With everyone’s love affair with social media, it can be hard to remember some of the other highly effective ways to market your event. And one of the most effective? Email marketing.
Email is the easiest and cheapest way to send a personalized invitation to your event. But one misstep and you end up in the spam folder.
If you want to make sure your time isn’t wasted and your emails are read, try these three tips:
Collect a high-quality list
The base of any email marketing campaign is your list. A bad list full of people that did not opt-in and are not interested in your message will lead to you being blacklisted by your email provider. So the first step is to not add anyone to your list without permission.
Next, make sure you have a sign-up form on your website’s front page and any blog post, like our member Viva Bella does. On your Facebook page, create a call-to-action button that will take people to these sign-up forms. These are the pages that are most visited by your prospects, so it’s important that you have an option for them to connect further with you. Simply having your sign-up form more readily available where your prospects are will help increase your list.
If you’d like to take it to the next level, create content, such as white papers and ebooks, full of information that will help your prospects do their job better. The price of the content? An email address. This will help connect you with the right people looking for the kind of education your event provides.
Create great content
It is so tempting to send email after email talking about your event, but that will only attract those who are already interested. So what can you do to make sure you reach those new prospects?
Create a content-rich email full of information that your prospects would be interested in. That can be as simple as repurposing content such as a blog article, or as in-depth as creating brand new content not available on your website. This can be a great way to keep your attendees and prospective attendees engaged year round, as well as give them something that they can easily share. And by adding an ad to your emails that directs people to your event information, each time someone shares that email, they are helping spread the word about your event.
Send it at the right time
The best way to make sure no one reads your email is by not sending it at the right time. No one is going to read your email when it’s sent at an off-time when no one is in the office. If you send it at the same time as everyone else, your email will likely get lost in the shuffle.
The cheapest way to avoid that is to look for those times when people will likely not being checking their emails or when they will likely experience an influx of emails and just avoid them. Another option is to use a feature of many email marketing providers: Customize the send time to when your list members will actually read it. The provider will look at times that each member has opened emails in the past and personalize the send time to each member. That can easily make your open rate higher.
What have you done in your email marketing that has helped connect with your prospects?
