Ask event management professionals about how they actively promote their events, and as many as 90 percent of them will say email marketing is their top preference. Even though email marketing is a common, highly effective & reliable communications method for getting people to attend your event, it remains to be one of the most neglected in terms of the quality and effort that is put into it.
Here are some tips to enhance your marketing emails’ effectiveness:
Many times the best approach is to keep things simple. If your email contains a lot of information, the reader may get bored and simply ignore it. On the other hand, simple and concise information about your event should be created in a way that it grabs attention, while providing just enough to get them interested. Remember, you don’t have to teach in email, you just have to pique their interest enough to get them to take the next step in the buyer’s journey which is to click through to a website or landing page.
Save the details for your event website or landing page.
Use your creativity in your email to get people excited, highlight special events, feature a speaker or other people who will attend the event. Keep each email focused to one topic and one call-to-action. Target the emails to specific populations who will respond to that topic and call-to-action. Then, put all of the detailed content into your website where it is available for search engines to index and attract organic content.
Bonus on this Point: Listen to Lisa Campo talk about Writing for Digital on HighRoad U
When's the last time your association updated its writing style, or thought about changing the writing style to match different segments of the target population? Generally what we see is that the organization is so bogged down with physically creating, sending and testing the email that there's only time to write for a "one size fits all" audience. Instead of time being put into tasks that matter--writing effective content that engages--the time is being spent cutting & pasting and running around the office testing emails on different inboxes.
If you watch primetime TV or see what words are being added to the dictionary each year, you'll notice that a lot of words that would never have been appropriate 10 or even 5 years ago have become accepted as "normal" conversational language. It's no surprise that different groups of people use different types of language, so the question is, are you taking advantage of language as a way to target?
Perhaps your content style still reads like a press release from a corporation undergoing Sarbanes-Oxley compliance or post-Enron. It's very valid that there is, indeed, a group of your membership that communicate this way and expects communication of this style to appear credible and legitimate. However, there are also groups that don't respond to this type of corporate jargon speak and instantly disregard, tune out and ignore this type of style because it instantly says "this isn't designed for me".
With smarter consumers comes higher demands to provide experiences that resonate with their cultural and environmental landscapes. It's important that we understand the massive diversity that now exists in any given membership and our organizations are adapting to the environments in which they now operate.
Perhaps there's no better place to start changing your writing style than within your emails since they are, by nature, a one-to-one communication and there's a certain level of intimacy and trust already established between sender and receiver. Also, the nature of an event lends itself to speak in far more action-oriented and engaging manner since events engage a variety of senses. A change in writing style might be just what you need to change your open, click through and conversion rates!
(By the way, "bestie", "sciency", "wackadoo" and "beatboxer" were all added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2014. You can also find a related blog on Weird Words Added in 2014.)
Let’s face facts---if you produce events, you see the same type of email over and over. You need a TON of emails to not only promote the event, but then to keep attendees informed and on track for where to go when. You need emails to move exhibitors and sponsors along to hit deadlines and engage. You need emails post-event to remind attendees of their ROI.
Instead of creating, testing and sending all of these emails, consider taking the rigmarole out of event email marketing and automate emails. By tying your email into your event registration, content and member management systems, you can effectively pull the right content automatically into emails and automatically target and send to the right people without you lifting a finger to deal with email, HTML or inbox testing. Smart event marketers are turning to automation to create hyper-personalized email communications that not only make it to the inbox, are responsive and look great, but save a ton of time on staff who can shift their focus to social media and creating engaging content for the email.
As event marketing goes more and more digital, it’s critical for your association board, executives and staff to understand how to harness the power of an omni-channel world to increase attendance and promote engagement. Modern event marketing is just one of the topics we’ll cover in our 2015 Innovation Roadshow series which kicks off May 15th and features global event expert, Steve Mackenzie from etouches, to talk about how modern organizations are using digital to innovate events.