By Kaleigh Moore November 21, 2023
Occasion e-mail advertising is a key technique for constructing anticipation to your subsequent occasion—whether or not on-line or offline. This submit explores key occasion e-mail advertising examples and methods to assist.
When a survey requested occasion entrepreneurs their simplest technique for getting the phrase out, the outcomes have been fascinating:
One of the best technique wasn’t word-of-mouth. It wasn’t social media.
It was e-mail.
Over 75% of the occasion entrepreneurs polled mentioned e-mail advertising was their choice. They reported 45% of their whole occasion ticket gross sales got here from e-mail advertising campaigns.
That makes occasion advertising easy, proper? Join an e-mail platform, tie in an occasion advertising platform like Eventbrite, and also you’re good to go.
However simply because one medium is the most efficient doesn’t assure future outcomes.
To make occasion e-mail advertising be just right for you, you have to be taught what it’s and the right way to use it. You’ll want announcement and drip marketing campaign emails to pump up pleasure effectively earlier than the occasion. And some examples to indicate the way it’s finished received’t harm, both.
Let’s dive in.
What’s e-mail advertising for occasions?
Electronic mail occasion advertising is a newsletter-based technique for constructing urgency and a focus for an upcoming get-together. A very good e-mail occasion advertising technique has a number of totally different options:
- Constructing pleasure and anticipation for the occasion, which helps you promote extra tickets
- Asserting, with good readability, the important thing particulars—such because the date, the time, and the right way to get to your occasion
- Offering hyperlinks and particulars in case your occasion is web-based
- Answering questions concerning the occasion upfront. This creates much less confusion when the day lastly comes
These steps sound intuitive sufficient. However bear in mind: occasion e-mail advertising will be totally different than your common e-mail advertising methods.
The everyday technique is likely to be to filter new potential clients to your lead magnet. The advantages you may obtain from this technique can construct over time, for ever and ever.
Occasion e-mail advertising greatest practices
Electronic mail occasion advertising is extra like constructing a marketing campaign round a narrative. It has a starting, a center, and an finish: the occasion itself.
If you wish to do it successfully, you’ll must maintain a number of greatest practices in thoughts:
Personalization
An occasion ought to really feel extra “actual” than most newsletters.
Occasions imply assembly individuals face-to-face, both on a webcam or in individual. It’s one factor to get a possible buyer to join a lead magnet. It’s one other factor to get them to decide to attending, say, a convention.
With e-mail advertising platform, you may incorporate personalization options aplenty:
- Use a platform like AWeber to robotically enter every subscriber’s distinctive first identify
- Use subscriber segmentation and tag every person with a particular class so you may ship them event-specific content material
- Add code to your web site and interact with subscribers based mostly on their explicit site-browsing habits
Arrange your marketing campaign accurately from the get-go, and your occasion emails will come throughout as eerily telepathic.
However there’s nothing unusual occurring. You’re simply training good personalization habits and skipping these publication subscribers who may not have an interest.
Buyer segmentation
Talking of buyer segmentation: you wouldn’t invite an e-mail checklist of cat lovers to an occasion at a dogs-only park, would you?
Not in case you wished anybody to indicate up.
With buyer segmentation options, you may tag particular subscribers. Or you may drill down even additional, separating subscribers by the varieties of occasions they may need to attend.
When you have a far-reaching viewers, for instance, you may tag “NY-Occasions” for subscribers native to the New York space.
Segmentation ensures that you simply don’t waste any time by campaigning to crowds of people that don’t have any intention of ever attending your occasions.
It’s not sufficient to have a “[CUSTOMER_NAME]” field originally of your e-mail.
Use buyer segmentation tags to make sure each e-mail feels related to each group you’re partaking. Your purpose? Establish particular niches of subscribers who will probably be enthusiastic sufficient to order a spot at your occasion.
Making the occasion appear actual
There’s a humorous factor that occurs with on-line interactions. We frequently overlook we’re interacting with different individuals. As Psychology In the present day notes, one survey discovered that faculty college students had the best improve in well-being once they interacted with individuals in individual.
Merely put, on-line interactions don’t register fairly as “actual” as face-to-face interactions do.
And that may be a tough promote. In spite of everything, you in all probability obtained most of your subscribers from on-line interactions.
Now, with occasion e-mail advertising, you’re asking individuals to start out seeing you as an actual individual. You’re asking to alter the context of your relationship, which requires a distinct model of engagement.
Begin by making the occasion appear actual:
- Open loops that may solely shut in individual. For instance, perhaps somebody enters a contest on-line—however they’ll solely acquire the prize in individual.
- Use compelling visuals. Do you might have snapshots from a earlier occasion? Embody them. Even when your occasion is totally on-line, embrace headshots for each visitor who will seem.
- Share a private story. Does the occasion come out of a private story or realization you had? Share it together with your viewers. In case your occasion is a lecture or internet convention a few particular subject, discuss concerning the private circumstances that led to your discovery of that subject.
How one can use e-mail advertising to spark curiosity in your occasion
Electronic mail advertising is like some other sort of promoting. Besides this time, you need greater than a click on.
You’ll want to inspire individuals to show up, enroll, and even pay a hefty sum of money simply to get in.
These are large asks. When you have a younger publication subscriber base, they’re particularly large asks. You should still be in the course of constructing familiarity together with your viewers.
To make sure your occasion sparks sufficient curiosity, construct the next methods into your marketing campaign:
Get your announcement in early
Ever discover how Hollywood doesn’t kick off a film marketing campaign with a full film trailer anymore?
It’s normally a sequence of teases. They’ll launch photos from the set years prematurely. Or they’ll hype up a short “trailer tease” on YouTube.
Lastly, the complete trailers turn into blockbuster occasions themselves: typically they debut throughout halftime of Monday Evening Soccer.
The ultimate trailer. Tune in to Monday Evening Soccer on @ESPN to look at it dwell. #TheRiseOfSkywalker pic.twitter.com/QAme0H5j0D
— Star Wars (@starwars) October 19, 2019
The important thing to this technique is beginning early. Plant these seeds of pleasure. Get on peoples’ radar effectively prematurely of the occasion.
Pleasure begins together with your first announcement e-mail. So now’s the time to start out brainstorming.
Brainstorm your e-mail topic traces
We’ve obtained a number of concepts for greatest practices on e-mail topic traces. Let’s do a short evaluation:
- Maintain them underneath 45 characters. This ensures individuals can learn an entire thought with out clicking. In any other case, your topic traces may fade into ellipses in your recipients’ inboxes.
- Use the “sentence case” to your headers, which retains issues informal. These emails ought to appear to be they’re coming from previous pals.
- Create a “curiosity hole.” This implies you need to introduce a thriller together with your topic line. If readers need to clear up it, they’ll really feel compelled to click on the e-mail.
Then write down a listing of your greatest concepts for announcement topic traces.
And right here’s the trick: sleep on them. Once you’re contemporary, have a look at them anew. Ask your self which one popped as essentially the most compelling.
Likelihood is, that’s your winner.
Construct an occasion touchdown web page
True: an occasion isn’t a static factor. It would come and go. Constructing an internet site can really feel like overkill when that is only a short-term marketing campaign.
However you continue to want a centralized hub the place individuals can discover key data and join marketing campaign emails.
Inside AWeber, you may construct a particular touchdown web page with buyer tags. This fashion, solely the publication subscribers who is likely to be occasion attendees will get the segmented emails.
It’s also possible to use the touchdown web page as a chance to do a number of the legwork.
Any occasion goes to have Ceaselessly Requested Questions:
When and the place? How are you going to attend? How a lot do tickets price?
You’ll seemingly repeat this data in social media posts and emails. However having FAQs up on a touchdown web page will make sure the solutions are there for anybody who needs them.
(Extra on constructing your touchdown pages in a second.)
Start capturing photos from the venue—or use inventory photos
In the event you’ve already booked a venue, use that venue’s present photos to make the occasion appear extra “actual.”
It’s one factor to say you’re renting an auditorium. It’s one other factor to indicate an image of 100 empty seats and write the headline: “Three extra days…”
In the event you don’t have entry to these photos, you may at all times select inventory photos, together with these related to the occasion’s metropolis, to assist construct anticipation.
Or ask friends for headshots you may embrace in your touchdown web page and emails.
Images are so necessary to our perceptions, they’ll even affect our reminiscences. The extra visible your marketing campaign will get, the extra “actual” it’ll really feel when the week of the occasion rolls round.
Create periodic reminders
A typical story has a three-act construction:
- An inciting incident, which pulls the story out of its complacency and creates urgency
- A second act of more and more complicated issues and escalating rigidity
- A climax the place the destiny of the story hangs within the steadiness
You don’t have to show your occasion emails right into a novel anytime quickly, true. However you ought to have a unfastened sense of this construction as you construct anticipation to your occasion.
Enter “periodic reminder” emails.
If the announcement e-mail was your inciting incident, these interval reminders will fill the area of a protracted second act.
And that may be a problem. The thrilling first announcement and the third-act buildup to the occasion are usually essentially the most thrilling components of an e-mail marketing campaign.
What do you do to create periodic reminders in between? Listed below are a number of concepts:
- “Unpeel the onion.” Like a terrific thriller author, solely unveil one clue at a time. Create intrigue by presenting photos, prizes, and different components out of your occasion out of context. Maintain your viewers guessing, then slowly reveal what every layer of the onion means to the final word occasion.
- Give away the main points. No should be coy concerning the logistics of your occasion. As a substitute, enable individuals so as to add occasions to their calendar—together with dates, occasions, and internet addresses.
- Construct your reminders in sequence. It’s extra enjoyable in case your emails run in a particular order, with every e-mail increasing on what you wrote within the earlier version. For instance, Canva sends tutorial emails the place every lesson provides mini-skills on prime of the emails that got here earlier than.
- Create a drip marketing campaign. Schedule your “second-act” emails as a drip marketing campaign from the outset, which helps you create a pure chronological timeline that seems like a narrative unfolding.
Collect FAQs and retailer them in your touchdown web page
It’s solely pure: an occasion goes to garner some questions.
When? The place? Who?
In the event you deal with your occasion e-mail advertising marketing campaign as a true-blue marketing campaign, then each marketing campaign wants that touchdown web page.
That is the “gross sales web page” to your occasion. And like gross sales web page, it ought to anticipate—and reply—each buyer query beforehand.
Begin with Ceaselessly Requested Questions individuals may have. The 5 Ws: who, what, the place, when, and why.
Clarify what individuals can count on to get out of your occasion, even when it’s one thing so simple as a enjoyable night time out.
And as questions are available, don’t overlook to notice these and jot down your solutions. Ideally, your touchdown web page will probably be an entire “hub” of any and all data associated to your occasion.
All that’s left for the client is to ask themselves by getting into their e-mail tackle. From there, you may tag them to a segmented e-mail checklist and get them began in your drip marketing campaign.
Get entangled on social media
Occasion e-mail advertising could also be the easiest way to get individuals to enroll, however you continue to want individuals to find your emails within the first place. And social media will be an effective way to attract them in.
One technique is to maximise your use of hashtags:
- Create an event-specific hashtag (like #Your-Occasion-Right here-2024) to construct a hashtag “hub.” Anybody who needs to submit their submit, connect a photograph of their invitation, or announce they’re attending can use this hashtag for visibility.
- Use event-adjacent hashtags to get extra eyeballs on your posts. These are significantly efficient when you might have industry-specific hashtags you should use. Individuals in your {industry}—who might already be in search of occasions—can discover your posts with a easy search.
And maintain at it. Possibly your hashtag posts received’t draw 500 likes and engagements in a single day. However each new submit retains your occasion on the prime of the search outcomes every time somebody seems for the hashtag.
Social media can also be a terrific place to start contests and prizes to create pleasure. You possibly can even use Re-posts on X and different social shares as methods individuals can enter, drumming up much more engagement out of your viewers.
Within the instance above, an occasion for Ukraine Support exhibits off the right way to create social posts:
- Inspiring, high-contrast visuals to attract the attention
- Important data: who, when, the place, what, and why
- Hashtags like #PossibleWithU assist improve the visibility.
Suggestions for constructing urgency when it’s crunch time
Now we enter the third act of your marketing campaign: the climax.
It’s crunch time.
Your device for constructing urgency right here needs to be to play on shortage. Shortage is straightforward: the much less of one thing there’s, the extra individuals will need it.
Shortage is a pure match for occasion e-mail advertising as a result of an occasion is inherently scarce. It solely occurs as soon as. And chances are high, there are all kinds of alternatives to spotlight shortage:
- You could solely have a specific amount of on-line friends
- There are solely a sure variety of seats or areas
- A venue might have a most capability
- If the occasion is simply occurring as soon as, your viewers might miss it
- A restricted variety of VIP spots
That latter level is vital. Creating “VIP tickets” will be an effective way to encourage new sign-ups whenever you’re nonetheless within the “Drip marketing campaign” part of the general marketing campaign.
For instance, “Withings” watches as soon as created a Cyber Monday sale with the next headline:
“Tomorrow is just too late.”
It’s an on the spot eye-grabber.
Why is tomorrow too late? If I take motion now, am I one of many fortunate few?
In the event you don’t have particular VIP presents, you may construct urgency with distinctive incentives. Possibly time is operating out on a prize contest. Possibly there are solely so many prizes you can provide out on the door.
These incentives are significantly helpful in case you’re approaching the occasion date and nonetheless don’t have sufficient signups. Some clients may want one ultimate nudge earlier than they decide to your occasion.
Varieties of occasion emails (with examples)
Utilizing story construction, you need to break up your occasion emails into three main classes:
- The announcement is the inciting incident: you need to shock individuals, pull them out of their lull, and inform them what they’ll get by attending your occasion.
- The drip marketing campaign emails are the lengthy second act: slowly construct urgency, reveal new solutions (reminiscent of thriller friends), and remind individuals of what’s coming.
- The pleasure emails will probably be your large climax: constructing urgency for the occasion.
Announcement emails
XXIX’s ten-year get together announcement e-mail begins with a enjoyable “incitement” sentence: Unsubscribe in case you don’t like events.
Effectively, all of us like events. Now they’ve our consideration.
Listed below are the keys to this announcement e-mail’s success:
- A gap sentence that challenges the reader and creates a little bit of a curiosity hole. Don’t inform me I don’t like events!
- It will get the announcement out early by mentioning a key milestone: XXIX turning 10 years previous. There’s the reply to your “why.” It additionally makes the occasion date a bit simpler to recollect.
- The e-mail offers particulars immediately so people who find themselves already can begin saving the date and placing the tackle of their calendars. Sure, it’s good to create intrigue, however you don’t need to be mysterious concerning the logistics.
Right here’s one other instance, from TwitchCon:
With the arrogance of “you’re going to be there,” this announcement e-mail will get straight to the purpose:
- It explains why you’d need to attend TwitchCon in Paris: “Get able to have a good time all of the stuff that makes Twitch particular.” And it solutions one other “W” query by explaining who will probably be there.
- It makes use of social proof with particular faces and usernames of standard streamers. This instantly attracts the curiosity of those streamers’ followers.
Drip marketing campaign emails
Bloomreach makes use of particular particulars to attract your curiosity. In the event you’re a part of their viewers, there’s likelihood you’ll discover one thing at this occasion you’ll like.
- This e-mail for Bloomreach re-invites individuals by mentioning the precise occasion particulars they need to know. Nevertheless it doesn’t have the large “splash” of a launch e-mail. As a substitute, it tackles the meat and potatoes of the explanations to attend the occasion, together with particular matters and audio system.
- Consists of primary particulars about when the occasion is, together with an above-the-fold call-to-action for people who find themselves instantly .
Now let’s have a look at the same instance from a 2023 convention from Maze:
Keys to success:
- Discover the time right here, a enjoyable, urgency-building transition to the ultimate leg of the marketing campaign.
- The e-mail nonetheless highlights what the enjoyable of the occasion is likely to be: “Be part of on-line on September 19 for X, Y, and Z.”
- The e-mail mentions the DJ leisure whereas discussing particular audio system on the occasion, supplying you with extra causes to affix in.
- It finishes off with a robust name to motion: registering free of charge.
Pleasure emails
It is virtually time! ⏰ We’re again tomorrow for G2E 2022.
Comply with alongside on our pages this week, October 10-13, as we share highlights from the present. It’s not too late to register: https://t.co/WolNcdnYIY pic.twitter.com/ZqgBUO69EM
— World Gaming Expo (@G2Eshows) October 9, 2022
Though not an e-mail, this tweet with an animated “timer” builds urgency and anticipation by letting you watch the seconds tick away.
- Discover the road “it’s not too late to register,” together with a robust CTA. It could be a tweet, however it reads like an e-mail.
- The animation highlights how rapidly time is passing, which builds urgency—even when it’s unconscious.
Sundance’s upcoming 2024 movie pageant makes use of some comparable ideas:
This e-mail for the Sundance Movie Competition doesn’t go off-brand with last-minute contests and prizes. Nevertheless it does spotlight {that a} “countdown” is starting:
- The e-mail builds urgency by highlighting that the lodging is promoting “quick.” Even when individuals suppose they’ve loads of time left to register, there are different components of logistics you should use to construct shortage.
- The e-mail contains particular occasion particulars, which is crucial at this stage of occasion advertising emails.
- Lastly, the e-mail features a new supply that may assist nudge individuals who have been on the fence about attending.
Construct an occasion e-mail advertising marketing campaign
An occasion e-mail advertising marketing campaign continues to be like different campaigns you’ve tried. It ought to have a particular touchdown web page, populated with all kinds of knowledge. You need to use buyer segments to personalize your messaging.
What’s totally different? Each occasion is a narrative with a starting, a center, and an finish—a climax that culminates within the occasion itself. In the event you can construct urgency as much as the top, you’ll have a profitable marketing campaign.
Nevertheless it all begins with a succesful e-mail platform. An e-mail platform that enables for efficient person tagging, buyer segmentation, and automatic drip campaigns to assist construct pleasure.
Don’t have an account with AWeber simply but? Join free at the moment. In spite of everything, the clock in your subsequent occasion is ticking.