-of-mouth dynamics.

How much should you spend on event incentives?

Setting a budget for incentives can be challenging. While 72% of event planners say events are more valuable than before the pandemic. If you don’t hit the sweet spot with incentive amounts, they could quickly stretch your overall event budget past its limits.

According to the IRF's 2025 Trends Report, the $50–$100 merchandise reward range is the fastest-growing in North America, and the average per-person gift card spend was $142 in 2024. $50 and $100 gift cards now account for half of all distributions.

But how much you offer should vary by how attendees earn them. The bigger the ask, the larger the incentive should be.

A few things to factor into your budget:

• 58% of event planners expect event costs to rise 5–14% in the coming year, so build in a buffer.

• Digital incentive delivery eliminates shipping costs and logistics overhead. That makes for meaningful savings at scale.

• Set a per-event cap and track redemption rates so you can optimize the incentive mix over time.

The right spend is the amount that makes your cost-per-qualified-meeting or cost-per-pipeline-dollar competitive with your other demand-generation channels. If a $50 gift card converts a booth visit into a demo that closes at your average rate, the math is straightforward.

Case study: An event company used digital incentives to boost sales by 200%

Like we said: many companies use incentives to increase event attendance and encourage participation, but few have quantified the difference between incentivizing vs. not. 

However, there is one company that has measured the impact incentives make on event attendance: FUSION Performance Group. The full-service events organization specializes in hosting and measuring the ROI of in-person and online events. 

When the pandemic hit, FUSION teamed up with Tremendous to build a virtual events playbook in keeping with global stay-at-home mandates. FUSION automated incentives for things like event registrations and feedback surveys. 

They devised a host of different incentives based on different kinds of events, and issued them all digitally. 

“We love to find a way to really customize the experience in the theme of the event,” said Lynn Davis-Hickman, IS & Resources Manager at FUSION Performance Group. “For example, in a recent western-themed event, everyone got a gift card to have a custom hat made. Clients still want to offer an experience, but stop giving away gifts no one wants.”

Since switching to Tremendous to incentivize event attendance and participation, FUSION has seen sales more than double. 

“We send hundreds, even thousands of people incentives they’ll actually use and appreciate in a matter of moments,” Lynn said. 

Key takeaways

When considering which incentives to use for your event, it’s helpful to tie them to trackable goals. 

• Drive registrations: Deliver a prepaid incentive before the event to trigger reciprocity; set a deadline to create urgency.

• Generate pipeline at the event: Tie booth and demo incentives to qualifying actions, not passive presence.

• Accelerate post-event conversions: Use targeted follow-ups with a reward to stand out in a crowded inbox.

The value of an incentive (perceived or actual) doesn’t have to be large, but it should depend on the value of the action.

When most people think of giveaways and incentives at events, they think of swag. But realistically, cheap swag gets thrown out. What most people really want is money. 

Tremendous gives eventgoers the gift of choice. Send dozens (or thousands) of digital incentives attendees can redeem however they want. With more than 1,000 ways to redeem, there’s something for everyone. 

Brand the digital reward with your logo and colors so attendees remember you fondly. Tremendous rewards take minutes to personalize and send, and seconds to redeem. 

Want to supercharge your event marketing strategy? Talk to our sales team, or sign up now.

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