Make Email an Event Marketing a Priority in 2019: 3 Tips

Email can be a powerful tool for getting the word out about your event. It goes directly to your audience, is easy to consume, and inspires immediate action. That said, there are a few things you can (and should!) do to stand out from the pack.

Here are three tips for upping your email marketing game in 2019:

1. Strategically build (and maintain!) your list

Focus on quality information over quantity of email addresses so you’re spending time communicating with people who may actually want to attend your event. Think about the places where potential attendees seek you out: Your website, social media, in person at your event(s), etc. Through online forms and paper ones, you can easily capture their name, email address, company, and any other information you may find useful for personalization and segmentation. (More on that in a bit.)

Building your list takes time, but the longer you continue these initiatives the more you’ll add to it. Be sure to regularly review your contacts to make sure they’re still relevant – and take the time to ask them to review their own information and preferences, as well.

2. Make personalization and segmentation work together
Personalizing your emails to the best of your ability will help make a – you guessed it – personal connection with the recipient. Going a step further, segmenting your lists into buckets of attributes will allow you to write more targeted communications – for example their location, the industry they work in, whether they’ve attended your events before, etc. As your relationship with each contact grows, you’ll be able to ask them to indicate their preferences as well.

Using all of this information to both personalize and segment your emails will help them stand out among the many (MANY) emails coming through their inbox, and give them more compelling reasons to attend your event.

3. Pay attention to metrics

You can learn a lot from the way that recipients engage with your emails. As you send more (and gather more data), tweak your approach based on what they respond to best: the days you send your email, the time of day, your subject lines, the email format, whether or not to include an image, etc. Your goal is to drive more registrations, so make sure your emails are sent how they want to be received!

You can even try A/B testing (sending two variations of the same email to your list) to actively test one thing at a time. Who knows, your curiosity may uncover something!