If you have an event coming up, you really should be using email marketing to ensure its success. Email marketing is one of the best ways to build awareness of your event. It’s also a great way to keep your prospects and future attendees up-to-date, so they become more excited as the event gets closer.
The beauty of email marketing is that it can be used through every stage of planning and organizing your event. Here are some examples.
10 Emails to Promote Your Event
When it comes to using email marketing for events, you could:
- Alert your subscribers about a future event.
- Converse with your mailing list to gather ideas for new and upcoming events.
- Send an email to sell exclusive early bird tickets.
- Keep your list up to date about new event announcements.
- Keep speakers, vendors, and bands up to date with important information.
- Remind ticket holders about the event a couple of weeks, and a few days, before the big day.
- Use email to promote sponsors and ambassadors.
- Round up what happened at the event, including links for anyone who wants to learn more.
- Follow up with attendees after the event to thank people and to gather feedback.
- Pre-sell tickets for next year’s event.
The list goes on. No matter where you’re at with planning your event, email marketing can be a huge help, and a medium you shouldn’t ignore. To help get you on the right path, here are six tips for successfully using email marketing for events.
1. Use a Targeted List Where Possible
When it comes to using email marketing to promote your event, your email list should be as targeted as possible. This ensures a high open and click rate. It will also prevent people from unsubscribing due to the irrelevance of the content you’re sending out
For example, if you’re running a small event in London, you might want to exclude subscribers from the US in your promotional emails. That’s unless you’re throwing a huge event that people want to fly across an ocean for. Excluding subscribers based on geolocation data is easily done with most email service providers.
As another example, if you’re sending out, say, 15 messages promoting your event, if a group of subscribers haven’t interacted at all with your first 5-7 messages, consider whether it’s worth sending them the rest of your emails. It might be best to exclude them from all but the most important of your promotional messages.
In short: Always consider whether each of your promotions should be targeted at your entire list, or rather at a smaller segment of your list.
2. Clearly State Your Value Proposition
Make sure your reader knows why they should even attend your event. What are they going to get from turning up? What pain-points will be solved? How will your event help them achieve their goals?
For example, is the aim to make new contacts, learn something new, make more profit, relax, have fun, build influence? Figure out how to sell this value proposition in the fewest words possible so you can use this message throughout your promotions.
This is because even a free event requires people to spend something that’s valuable to them — their time. So make it clear what they will receive in exchange for attending the event.
In short: Regularly let people know what benefit(s) they will receive from attending your events.
3. Key Information Should Be Easy to Access
Aside from the date, time, and place of the event, include plenty of other details that show what attendees will enjoy during the event. This sounds blindingly obvious, but there are far too many event organizers that unknowingly hide important information away.
Key information should not be more than a couple of clicks away. To help with this, tweak the email template you will be using to promote your event. It should include links in the header or footer to the most important information. For example: Buy Tickets, Event Schedule, Speakers, Directions, Contact. These links should point directly to the relevant information, not simply your home page.
In other words, think about what lack of information might stop someone from purchasing a ticket while looking at this email. Then include easy access to that information. Reducing friction like this, at every step of the buyer journey, is key to getting enough attendees to your event.
In short: Each email must provide access to key information within a maximum of two clicks.
4. Make Your Email Template Mobile Friendly
About 75% of people who read your emails will do so on a handheld device — either a smartphone, or a tablet. This is why it’s so important to make sure your email template is mobile friendly. If you’re using a template provided by your email service provider, you likely don’t need to worry about this. Alternatively, we’ve listed 25 high quality responsive HTML email templates you might want to check out.
Whatever template you use, always send yourself a test email and check the message on both desktop and mobile. You should be looking out for any problems with appearance, how fast or slow the message loads, whether the message has been clipped, if the text seems too small, etc.
If your message doesn’t load properly and quickly, readers will likely close your email and move on. That’s not a great way to get people to attend your event.
In short: Always check that your emails load fast and display correctly on both desktop and mobile devices.
5. Use a Clear and Bold Call To Action (CTA)
Make sure that your CTA actually gets your readers to take action (ideally reserving a ticket). On average, readers spend about 11 seconds skimming a message, so there’s a very good chance they’re not reading every word that you’ve slaved over.
This is where good layouting comes in. A good headline that gets across your value proposition. A nice image. And deliberate positioning, color, size, and text of your CTA button. All of this works together to get your readers to hit that “Buy Now” or “Learn More” CTA.
One excellent way of making sure you’re using the right CTA is to use A/B testing. Most email service providers offer this feature, and if you have a good number of subscribers (at least a couple thousand), you’ll be able to definitively figure out the best CTA for your audience. This works by sending a small percentage of your list one CTA, and another small percentage of your list a different CTA. You can then keep an eye on which CTA performs best, before sending your message to the rest of your list.
Check your email service provider’s help documents for more information on A/B testing.
In short: Test your call to action to ensure it’s as effective as possible.
6. Time Your Messages Carefully
Finally, think about the timing of your messages. You’ll want to schedule your email campaigns so they arrive in your readers’ inboxes at the most convenient time. Often, this is just before they check for any incoming new messages. This ensures that your message will be near the top of their inbox.
If you’re targeting people when they are at work, perhaps sending the email at 9:15am will work for you. Or if you want to catch people before or after work, maybe 8am or 5:30pm might be best. Or maybe you want to contact people over the weekend when they’re less busy.
If you really don’t know what day and time to send your messages out, start with the midday-midweek rule. According to analysts at Moosend, the most effective time to send emails is after lunch time between 2pm and 4pm, Tuesdays thru Thursdays. These are the times and days when a majority of people may have lighter workloads, and have the spare time to read through emails for a couple of minutes before going back to their routine.
In short: Schedule your messages strategically to achieve maximum open rates
Using Email Marketing For Events
As you can see, email marketing offers a huge amount of promise when it comes to hosting successful events. It’s a medium that can be used during every stage from planning and organization, to gathering post-event feedback. So provided you keep the above tips in mind, and approach email marketing for events strategically, your events will benefit from positives that come with email marketing.
