Event Email Marketing: 10 Do’s and Don’ts for Success

Jul 05, 2024 Praggya Joshi

Trends may come and go, but one constant in the event industry is the power of emails. Email marketing for events offers several short- and long-term benefits. It helps achieve short term goals like building excitement and generating buzz about your event. Its long-term effects include forging deeper connections with potential attendees, gaining insights into your marketing and promotional techniques, and delivering more personalized experiences. This, in turn, helps you consistently climb the ladder of success. 

As a leading provider of event technology, Eventcombo has worked with many event planners who have substantially increased their ROI through carefully crafted email campaigns. This blog distils their learnings into a set of best practices and common mistakes to avoid when starting an email marketing campaign for your event.

Do's 

1. Segment Your Email List
Assign your customers different categories based on the data about their behavior and demographics you have gathered. You can then create multiple email lists in your event management software and schedule your emails for optimal delivery to the different audience segments.  

The benefit of this practice is that you deliver personalized messages to your audiences, leading to increased engagement. 

2. Keep the Event Announcement Concise 
Your email announcement should have only the most essential information. It includes the date, time, venue, ticket price, and a clear CTA to register. Do not disclose any big details related to the event in the first message of your event email campaign.  

3. Use Visually Appealing Email Templates with Multimedia
Grab the recipient's attention with an aesthetic email highlighting the key values of your event. An email for event marketing utilizing multimedia and videos has greater open rates. According to a study by Salesloft, when marketers use videos in their emails, they gain a 16% higher open rate and a 26% increase in replies!  

With Eventcombo's Email Marketing Engine feature, you can add images, videos, and other multimedia to your emails effortlessly.  

4. Send Exciting Ticket Offers to the Most Likely Attendees
If your email list consists of 50 people, identify at least 25 of those who are most likely to attend the event. Do this two weeks before you begin your campaign for the rest of the people on your list. Send the chosen ones a personal invitation to purchase tickets at the best possible price. This will make those people feel recognized. 

5. Make the Event Sharable 
You send emails to spread the word about your event. Event websites and mobile apps are other ways that complement your pre-event email marketing and expand your reach. A mobile app and website should show updated information, attendee registration, and have tools for query management. They should be populated with time as the event date draws nearer.  

Create a customized SEO and mobile-optimized event website in a few minutes with our Event Website Builder.  

PRO TIP – Combining social media with email marketing will help you build brand awareness as well as communicate directly with your target audience. 

6. Give Your 100% in Writing Subject Lines 
47% of recipients decide whether to open an email based solely on the subject line. If those subject lines are personalized, it increases the open rate by 50%! The more compelling and tailored your email's subject lines are, the more your email will stand out in a crowded inbox. Keep them short, up to 60 words, and highlight your event's most unique and interesting aspects.  

TIP - If you cannot brainstorm on a compelling subject line, try using AI tools for event planning.  Create catchy content based on the prompts about your event.  

7. Promote Different Aspects of Your Event to Build Excitement 
A major goal of email marketing for events is to generate excitement in people. To do so, you should consistently send emails that highlight different aspects of your events that potential guests will love to know. So, craft emails about the following: 

• Reasons to attend the event 
• Sneak peek of the venue 
• Speaker introductions or fun facts about them 
• Social proof from your past events  
• Raffles or giveaways  

8. Don't Forget to Test Before Sending
It doesn't matter if it's your first or third email marketing campaign for an event. You need to test out the message through A/B tests on different categories of audience. Doing so is simple. Just send a few emails with a specific subject line to one group and change it to another group. Use analytics to uncover how its it’s performing and finalize the email template with the most open and click-through rates.  

Eventcombo's Email Marketing Engine lets you track clicks, opens, bounce rates, and other key metrics to refine your event email marketing campaign for the best results. Learn more about it here.  

9. Increase the Frequency of Reminder Emails as the Event Dates Approaches.
A reminder email is a powerful antidote to no-shows as it prompts people to prioritize and attend the event. To leverage emails reminder for maximum attendance, start by sending one a couple of weeks before the event, followed by a week, and three days before the event. Lastly, schedule an email exactly on the day before the event goes live.  

10. Send Post-Event Emails to Maintain Connection
Your email marketing plan for the event should always have post-event engagement included. This can be in the form of Thank You emails to show gratitude or surveys to inquire what attendees liked and disliked. You can ask questions related to different aspects like venue, food, activities, favorite memory, or suggestions for improvement.  

QUICK TIP – Three types of emails should ALWAYS be a part of your event email marketing strategy. These include: pre-event registration inducing emails, post-registration reminders, and post-event engagement emails to stay connected with the registrations 

Don'ts 

1. Automate Single Email Sequence for Everyone in the List
Your event email marketing strategy should follow the responses you are getting. There should be different sequences of emails for people who didn’t open the earlier message and for those who show quick interest. Do not schedule a single email sequence for everyone in your contact list regardless of their engagement level.

2. Make Registration Confusing & Difficult
The registration button in every email should be big and bold and be easily noticeable. Making registration easy and seamless should be one of your major goals while creating event-based email marketing messages. 

3. Making Emails Inaccessible for Mobiles 
More than 70% of all emails are opened on smartphones. So, if the font of your message, images, and videos cannot be accessed on small screens, you'll lose out a significant portion of potential attendees. Luckily, Eventcombo's event management solution has a ton of mobile-friendly email templates with various customization options. Your guests can easily find out everything they need to know from your message.  

4. Forget to Highlight Key Attractions
Have you gamified your event and kept exciting rewards for participants? If so, highlighting it is essential to trigger action. Even if the gifts are small and symbolic, mentioning about the same in a catchy way will motivate the recipient to explore further.  

70% of Global 2000 companies leverage gamification to boost engagement. Be one among them using Eventcombo's all-in-one event management software. It helps you easily set up quizzes, surveys, leaderboards, and keep your attendees glued from get-go.

5. Send Emails Randomly Without Checking Analytics 
If you send too many or too few emails without understanding how they are performing, you risk losing subscribers. Monitor the click-through and open rates of your campaigns to amend email content and their frequency. It should be reflected in your email marketing calendar.

6. Forget to Incorporate a Link to a Calendar Event 
Are you hosting a virtual event? If you haven't given a thought to keeping a link to automatically add the event to your recipient's preferred calendar. It's an easy way to ensure that attendees are always reminded of attending the event.  

7. Add a Ton of Images 
Yes. Images make the email content appealing. But overcrowding the message with flashy images won't entice your recipients. Use a few but high-quality images to make the email seamless and captivating.  

8. Stop Updating Your Event Website 
If your potential attendees need to know a specific event detail, do you think they will open their inbox and scroll through a long list of messages to find their registration email? Never. So, to prevent them from turning disinterested, ensure to update your event website incrementally as the scheduled day draws nearer.

9. Buy Email List for Marketing 
Buying email lists indirectly means that you are sending emails to contacts who have not consented to getting your promotional messages. It is a direct violation of GDPR for event planning regulations which states that businesses require an opt-in option for all contacts who give their emails and similar personal data. If they don’t opt in, you cannot send them emails. 

10. Forget to Personalize Follow-up Messages According to Different Interest Groups
Your follow-up emails play a major role in post-event engagement. But they should be personalized according to how different segments of attendees responded during the event. Use data-driven insights to determine the categories of people who showed a keen interest in specific topics and send them follow-up emails with further reading materials or special offers related to their interests.  

The Reporting and Analytics feature in Eventcombo’s event management platform provides complete data on registrations, ticket sales, attendance, engagement, so you can personalize your follow-ups effortlessly.  

Pull off Your Event Email Marketing Like a Pro! 
Event based email marketing is slightly different than traditional email marketing because you need to keep inciting the curiosity of your target attendees until the scheduled date. Although you have a lot of information, it’s essential to send it in little chunks highlighting the different aspects of the event and their benefits. Ensure that your content is concise and laid out in a visually aesthetic way. You can always take the help of our Email Marketing Engine to craft customized and mobile friendly email sequences and reminder emails. It’ll keep your audience engaged both before and after the event.  

Check out our extensive suite of event tech and feel free to request a demo.