Engineering a successful event takes diligence, deliberation and a ton of work. There are many elements that contribute to the outcome of an event including the core idea, the hosts, the audience, price planning, marketing and logistic systems. Here are some pointers on how to make your future events result in a sold-out affair.
Our client Resa's Pieces used our email marketing platform MadMimi to make an announcement about their upcoming event. The campaign was hugely successful. It had much better open rates (almost 50%!) and click through rates (more than 10%). We wanted to find out the specific reasons that made it highly successful, so that we might all benefit from the knowledge. With the information in this article we’re sure you can make your event announcements super-responsive.
Let's dive in.
The Success Factors
Here are the top factors that make events successful.
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Email List Quality: Subscribers who look forward to hearing from you will be most responsive to your announcement. Make sure you have the permission (and email address, of course) of the attendees to your previous events. Your most recent customers, prospects, vendors, partners come next.
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Pent-up Demand: Make your event so enticing that your audience wouldn't want to pass it up. Your audience must be craving for your event. Get the most amazing people to host the event, book the best hall possible, make the ticket price reasonable considering how awesome the event is going to be.
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Follow-up Repeatedly: People are busy, their email boxes already filling up quickly and it's easy to miss your email. Make sure you announce about your event several times, all at strategic points in time. Resa’s Pieces announced a save the date, then when ticket sales opened and a couple of follow ups. The emails went out over a 4 month period.
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Offer an Early Bird Advantage: Reward early action takers with a gift, a discount coupon, preferential seating, a music CD or something else fitting.
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Relevant Content: When you email frequently you may run the risk of annoying your audience. You can undermine that by making your communication interesting in every email. Talk about the different aspects of the event. Touch upon the event hosts, attendees, their expectations, a sampling of music, the venue, arrangements being made, testimonials, etc.
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Make It Personal: Segment your audience by previous event participation, locality and tailor your communication accordingly. You can easily address them by their name if you're using MadMimi. Let the emails go out from the most familiar person in the host organization. Write them in a one-to-one style for the best impact. Try an audio or video embedded or linked off the email.
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Get More People On Your List: Make it easy for event attendees to spread the word with their friends, family and business associates. Add a 'share' button in the email and on relevant thank-you pages.
Bonus Tip: Getting The Most From Your Upcoming Event
Capture the email addresses (and permission to email) of all event attendees. This will be one of the most affordable ways to build a highly targeted audience list. Resa’s Pieces literally started with a list size of zero several years ago. Now their list has thousands of super-fans all waiting to hear about their next concert, and ready to buy or sponsor the organization.
I hope the above pointers will help you craft a super-responsive event announcement. If you have any questions, feel free to let us know in the comments.
