For event marketers, email is an integral part of the overall strategy. In fact, studies show that 40% of marketers believe email marketing to be the most effective channel for event promotion. Stats like these prove that email marketing is still very much alive. The challenge for event marketers is to craft an email strategy that directly addresses their needs and objectives.
One of these key objectives is event registration. This is always an important metric for success because more registrations results in higher revenue, which provides a stronger ROI. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that live event email marketing campaigns are usually dedicated to boosting event registrations.
Achieving such a task requires a well designed email with a strong call-to-action. Regardless of the industry, a good email inspires some sort of action, whether that be to purchase a product, petition for a cause, or register for an event. The following steps will help you crystallize your message and convince readers to attend your event.
Steps for a successful Event Email Marketing campaign:
1. Segment Your Campaigns
Emails are most impactful when they specifically relate to the reader. If the message is tailored for the recipient, there is a higher likelihood that he or she will respond to the message. Effectively segmenting your email marketing data is key to campaign success. There are numerous ways one can segment an email database and there are specific factors event marketers should always keep in mind. Some of these include:
- Job Title
- Industry
- Geographic Region
- Ticket Type
These characteristics should determine the type of message you plan to send out and the more relevant you can make the email content, the higher the engagement.
2. Keep a Clear Message
A common mistake among emails is cluttered and lengthy messaging. Given that a person receives over 120 emails per day on average, it is important to send a message that is clear, concise, and memorable. As soon as the reader opens the email, he or she should know what it’s about.
In the example above, C100, host of 48 Hours In The Valley, does an effective job of grabbing the reader’s attention with a short, to-the-point message. After a quick scan of the email, one can surmise that this is a message announcing the companies who were invited to the event. In just two enthusiastic sentences, coupled with eye-catching logos, the message is clearly conveyed.
3. Maintain a Clean Design
Keeping in line with simplicity, an email’s visual language should also be easily digestible and eye-catching. An email fails to do its job if the reader is not immediately attracted to its aesthetic. And more often than not, a simple and clean design is the best way to capture the recipient’s attention.
A specific way to achieve this is to maintain a consistent color scheme. As shown in the example above, this email promoting Forecast 2017 does a good job of maintaining a pink-to-purple color palette throughout the email, staying consistent throughout. This creates a unified visual feel and further strengthens the event brand.
4. Know Your Audience
Similar to our previous point on segmentation, being deeply knowledgeable of your target audience could help you create messages that really resonate. For example, this promotion email for Apple WWDC shows that the message is intended not only for a specific person, but a specific type of person.
The strategy here was to leverage the fact that most of the recipients of this email were going to be developers. This short, humorous message is one that developers will immediately understand and appreciate as an inside joke. Being intimately familiar with your audience and their particular vantage point can empower you to make bold email strategy decisions such as this.
5. Create Catchy Subject Lines
The first thing that your reader will see when they see your email hit their inbox will be the subject line. So it makes sense to focus on creating a subject line that begs to be opened. Writing the perfect subject line is never easy, but it will help to keep these three things in mind.
- Personalization – As long as it is applicable, use a personalization token in the subject line to grab the reader’s attention. This will help it stand out among the other emails that do not directly address the reader by name. The personalization can come in the form of a first name or even the company name. Depending on the context of the message, apply the token that would make the most sense.
- Emoji – Though there are not yet enough statistics to show if emojis in subject lines help increase open rates, plenty of companies are nonetheless adopting it as a strategy. Because using emojis in subject lines is a relatively new method, doing so will help your email stand out in a jam-packed inbox.
- Short Length – Keeping a short subject line tends to result in stronger click-through rates. According to one study, emails with subject lines less than 10 characters long had open rates of nearly 50%. Although correlation never equals causation, it’s worth noting the relation between having a short, to-the-point subject line and high open rates. Below you can find a few examples of short subject lines used by top companies.
Wrapping Up
Creating the perfect email marketing strategy may not be completely possible, but with the right tips and knowledge you can craft a campaign that hits all of your major goals. As mentioned, an event marketer’s core objective is to drive registration. Hopefully you can mix and match these best practices to create a campaign that aligns with your events strategy.