Events, badge scanning and the introduction email
Tagging everything you capture at a show, what a badge scanner can and cannot read, and the one message that goes out afterwards.
Add the event first
On Contacts, add the show with its dates. Anything captured while it is running is tagged with it automatically — through a card, a form or the badge scanner — so nobody has to remember to file anything at the end of a long day.
That is the whole point of the feature. Six months later, "how did Birmingham go" is a question your contact list can answer.
What a badge scanner can read
Badges carry one of three things, and only one of them is readable by anybody who is not the event's organiser.
**Contact details** — a vCard, a MECARD, or text with an address in it. Common at smaller events. These are read straight into a contact.
**An identifier** — a badge number that means nothing on its own, with the attendee's details held behind the organiser's own lead-retrieval system and an exhibitor licence. This is the usual arrangement at large shows, and it is deliberate: lead retrieval is something organisers sell. Nothing outside that show can resolve one, and the scanner says so rather than appearing to fail.
**An encrypted payload** — the same idea, unreadable without the organiser's system.
What "scan any badge" means elsewhere
Some tools advertise scanning any badge at any event. What they are doing is photographing the printed badge, reading the words on it, and buying the rest — an address, a job title — from a data provider.
That is worth knowing rather than envying, because the result is a different thing. Badges frequently leave the address off on purpose. An address that was guessed from a name and a company was never given to anybody, which matters both for whether it is correct and for whether you were entitled to it.
The introduction email
Under Team, you can turn on one message that goes to somebody whose details you have just taken, straight away or after a short wait, so they have yours before they have forgotten who you were.
**It sends once and there is no second message.** That is deliberate rather than unfinished. Somebody who handed over their details agreed to hear from you about that; a sequence is marketing, with different rules and a different set of obligations. The message says it is the only one and how to say if it was unwanted.
It is never sent to an imported list, whatever the source column says — an import is somebody else's list, and writing to it is the easiest possible version of this mistake to make.
It comes from our address with your name in front of it, and replies go to you. That way it arrives reliably without you having to change anything about your own domain.