Harnessing the Power of Email Marketing for Your Event
Marketing Events create and leverage interactions between a business and its customers to promote products, services, organizations, or causes. Companies can use all types of events, online or offline, to support campaigns including conferences, fairs, seminars, webinars, galas, networking events and more.
The idea behind using events as a marketing tool is to engage consumers who participate in the event, and reinforce the value proposition of your brand or the brand of your sponsor and drive some combination of interest, affinity, and purchase decisions. Typically, to make the most of these events, you should create scenarios that allow you to showcase the capabilities of your product.
In this post, we will focus on how you can use email marketing to promote your event strategically. However, before we dive into the main topic of the article, here are a few of the other possible digital marketing channels for marketing your events:
- Social Media Marketing (SMM) – Using social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to promote events is very popular for a few reasons. First, you can easily create, customize and manage your events including adding important information, seeing how many RSVP’d, and communicating with the event-goers. Second, with almost 3 billion people that are using social media worldwide, the people you want to target are likely already there. Finally, most sites allow you to use various paid options that can further increase the exposure of your event.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign – This model is intended to drive traffic to your website. The idea behind it is that you only pay the publisher, which is typically a search engine, when the ad is clicked. The advantage of this model compared to others is that the payment amount is linked to how successfully it performs.
- Organic content marketing – The goal behind this technique, which is also called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is to drive traffic to your website from users who search certain keywords on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. This advertising technique is centered around creating high-quality content that is enjoyable to read and less focused on promoting businesses or products. As a result, the search engine usually gives the content a good rank and it appears high in search results. This makes it more likely that people who search for specific keywords will click on your site and read the content.
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As far as email marketing is concerned, there are many benefits of implementing it into your strategy. Here are just a few:
- Reach specific target audiences. – Email marketing allows you to fine-tune your desired target audience, so you can reach exactly the right customer base for your business.
- Customize your invite. – With email marketing, you can design the event invite however you like! This means you can add a lot of important details and make the invite look exactly how you want it to.
- Personalize your message. – Advanced email marketing software solutions offer advanced personalization features across every aspect of your email, so you can change the content of the invite to help your recipients feel special and entice them to RSVP.
- Automatically time and send your invite. – Another advanced feature of email marketing solutions, timing your newsletters and event invites can help you verify that each and every one of your contacts receives your email at the best time for them. This increases open and conversion rates tremendously.
Now that you understand what makes email marketing an efficient tool to market your event, here are some best practices:
How to harness the power of email marketing for your event:
#1: Strengthen the connection with your guests
One of the best advantages of email marketing is the ability to build and maintain a relationship with your target audience and event-goers. With email marketing, you can easily reach your target audience and boost engagement by allowing them to interact with your campaigns. With this approach, you can also build a long-lasting relationship by keeping them updated with the latest news on your events and other promotions.
Source: https://marketingunited.com/
#2: Make an informative and educational invite
Give your guests all the necessary information about the current event they signed up for, and use this opportunity to expose them to your upcoming events and other deals they can take advantage of. Ensure that the invite contains all the information you want to convey to them; including the story of the event, why you decided to host it, and what they should expect. You can also use emails to inform them about possible logistics requirements, add a map, or notify them about a dress code. The more informative your message is, the more likely it is to get guests excited for the event and invite more friends.
Source: https://www.salesforce.com/
#3: Tailor the invite to your event
Not all events are physical, you can use email marketing to bring traffic to your online events such as webinars, online courses you are hosting, or an online presentation. For example, you can directly link your event in the invite and allow users to request a reminder with a link to their email 10 minutes prior to the event starts.
Souce: https://www.aarp.org/
#4: Automate the process
Advanced email marketing solutions are the future. Automating the process of email marketing will leave you plenty of spare time to create and execute all of the other aspects of your marketing strategy. This also allows you to leverage the automation features for all transactional messaging, friendly event reminders, and surveys sent after the event.
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Now that you know how you can harness the power of email marketing for your event, you can start to build your own winning email marketing strategy. With the right tools and strategy, you can create memorable and convincing invites that will bring more traffic and visitors to your events.
Luda Greko is the head of content marketing for ActiveTrail, a leading provider of professional-grade email marketing and automation software for growing businesses. By day she writes for top online marketing sites about email marketing and marketing automation, and by night she is a lifestyle blogger and a social media enthusiast.
