This is a guest post from Gen Ashley, Chairperson, @SocDevLon and Director, @WWCLondon.

Despite the marketing zeitgeist having shifted to social and content marketing, email still remains one of the most important widely used channels amongst marketers. However, getting the response you want from email marketing for events remains challenging.

So while email marketing is always sent with the aim of converting a potential customer into an actual customer, or activating a current customer to remain engaged in your business, you have to ask: What can you do to make it most effective?

Make sure your email and landing pages are mobile friendly.

The rise of mobile has been predicted for several years now, and we’re starting to see this shift materialise. Email marketers have been addressing that with varied amounts of success, but the best ones understand that mobile-friendly marketing should be a high priority.   Whilst most emails are coded using the table standard, creating a mobile-friendly responsive email is possible using the same tactics that are applied to traditional websites.

If you don’t have the technical skills to deploy responsive emails in-house, there are all great providers out there that will do it for you, such as MailChimp and Aweber (both of which are integrated directly with Eventbrite), to name but two.

Always have a Call to Action

Email marketing for events is designed with the end goal of an ideal customer action, so make sure that you’re not wasting a customer’s time by obscuring that action. An effective call to action brings focus to your site or product, is clearly measurable, and provides direction to your users.

Provide value to the receiver

Make sure that you’re providing value to your user base. That might come in the form of offering a free giveaway, giving your audience special deals, alerting them to important news, providing best practice tips, or highlighting someone within the user community. Basically, give your audience a reason to read your emails!

Know your audience (and segment accordingly) 

Position yourself in the minds of your audience, so that you can segment the most pertinent information for them.   Differentiate between a brand new user, a highly plugged-in user, and a user that might need re-engagement. This way you can tailor your content to suit their needs, making the email more valuable and more likely to achieve the impact you want it to.

A/B Split Test

One of the strengths of email marketing for events is that you can track its success. You should take advantage of this, and measure what is working and what isn’t. A/B testing is a simple way to do this, and it allows you to send essentially the same email to your database, but with one varient changed, such as the subject line.

You can then see which subject line has been opened more times, providing you with valuable information on how to send future emails that are more likely to be opened.

Avoid spam trigger words and do not spam

No one likes spam. Think about how many e-mails you receive per day, on average. Make sure that you do not alienate your user base by spraying them with too many emails, or using terminology that is most often associated with spam. You view a list of ‘spam’ words to avoid here.

Be strategic and set goals

Effective email marketing for events is highly tracked and analysed. Understand from the outset how you will measure an email campaign’s success. Is it open-rate? Is it click-through rate? Is it list growth? And then make sure you’re keeping track of these metrics, and why they are working or not working. It’s also important to experiment so that you can watch your metrics move. 

Retarget and Remarket

A relatively new and cost-effective method of marketing is called ‘retargeting’. Essentially it allows you to cookie someone who visitrs your site, or in this case, opens your email. That then allows you to serve highly targeted ads to that user when they visit other sites across the web.

It’s a highly effective method of keeping your brand and messaging top-of-mind, targeting a user that has already shown some interest and engagement in your company. Used with email, it can yield great results.

Useful Case Studies

If you’re interested in digging into more about email marketing for events, take a look at these great case studies compiled by eConsultancy.

If you’d like more great tips like these, you should sign up for our next live event ‘Event Marketing for Startups‘ at Campus London, Wed 12th Nov.

More details and register your free place here.