Promoting your event takes a special mix of the physical and the digital world these days. You can't just put up some ads or posters and expect the world to rush to your doors on event day, there's a certain amount of targeting and care necessary to get the right audience to your event. Event Email Marketing is the best way as we see it.
You've got your own contacts likely, and you know them best. It's time to really leverage your list and get those contacts converting as registrants. Event Email Marketing is not much different from regular email marketing, except there is a timeline involved with a Call-To-Action that needs to give snappy, instant results like providing tickets and so on. That means your back end system is not only going to need a landing page that's relevant, but it also needs a payment processor, and ticketing management system running your event's registrants, but that's a blog for another time.
We have some great email examples here that we picked out from an amazing size called Really Good Emails, which shows some of the best emails ever made with moderators curating email submission that come in with fine-tuned precision.
Let's take a look and dig into each example, and how it can be applied for your event.
Jump to a Strategy
| Speaker Spotlight | Multiple Events, One Email |
Salesforce: Speaker Spotlight
See the original at the world's coolest email archive Really Good Emails.
No matter the size of your event, whether it is a large conference or just a small workshop. Leverage your speakers in your email. Put their faces up front, and use it to your advantage. If you're running a much larger event, list all your main speakers and use it to show your event's clout in your industry, and if it's a small event, make sure you really leverage your main speaker's background and talents.
In larger events, you won't really need to justify their presence if they're representing reputable businesses, but for smaller headcounts, you need to really leverage your speaker's personality and background to justify a reason for an email recipient to go to this event.
Even better, is because people love their face being on everything, you should negotiate with your speakers to leverage their email lists as well. This is one of the best ways to not only target your networks but also networks of people in your industry. We suggest not handing an email to your speaker as a template, as this removes control from your organization's EDM campaign. You may lose UTM codes on lines, messages, and lack open rates and other crucial data to your future's digital success.
As well, you might expect someone in your industry to be a part of multiple lists, so spreading a copy of your email around is not advised, as it might show up in one's inbox more than once, annoying them. If you're just starting off events for the first time, it'll have to take some trust-building with your partners and speakers in order to get access to that sweet, sweet list of theirs, but it'll happen, trust us. They want attendance just as much as you do.
Did you know? 2019's biggest email marketing trend has been a 58% increased in EDM tools that personalize every email?
WistiaFest 2017: Early Bird Offers
See the original at the world's coolest email archive Really Good Emails.
Your event is selling tickets. That's awesome.
Focus your efforts on marketing the savings to your contact list. Everyone loves saving money. Early bird offerings are an events industry standard. By creating discounted pricing based on the amount of time ahead of the event, you'll incentivize very early registration, easily covering your overhead costs from the get-go, which is always great to report to your higher-ups, or even your venue partner if you negotiated pro-rated payment schemes or profit sharing.
But you know what else is a great way to price your Early Bird offer?
Bonuses.
You don't always have to discount your prices. You could always give away bonuses that make sense to your audience. Promise some great freebies and swag bag offers (or promise extra items for early bird registrants) to early bird attendees and make them feel valued. Not quite a VIP ticket, but not quite a basic attendee either, and this helps bring down the number of tickets required for you to break even.
Note: If your goal is to pay off the investment of the event, then going for early bird offers really brings down your margins, so do understand that if users don't latch onto this strategy, you might put yourself at risk for a low event turnout, and that's just going to hurt your ROI in the end.
Tip: Follow up this email with a count down to push more registrations, something like “1 week left to save!” would do just fine.
Did you know? Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days for open rates at around 10am, but Monday morning at 8-9am are best for inviting people to be attendees.
HypedMarketing: Event Poster Email
< See the original at the world's coolest email archive Really Good Emails.
If your event is an easy to understand title that doesn't require much context to really sell what you're offering, then just go for a poster-image email.
What is a poster image email, you asked? It's a concise image or designed email that has all the main points of information of your event that can be all read without needing to scroll around to find it in a more traditional event marketing email.
You just need a title of the event, a short description, date, location, a schedule that's easily read, some images, and that's about it. It's gotta be pleasing to read and eye-catching, so if you need help making one up or if you're graphically-challenged like me, there are some great tools out there like Canva Poster Templates that can help you make really eye-catching posters that are meant for both social media and emails.
Just remember to make your CTA button separate from the image if you end up just posting an image in the email fields rather than building out the graphic via HTML.
The other great thing about the poster-type emails is that the image used, or a screenshot of the email's content is social media friendly and can be easily used in social media posts. Canva is also great at choosing template sizes that make your content prime for social media sharing as well.
Did you know? 55% of emails are opened on smartphones.
Emma: Engaging Video Content
See the original at the world's coolest email archive Really Good Emails.
Video content is one of the most engaging tools to leverage, not just for event email marketing, but for any level of marketing. If you have the ability to transform text and image content to video, then you really should. With the introduction of HTML5 around the web, embedding playable video content is now gaining more support across multiple different email providers, so we truly are entering a new era of event email marketing.
The great thing about events is they provide REALLY great B-roll. Something about large, engaged crowds, shows, speaker on a stage with a lapel or ear mics really just jazzes people.
So if you have recordings from past events, make your announcement or invitational event email campaign all about B-roll, testimonial, clips or speakers saying something really ear-perking, and you'll have everything you need to really push conversions. It'll get people all riled up to join the next event, and it's the best time to record your current event to make your next video even better.
Tip: Always always always add a link for contacts to watch the video on another host, like YouTube, as some email providers don't allow for in-email video streaming, or even corporate email networks will sometimes cut our video from emails for productivity reasons. A safe and not-so-risky solution is to take a screenshot from the video and place a “play button” over the image, giving the impression it's clickable to watch, but add a hyperlink to the image that takes them to the video on YouTube. It's the same approach, but I say you should be bolder and go for straight-up embedded video content.
Did you know? Only 17.5% of marketers are using HTML5 video in their emails?
ATD Attractions: Count it Down
See the original at the world's coolest email archive generate and embed a count down timer easily if you can find some tools on Google, of course, free tools are tough to align with your branding, so if that's important to you, you can always pay for a decent tool to generate an embeddable count down timer for you.
Add this to your early bird, VIP, and even your basic ticketing email offers.
Want to know a great hack that works too?
Post that same count down timer on your website and social media accounts. This is one of those strategies that transcend email and can work it's magic into your other digital spaces as well.
Another great way is to make static images of the latest number of seating available if that's how you market your tickets, as “seats”. These don't need to move honestly, but it's a great way to make urgency the selling point. It's not a count down timer, but it really does the exact same job.
Note: Follow up these emails. Someone who comes back to read it again after the timer expires won't find value at all, so always follow up so that previous emails with timers get pushed further down an inbox and the latest email will be the priority read.
Did you know? 91% of Americans prefer to receive promotional emails versus other mediums like phone calls or mail.
Litmus: Promote Multiple Events in One Email
See the original at the world's coolest email archive Really Good Emails.
This one is really simple. Do you host multiple events in close time frame to each other? What if you're hosting events at the same time, but different locations? Want to save on time making emails for each event?
Just put all those bad-boys into one email. It's going to be a little cramped, but that's where the strategy of simplifying and finding the right message the fits all the events is the real solution, and it's not an impossible one. Just think holistically about the value of all your events combine, package it up, and push it out. If you can't find a creative way to make the CTA's separate from each event, then just go ahead and make a landing page for the email that gives you more room to work with, if someone already clicked to know more, they'll read the LP enough to select the event that's right for them.
Did you know? B2C emails get opened on mobile 57% more than B2B emails.
Chimp Essentials: Keep It Simple (Stupid)
See the original at the world's coolest email archive Really Good Emails.
I wasn't calling you stupid. That's an actual acronym used by reputable organizations like yours, and it was invented by the U.S. Navy, so you know this is big-boy stuff.
Jokes aside, sometimes, you just need to give them the message. This is a special case for contact lists where your audience is already super engaged with you. If you know they're engaged, then by all means, just give them a quick, simple little email that makes your life easier to make, and their lives easier to read. This could also be good for contacts you know that frequent events often, so a short intro of the event is probably all they need, they just need someone in front of them to tell them an event is coming up.
Did you know? Personalization of the subject line increased click-through-rates by 14%
LiveFront: Consistent Color Scheme
See the original at the world's coolest email archive Really Good Emails.
This is a basic design principal simply applied to an event email marketing campaign. Your brand deserves a spotlight, and having a consistent color scheme with good use of white space could be even more eye-catching than an event email with quality images and photos. It's really about the human psyche involved. What can draw their eyes to the CTA? What's the information that's most important, and have you make it easy to pick out?
Sometimes, you don't need a strategy for email campaigns. You just need to have good looking, honest-to-god emails.
Did you know? Geo-targeted emails get a 26% increase in open rates.
Marketing United: Justify the Trip
See the original at the world's coolest email archive Really Good Emails.
Most events are for corporate. That means if you want the right audience to show up, the trip has to be justified, especially if it's on a working day. If their boss is the decision maker, and they hold the coin purse, then you gotta make it easier for your contacts to bring the case to their boss that they should attend your event.
Deliver something to your contact like a list of benefit, summaries and so on that sweeten the deal. Even better is if you have a large enough event to get transcripts and recordings of the whole event, offer than to the boss as a post-event sum-up for them to look at. As well this is also a good time to show off who is coming. Get a list of great companies from registrants already signed up, and deliver a list of these attending companies so that the contact's boss can see the networking value in this event alone. In my experience, this networking value really does the trick.
Don't make the email about the boss, you need your contact to click the email, so the general message of your email should be for the contact, but the offer needs to help sell it to the boss.
Did you know? 47% of Millenials unsubscribe if they get too many emails. :(
EIQ: Post-Event Thank-You
See the original at the world's coolest email archive Really Good Emails.
Possibly one of the most under-utilized email strategies is the post-event email thank you. Yes, you want to drive awareness of your event. There's 9 cool examples and strategies we gave you before you got to this one, so you have plenty to work with. But what you really need is to look at your strategy as more than just a way to get people in the door, it's about getting them back to that same door for the next event.
I dare say the post-email can be more crucial than the first one.
Thank your attendees for attending, and really push the value of the post-event data to them. How many people were there, who was there, and what they experienced. It's going to help them feel like they were a part of something great and it may even push them to share their experience with friends or even on social media. As well, swag bags are great to offer before the event, but digital swag is awesome too. Send them photos, videos and more that bring them more value that they can enjoy.
Another cool thing that works is setting up a way to give previous attendees discounts on their next event they book with you. It is really good at instilling loyalty with your brand.
Did you know? A 0.25% unsubscribe rate is considered average.
Mix & Match Event Email Marketing Strategies
I bet all these strategies and examples are awesome, and you're wondering if you could just use more than one.
By all means, I hope you end up combining these strategies in a way that is smart. Why not use Early bird pricing with a justification package for an employee's boss? Heck, you could probably find a way to combine all of these strategies into one awesome email if you've got the chops for it.
And with the way things are moving content-wise, emails are getting more and more creative each day. There's a ton of great ideas coming out, and we'll try to keep this list as up-to-date as possible.
Don't have an email marketing tool? Book a meeting with us and we'll get you set up and ready to use any one of these great strategies from this blog.
