Hopin acquires Attendify, gears up for Zoom battle

Well it’s a heady day over at virtual events platform Hopin. Only just over two years old now, the London-based unicorn has announced the acquisition of competitor Attendify, thereby expanding its event marketing suite offer. This marks Hopin’s fifth acquisition in the past year, and they’re clearly angling to be the winner of the virtual events pile. That is if upcoming Zoom Events doesn’t dramatically change the game.

Attendify bills itself as, “a fully integrated mobile and online event platform that’s easy to deploy, designed to engage, and purpose-built for today’s hybrid and virtual events,” however it’s clear that Hopin isn’t after the “event platform” as much as Attendify’s event marketing features. With this acquisition Hopin is expected to fully leverage this tech, citing the ability to, “empower organizers with the elevated tools they need to reach more audiences.”

Specifically, Hopin will use the Attendify tech via an upcoming introduction of Audience CRM tools, thereby allowing event organisers access to automatically captured attendee engagement metrics and intent signals. The new feature will measure which attendee visited a sponsor, voted in a poll, or engaged with a session. Likewise, by plugging Attendify tech into Hopin, event marketers will have access to a campaign manager that will flip the switch on an email engine that can be used to drive registrations, trigger information sent out to registrants, and engage audiences between programmes.

Meanwhile … While Zoom has signaled their intent to move up to the Hopin space, Hopin isn’t waiting around for the dust to settle, and today announced its new free event management plan.

Clearly making the downmarket move, Hopin’s free plan includes gatherings of up to 100 organiser invited participants that can last up to two hours. Features that we’ve all become accustomed to include networking, Q&A, polls, and whiteboarding. Not to be confused with waterboarding, as that’s a whooooole other platform altogether.

“As we continue to help our customers navigate a reshaped events industry, our focus remains on investing in Hopin’s all-in-one platform, including augmenting it with intuitive marketing tools,” commented Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat. “With the addition of Attendify, our event marketing suite gets even better and we can deliver more meaningful tools to organizers that drive growth. And now, access to our platform is even easier, no matter the event budget. With our new free plan, anyone can create events, wherever they are.”