After 11 years of experience, and lots of failed and successful campaigns, we have created a fool-proof event email marketing guide.
This will help you only if you read it and implement it. OR you can directly move to the case study that would compel you to read this whole article.
If you are just now starting with email marketing for events or need a refresher, here are 8 key elements for driving at least 30X ROI from your upcoming email campaigns.
A recent survey shows that more and more organizers are using email as a marketing tool for events. But this isn’t a surprise to me, as event email marketing is one of the most powerful channels for event promotion ideas.
Fun fact: As per Statista, the event industry is prone to 3200% returns on their investments in email marketing.
What is email marketing for events?
Basically, email marketing is one of the most profitable ways to promote your next event.
It has the potential to promote your event and make it go viral, or it can be used to keep your existing customers coming back for more.
Myth buster: Email marketing is not just about broadcasting your message to masses of people. It’s also about staying in touch with your attendees.
What can you do with event mailers?
- notify people about upcoming events
- keep them up-to-date on event details and send reminders
- and provide opportunities to encourage attendees to share their experiences
Do you know why event marketers prefer email marketing over other means of promotion? Read on and see!
Importance of email marketing for events
Email marketing best practices are essential for all businesses, no matter what their size.
Benefits of mail-blasting for event marketers,
- one of the most cost-effective means to reach out to target audiences
- provide valuable information and it will potentially lead them to actively engage with your brand and become a customer
- when used effectively it can improve your search rankings and increase your website traffic
Check out what experts say about the benefits of marketing via emails.
How do you market an event through email?
With mailers, you can reach out to your audience with a targeted campaign that will make sure they know about your event.
Here are the obvious but most neglected steps for the best event email marketing:
1. Figure out your audience
Who are you trying to reach? What are their interests? What do they care about? How can you reach them in an authentic way that fits with the kind of person they are?
2. Find ways to connect with them
Do they have social media accounts? Do they like getting postcards in the mail? Can you send them something that will make them remember your event and want to come back for more?
3. Targeting is key
Don’t just send the same thing to everyone! Your audience is unique, so make sure your marketing materials are too!
Pro Tip: You can also try and learn to target your audience through event advertising campaigns.
What are the 3 types of marketing emails?
While experimenting with tons of mailers, we created 3 buckets and sorted mails into these categories. Here’s how these categories will help you get the most out of your email marketing campaigns.
1. The promotional email
Most commonly used. These mails will highly impact your ticket sales. Don’t take them lightly.
You will be using these mails to announce a new event, early beard ticketing, special discounts, or to remind audience to buy tickets before the ticket sale closure.
2. The transactional email
Low impact on revenue. But high impact in building brand value and awareness.
These mails are usually triggered by user action, like purchasing tickets or sharing your event. Marketers use these types of emails to thank attendees.
These mails will help you increase attendee engagement and give them additional information about their recent activities and what they can do next like share your event on social media.
3. The relationship-building email
High impact, but depends on how you market it. For instance, you can share “funny behind the scenes” of your event with attendees to create a fear of missing out and make them interested in coming.
Or you can create an aura of suspense and offer a surprise event or celebrity so that they will be eager to refer the event to their family and friends.
In short, You will be focusing on building one-one connections with your followers and attendees.
Articles that will help event planners: 1. 15 Unique & Interesting Event Theme Ideas 2. Sell Last-Minute Event Tickets With These Tactics 3. Top 20 Event Quotes That Event Planners will Relate
Top 5 tips to improve the success rate of your email marketing campaign
When people receive tons of emails every single day, do you think your mail will stand out?
Yes? Then consider the following points that might change your mind.
Do you write compelling event email subject lines?
On average, a person receives more than 100 emails per day. Out of those, 10 are barely opened.
A lot of email campaigns go unnoticed by the target audience just because they didn’t have a catchy subject line.
Pro tip: To get your email opened by attendees, you need to add something that would feel like a genuine clickbait.
Here I have explained and given some catchy email subject lines that will help you skyrocket the open rate.
Create high-quality content that will engage your readers
Don’t spend hours writing and editing something only to see it fail. Keep this checklist in mind to finish the job quickly and effectively!
- Keep it short and sweet
- Make sure your content is relevant to your audience
- Use images and videos as much as possible
- Write in a language they talk in
- Write from the heart, not just from a template
Pro tip: Keep the recipient in mind while creating the mailer. This will help you create the piece of event email that people will find some connection with.
Optimize CTA in your mails
We recently observed that optimizing your call to action (CTA) can increase conversions by up to 20%. Here’s how:
- Use a CTA that matches the offer. If you’re offering something specific, like “Download our toolkit,” then use that exact phrase in your CTA. If you’re offering something broader, like “Check out our new blog posts,” use something like “Learn more”.
- Avoid using a strong verb for the CTA. You need to ensure that you avoid words that would increase the spam words.
Note: When someone reads an email, they’ll often scan it quickly without reading every word—they’ll read only what interests them at the beginning of each sentence or paragraph.
Pro tip: The most important information should come first so that readers can easily see what they want right off the bat.
Select an awesome template (which can be surprisingly tricky!)
What type of mail do you think people like? Do they like boring mails with long texts? No! People like well-designed mails that will catch their eye and compel them to take a look.
Now, here comes the hack to improve mail engagement. It’s called HTML mails. They are widely used by event marketers and have no link to coding as there are many attractive email templates available that will make your job easy.
3 steps to send HTML emails:
- Download free templates
- Edit file in HTML editor like sublimetext
- Copy-paste that code into the email sender
OR
- List your events on AllEvents
- Import subscribers
- You can automatically send an HTML invitation email to your attendees for FREE
Don’t be pushy! And don’t Spam!
One thing that people don’t like is getting poked every now and then. So, you need to give them space such that they convert instead of hitting the unsubscribe button.
The first thing you need to do is, segregate your leads. Then prioritize and schedule your emails. Also, ensure that you don’t send more than one mail in 2-3 days, or else they’ll get bugged.
Pro tip: This is extreme, but if someone hasn’t opened an email from you in a month or two (or even three), it’s probably time for them to go on an unsubscribe list. Why? Scroll down!
Avoid this mistake while launching campaigns!
We once received a letter from overseas just because we kept sending them promotional emails even though they were not interested.
Here’s a snap of it.
Example of event email marketing that got us 34X ROI
Now here comes the interesting part. Out of our many high-yield mail blasts, there was one typical mailer that caught our eye.
We launched a campaign, where we only intended on giving value. But we ended up with significant returns.
What was the mailer about?
The objective was to help event organizers to get leads and sell tickets. To do this we sent custom mailers to their followers so that they would be notified about the new events.
Here’s an example of a mail for our organizer pH Designs.
What did we do differently?
We knew that the best options won’t get the receivers compelled to read it.
So, we dived into the perspective of the recipient. We kept the name of a client with whom we had interacted and kept them as a reference while drafting the mail.
The above method might seem odd, but trust me, you’ve already crossed the biggest hurdle if you try this.
Next was to improve the open rate. The subject line had to be optimized. To do this, we made the content catchy and made it personalized. To add a cherry on top, we embedded emojis. For instance, early bird tickets gets attendees a sense of urgency to buy tickets.
Secret tip: We check the mail’s readability with mobile as well as desktop before launching it.
Never forget A/B testing
This is something that we have drilled into our minds. We create 3-4 versions of mail and test it to check which one’s working best.
Remember: Don’t keep the test period too long or super short. Otherwise, you’ll end up either wasting time or not having sufficient test data.
Pro tip: To get a better look at our marketing campaigns, take a look at how we pushed 800+ tickets sales in Jewelry Exhibition.
Let’s conclude our discussion on email marketing for events…
So, what did we learn? We learned that event email marketing campaigns can increase your ROI multifold.
And we learned that if you’re looking to get more out of your event marketing efforts, you need to be thinking about how to communicate with your audience in a way that’s both effective and personal.
We hope that this article helped you understand why event email marketing is so effective, and how you can use it to drive real results for your business. Good luck with your next campaign!
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