4 Ways to Build Your Events Pipeline Through Email Marketing
When it comes to creating and promoting an event effectively, an events pipeline is the cornerstone of your success. Creating an events pipeline means that you need to strategically plan, organize, and promote your event from the initial concept to the final execution.
This approach involves defining your objectives, targeting your audiences and creating segmented marketing strategies that include your desired marketing channels, the teams involved in this project, and the materials that signal success.
In such projects, the importance of email marketing is undeniable:
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The ROI of email marketing is one of the highest in any marketing channel, but this is not the only benefit. Using email marketing for your event marketing strategy allows you to connect directly with potential attendees, nurture their interest, and ultimately drive them to take action.
Of course, you will need your email marketing messages to be tailored to each individual and your email automation sequences to include crucial steps like updates and time-sensitive messages.
So, let’s go ahead and see how you can engage your audience and build a successful events pipeline using email marketing.
Preparing Your Email List
Your email list is the tool that will allow you the ticket to success when it comes to your events pipeline. To do so, you’ll first need to clean and prune it, ensure you’ve got all of the right emails and keep it in pristine condition.
An overcrowded list filled with inactive or outdated contacts can hurt your email marketing efforts more than you might think. Non-interested subscribers could mark your email as spam, while inactive or invalid email addresses will drag down your engagement metrics.
To ensure your event invitations reach the right inboxes, it’s imperative to clean your list every so often – six months to a year, depending on your list size and your objectives. Remove those who have shown no interest in your emails for an extended period of time, and reduce bounce rates by removing inactive and invalid addresses. A clean and pristine list is the foundation for a successful events pipeline.
List-cleaning tools are among the most sought-after capabilities of an email newsletter software, but so are segmentation tools. Segmentation is the second step in preparing your email list.
When you segment your contacts for your event, you essentially break down your audience into smaller groups with common characteristics. To do so, you can use geographic, demographic, psychographic, or any other type of data that benefit your marketing plan:
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Segmenting your email list will help you create a tailor-made message that appeals to your audience every single time. This not only boosts open and click-through rates but also enhances the overall attendee experience.
On the other hand, generic email messages might appeal to some recipients. However, others will find them dull and even annoying. This could result in too many spam complaints that could harm your deliverability. In any case, it will surely not benefit your open rates.
Crafting Compelling Emails for Your Events Pipeline
A compelling email is half the job done, provided you do it correctly and serve the purposes of your event marketing strategy. Your email’s visual appeal can determine whether recipients engage with your message or simply hit the delete button.
So, the first thing to do would be to create eye-catching email design and use the appropriate templates.
First of all, make sure your emails are responsive. Here’s why:
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Email opens on mobile devices surpass those on desktop. In an era when users open their emails on various devices, a responsive design ensures that your message looks great and functions well on smartphones, tablets, and desktop.
Opt for single-column designs like this one:
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Single-column design is an easy way to create an engaging email message and improve engagement on a mobile device. It gives more emphasis to headlines, CTAs and images, making your email scannable.
Incorporating images and visuals is another key aspect of your events email marketing. Visual content can grab attention and convey information quickly while generating leads and converting existing ones. But remember, striking a balance between visuals and text is key to maintaining loading speed and ensuring that your message is clear and concise.
Of course, a visually appealing email isn’t automatically a good email. After all, an interesting subject line, a cheeky headline and a compelling CTA is what will showcase what your event is about.
The first thing to do would be to pay meticulous attention to your subject lines as they are the make-or-break factor for your open rates:
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A spam report can come because of an unsuccessful subject line, while 64% of users open their emails based on the subject line alone. Craft subject lines that intrigue, create urgency, or promise value. Of course, all this depends on the stage of the funnel your user is in. If they haven’t registered for your event yet, it makes sense to use urgency, while intriguing or value-centered email subject lines are best for new users.
Once the email is opened, the content must deliver on the promise made in the subject line. Keep your event descriptions clear and concise. Highlight what attendees can expect and why your event is worth their while. And don’t forget about optimizing your calls to action (CTAs).
Your CTAs will lead users to the desired actions. So, make them stand out with actionable verbs that lead recipients from action A to action B in the registration process.
Leveraging Email Automation for Your Event Emails
Email automation is one of the most important methodologies with a toolset that drives efficiency and consistency for your events pipeline and the emails that create it.
At its core, email automation allows you to automate repetitive email tasks while you use your time and resources to resolve more important marketing issues. An automated email sequence is a predefined set of email messages that are sent automatically to a specific group of recipients at scheduled intervals or in response to certain triggers or actions.
The aim of an automated email sequence is to engage, educate, nurture, and guide recipients through a predefined journey or workflow.
In our case, you need to create and follow these steps:
- A pre-event teaser email that will spark curiosity and build anticipation.
- An event reminder email that will be sent to registered attendees and remind them of the date of your email.
- A post-event follow-up email that will help gather feedback for your future endeavors, while maintaining engagement and interest.
Of course, email automation isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, as audiences are different from brand to brand. For example, in the above sequence, you could use two event reminders, one with a countdown timer to spark urgency. You could also use a different sequence for the non-openers of the initial email.
Personalizing content is another component you need to consider for your automation emails. After all, email personalization is the heart of email automation. By tailoring your emails to individual preferences, behaviors, or demographics, you can create a sense of exclusivity and relevance for each recipient.
Opt for personalized recommendations and take it a step further with triggered event emails. Utilizing data and analytics, you can suggest specific sessions, workshops, or networking opportunities based on an attendee’s past interactions or interests. This will enhance the attendee experience and boost event engagement and conversions.
After all, who doesn’t need recommendations that are spot-on and relevant to their past experiences and behavior on your events website?
Event Email Performance: Tracking and Analyzing
In the dynamic landscape of email marketing for your events pipeline, tracking and analyzing performance is paramount to your success. To create email marketing campaigns for your events and understand what makes users tick, you need the right tracking tools in place.
Of course, your email marketing and marketing automation platform will give you tools that analyze your data and give you a bird’s eye view of the behavior of your recipients. You can also use Google analytics tools and monitor how recipients engage with your emails, or UTMs parameters that showcase how the links in your emails perform.
That way, you’ll understand the value your links have when it comes to your audience and the types of CTA they’d like to see. If a CTA is actionable, but the action itself is nothing of value to your audience, you will need data that will point you in the right direction.
Tracking performance will allow you to turn your data into actions and understand insights that can transform your event marketing strategy and your event email marketing as a whole.
Track the following four key email marketing metrics to understand and optimize your event email marketing strategy:
- Your open rates. They measure how many recipients open your emails
- Your click-through rates. They will reveal the percentage of people who interact with your email’s content.
- Your conversion rates. They will track the number of subscribers who take the desired action, such as registering for your event.
- Your ROI. This is pivotal to understanding the economic impact of your email marketing efforts.
These metrics are vital for your events pipeline. They will allow you to assess what’s working and what needs improvement.
The Takeaway
The fantastic thing about email marketing for events is that it’s a chameleon. You can adjust it to every marketing action and make informed decisions based on data.
Whether it’s tweaking subject lines for higher open rates, optimizing CTAs to boost conversions, or fine-tuning content to resonate better with your audience, data-driven insights empower you to make informed decisions. Additionally, tracking your efforts will help you refine and enhance your email campaigns.
Embrace a culture of continuous improvement. Ensure that each email campaign becomes a learning opportunity to refine your strategy, use new tools to automate and personalize your email marketing efforts and engage your audience more effectively with segmented email campaigns.
These small tricks will ultimately elevate your events pipeline to new heights.
The author Téa Liarokapi is a Senior Content Writer for Moosend, an email marketing and marketing automation platform, and an obsessive writer in general.
About the Author / Ana Almeida
