Email Marketing | Event Marketing | Workforce & Human Capital | HighRoad News & Events | Graphic & Information Design | Lead Generation & Growth Strategies
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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:
1. Test, Test, Test Event Emails for Inbox Deliverability
When it comes to email marketing, what you see in your emails isn’t exactly what the readers will see – literally!
The gorgeous HTML template your designer created may appear superb to you. However, when the email ends up in your reader’s inbox, it CAN look totally different. This is because there is no established standard for rendering (or ‘displaying’) email.
The key to testing is to know what email clients your users open email within and to focus on troubleshooting rendering issues on this selection as opposed to perfecting it across all email clients (there are a LOT and unless you know that 90% of the population is using Lotus Notes, you can probably skip this one). The easiest thing to do is to utilize email preview inbox tools such as Litmus or Email on Acid that can identify and any problems with the way your emails are displayed prior to being sent out. Unfortunately, these tools don’t tell you how to fix the issue (such as Microsoft 2013 issues that arise); here is where the art and science of email marketers comes in and you need email coding expertise or a good partner to help you fix the issues.
2. Make the Email Responsive
On average, as many as 47 percent of all emails are opened on a mobile device, making it necessary for email marketers to create responsive emails that can adjust automatically depending on the screen size.To ensure your emails are leaving an impact on your readers like they are supposed to do, have responsive templates created for your event’s email marketing campaign.
Studies say that most people still do not register for events on their mobile if the event is more than a nominal fee; however, people do read the email and start deciding if the event is right for them during their mobile experience. Users typically then return back to a desktop or laptop to look at the email again and actually move to the website to complete the transaction. Make sure that no matter where the user is in their buying journey, that your emails, websites and landing pages work on the device that they pick to use.
3. Use Smart Content
Making the content smart has more than simply including the name of the reader into the greeting. Smart content is all about providing content relevant to the recipient based on their title, role, and location. It makes call-to-actions (CTAs) more effective, with research indicating an increase of more than 20 percent in signups due to use of smart content.
Smart, personalized content will ensure that you get the maximum number of people to sign up for your event.
4. Keep Email Content Short & Simple (Biggest Challenge for Associations EVER!)
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
5. Match Writing Style to Target Audience (VERY Hard for Associations to Do)
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.)
6. Use Graphics That Provide Context & Aren't Just Decorative
Graphics and images have a powerful effect on the way your message is conveyed and delivered. If used properly, graphics can significantly increase the chances of generating interest among your recipients and click through to the next step in the buyer’s journey.
Instead of just using images to decorate, add copy to the image that instantly provides context and allows the user to understand what’s in it for them. Don’t just include images to break up text; use imagery to set tone and provide instant understanding for what you want the user to do.
7. Don’t Forget the “View in Browser” Feature of Email
Good email platforms allow you an instant way to include a “View in Browser” feature that aids a user in seeing your content as you originally intended instead of within their email client. View in Browser shows the content within a web browser as opposed to their email client browser (and yes, they are totally different) and has the added benefit of being able to be indexed by search engines and stay perpetually published so that the world can see it instead of just being seen by an email recipient.8. Automate Event Emails
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.
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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.
