Email marketing is the best digital channel for producing return on investment (ROI) for a company. Are you emailing your list effectively?
Event services companies must allocate resources toward attendee generation. Ensuring attendance is of key importance to event marketers. FrescoData has compiled some key tactics to raising event awareness and driving event commitment. You can achieve higher attendance rates by employing these techniques on your email address list.
Simplify Your Opt-In Process
When building your valid email address list, it may seem important to ask a variety of information about your potential customers. Where do they work? What is their job title? Will they share a phone number along with their email? Getting a lot of information from them when they opt-in to your emails may seem like a great tactic, especially because it helps you segment your email lists and create better email campaigns.
Truthfully though, this is not the case.
People are distrustful of sharing information online. With the variety of data breaches happening throughout the world on a regular basis, people are becoming increasingly more concerned with online privacy. They are likely to abandon an email registration process if it is too long or too invasive. Consumers are untrusting of companies they are not familiar and do not know well.
Regulators are also interested in protecting consumer privacy, as is seen with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)[AM1] in the European Union and the Consumer Credit Protection Act (CCPA)[AM2] in California. These regulations have specific requirements about what information companies can and cannot obtain from potential customers. They also dictate specific ways in which the information can be gathered as well.
What this means is that you must make sure you only gather information pertinent and relevant to your event from consumers during the opt-in process. The information should be as minimal as possible. Name, company and email should be more than enough to start with for most companies. As you get acquainted with your audience over time, then you can ask them for more information. You can send out emails containing surveys that promise your audience more personalization in the email they receive. This tactic not only ensures you receive information that people that are truly engaged with your email campaigns, it also is compliant with consumer privacy regulations.
Focus on Creating Interest
No one wants to receive a sales pitch the first time they encounter a company. They especially do not want to if they are being pitched a ticket to a high-priced event. Some events cost upward of $1000 or more. Beginning email cadences to new potential customers with a sales pitch will alienate them and cause them to distrust your brand.
Instead of focusing on the sale, engage new potential customers with stories. Build interest for your event by explaining what it is about, what they will gain by attending and showcasing the experience they will have at the event. Starting with these types of emails first and then building to a sales pitch will be much more effective at driving sales than other approaches. This methodology helps email address list recipients feel more connected to the event and gives them an opportunity to see themselves attending the event before a sales pitch occurs. This will make it more likely for them to buy a ticket once the sales pitch does come later in the email cadence.
Make Recipients Fear Missing Out
Have you heard of the fear of missing out (FOMO)? It is a phenomenon where a person feels apprehensive about other people having rewarding experiences that they are not a part of. In the digital age, FOMO has become a commonplace feeling for many people. For marketers, this feeling presents an opportunity to drive interest and generate event ticket sales.
When creating email campaigns, they should focus on the experience a recipient will have at the event. Go into detail, highlight all the benefits of the event. The more persuasive you are, the more users will react. The idea is to make recipients so interested in your event that they will be hurt if they do not. Your stories need to be compelling to create FOMO in your audience. Once the FOMO is there, they will be driven to buy tickets once the opportunity presents itself further down your email cadence.
Use Social Media to Your Advantage
No matter what you do, there will always be some people in your audience that do not attend your event. This is not ideal for your marketing goals, but it happens. How do you drive them from an interested observer one year to an attendee the next? Using social media to your advantage during the event can help cause this push toward attendance.
During an event, you should be posting as much as you can about the event on social media. Highlight funny moments. Share informative information. Showcase stories from real attendees and the benefits they are gaining from the event. Also give attendees an opportunity to share about your event themselves. Create hashtags specific to your event that allow attendees—and non-attendees—to interact with one another.
Along with sharing all this information on social media, you can take your best posts (the ones that performed the best) and share these with your email lists. Email has a better deliverability rate than social media does. This means that your audience is more likely to see your emails than your social posts. Create daily round up emails for your event. These emails will be beneficial for attendees—who may have missed something during the event—and non-attendees—who are probably curious about what is happening at the event. For non-attendees specifically, these emails can make the difference between them attending the following year or not.
Conclusion
Event services companies have a lot on their plate. They not only have to create an amazing event, they must convince people with valid email addresses that their event is worth attending. Event companies can build their email campaigns themselves or use the experts at FrescoData to build them for them. FrescoData prides itself with knowing advanced email marketing techniques that can drive email campaigns to generate more results. From using email address lists obtained in a compliant way to creating email marketing campaigns that generate FOMO in recipients, FrescoData has your company’s back. Allow FrescoData to create these campaigns for you so you can focus on what you are good at, creating an outstanding event.
