Is e‑mail marketing for professional events dead?

Have you late­ly found it dif­fi­cult to pen­e­trate the com­pet­i­tive mar­ket and reach the right audi­ence for your events through email mar­ket­ing? Many pro­fes­sion­al events com­pa­nies sim­ply deduce that email mar­ket­ing is no more effec­tive.

So, is email mar­ket­ing dead in 2023?

The fact is that e‑mail mar­ket­ing for pro­fes­sion­al events is not dead. There is sim­ply a need to read­just the strate­gies that you have been using, and when you do so, you will see the desired results.

Stick­ing to a sin­gle strat­e­gy while doing busi­ness is nev­er a long-term solu­tion. In the busi­ness are­na, you need to be adap­tive and inquis­i­tive to find and learn new mar­ket­ing strate­gies.

Some­times, one strat­e­gy might not be enough, and you might have to devel­op hybrid mar­ket­ing tech­niques to reach the right cus­tomers.

1. The present condition of email marketing for professional events

When talk­ing about the pro­fes­sion­al events indus­try, the demo­graph­ics vary great­ly com­pared to many oth­er indus­tries. Ser­vices are offered to a diverse group of demo­graph­ics – and this may depend on their age, gen­der, income group, pro­fes­sion, etc.

When you study your com­peti­tors, you will find them using var­i­ous means to reach out to their prospec­tive clients. It may include using social media plat­forms like Insta­gram, Face­book, etc.

How­ev­er, this does not mean that e‑mail mar­ket­ing for pro­fes­sion­al events is not effec­tive these days. In fact, peo­ple still con­sid­er emails to be a very legit form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The major­i­ty of Gen‑Z prefers to receive brand com­mu­ni­ca­tion via email.

More­over, event organ­is­ers rat­ed email mar­ket­ing as the most suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. So, why do many peo­ple believe that email mar­ket­ing is dead for the pro­fes­sion­al events indus­try?

The next sec­tion will high­light fac­tors con­tribut­ing to the per­cep­tion that email mar­ket­ing for pro­fes­sion­al events is no longer effec­tive.
Fac­tors that con­tribute to the per­cep­tion that email mar­ket­ing for pro­fes­sion­al events is no longer effec­tive

The prime rea­son behind the belief in the non-effec­tive­ness of email mar­ket­ing for pro­fes­sion­al events is insuf­fi­cient results or a low response rate. There are many fac­tors respon­si­ble for email mar­ket­ing not deliv­er­ing desired results.

1. Lack of focus on personalisation

One must realise that email mar­ket­ing has changed over the last decade, and the strate­gies that worked in the past might not be as effec­tive now.

Those who effec­tive­ly gain results from email mar­ket­ing for pro­fes­sion­al events nev­er dis­card per­son­al­i­sa­tion. Whether using per­son­al sub­ject lines or focus­ing on email design, every­thing must be cus­tomer-cen­tric when adopt­ing email mar­ket­ing.

The fact that most organ­i­sa­tions fail to fol­low the basics of per­son­al­i­sa­tion leads to poor results from email mar­ket­ing for event man­age­ment, lead­ing to the per­cep­tion that it’s no longer effec­tive

2. Non-mobile-friendly templates

Almost every­thing in the world now runs on mobile. Peo­ple want to access every­thing on their mobile phones – even emails! But when you do not use mobile-friend­ly tem­plates, the users do not find them inter­est­ing.

As a result, the response is neg­li­gi­ble. Once again, in such a predica­ment, it is led to believe that email mar­ket­ing is inef­fec­tive for pro­fes­sion­al events.

3. Ignorance about GDPR requirements

GDPR requires clear, indis­putable con­sent from cus­tomers to receive com­mer­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Mar­ket­ing emails that com­ply with GDPR are legal. GDPR ensures that con­sumers’ data is pro­tect­ed and used by firms they trust.

It means that the email cam­paigns will only reach those inter­est­ed in them. It ensures legal com­pli­ance for email mar­ket­ing. Those who fail to use GDPR-com­pli­ant email mar­ket­ing tools do not get the results from their email mar­ket­ing efforts, and they believe it is no longer effec­tive.

3. Best Practices for Email Marketing for Professional Events

You must fol­low the best prac­tices to ensure you get the desired results from your email mar­ket­ing efforts. If you are an event man­ag­er, you might want to brush up on your knowl­edge of the right way to start the email and cre­ate impres­sive sub­ject lines.

Use the fol­low­ing tips to pilot your email mar­ket­ing for pro­fes­sion­al events in the right direc­tion:

Segmenting the target audience

Your email list’s audi­ence will like­ly rep­re­sent var­i­ous inter­ests and lifestyles. Con­se­quent­ly, it is rea­son­able to pur­pose­ful­ly address or con­tact each of the dis­tinct groups of indi­vid­u­als who con­sti­tute your mail­ing list.

Your audi­ence mem­bers could have a com­mon inter­est in the event you’re host­ing, but that does­n’t mean they’re all the same. If you want to engage them, you will not be suc­cess­ful if you treat them all as if they were one mas­sive mass audi­ence.

So, it is a good idea to divide indi­vid­u­als of your audi­ence into groups (or seg­ments) depend­ing on loca­tion, age, the kind of event they are attend­ing, their inter­ests, and how involved they are with your event.

Because of this, you will have the abil­i­ty to deliv­er the infor­ma­tion that is both use­ful and the most engag­ing for each sub­set of your email list.

Create personalised subject lines

Cre­ate sub­ject lines that are inter­est­ing to read. Most mar­keters believe that the sub­ject lines have the most influ­ence on the per­cent­age of emails that are opened.

Peo­ple make the deci­sion to flag com­mu­ni­ca­tions as spam based only on the sub­ject line, which fur­ther empha­sis­es the sig­nif­i­cance of sub­ject lines. Hence, you must com­pose sub­ject lines that pique their inter­est to improve the per­cent­age of peo­ple in your audi­ence who read your emails.

It may be chal­leng­ing to write sub­ject lines for emails that cap­ture the read­er’s atten­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly if you are deliv­er­ing var­i­ous mes­sages dur­ing your event adver­tis­ing cam­paign. To get peo­ple to click on your links, make sure your sub­ject lines:

• are very clear and easy to under­stand,
• are less than 50 char­ac­ters (to make them mobile-friend­ly),
• use lan­guage and mes­sages that your tar­get buy­er per­sona knows and is inter­est­ed in,
• use action-ori­ent­ed lan­guage and verbs to make your writ­ing feel urgent and excit­ing,
• avoid spam trig­gers like “Cash,” “Quote,” and “Save”,
• include their first names.

3. Each email should have at least one call-to-action button

Those who receive your email will skim over every­thing rather than read them thor­ough­ly. Because of this, you should ensure that your call-to-action (CTA) but­ton is well-defined and sim­ple to locate, even for the most effi­cient email scan­ners.

If you are organ­is­ing a spe­cif­ic kind of event, then you will not be able to call your receivers to take any action that gen­uine­ly helps if you do not have a CTA but­ton.

You will want to posi­tion your call to action (CTA) in a spot that allows for clear vis­i­bil­i­ty and makes it obvi­ous why some­one would want to click on it.

4. Choose the best location for the most important information (assets)

Your asset of the most impor­tant infor­ma­tion of your pro­fes­sion­al event should be high­light­ed and placed in the best posi­tion to attract atten­tion. If you want to include a ban­ner image, GIF, or video in your email, show it imme­di­ate­ly.

This will assist in cap­tur­ing the inter­est of the read­er. Now that you have their atten­tion, you should imme­di­ate­ly ask them to do some­thing. There is always the temp­ta­tion to utilise a call to action as an out­ro, but if you want the read­er to take action after read­ing your email, you should place the CTA high­er up on the page.

If you do this, the per­cent­age of peo­ple in the audi­ence who respond to what you say will be sub­stan­tial­ly greater.

5. Keep your email straightforward

Every­one gets mar­ket­ing emails, and peo­ple are hard­ly impressed with unnec­es­sary gib­ber­ish. You must keep your emails for pro­fes­sion­al events pret­ty straight­for­ward and com­mu­ni­cate pre­cise­ly.

When con­vey­ing impor­tant infor­ma­tion, use short sen­tences using straight­for­ward lan­guage. Make the con­tent more scannable by employ­ing head­ers and sub­head­ing titles, lists, and links that are sim­ple to spot in the text.

6. Recheck your emails

When you are final­ly ready to send an email, prac­tise dou­ble-check­ing again to see whether the email looks as nice as you believe it does before you push the “Send” but­ton. If the email mar­ket­ing solu­tion you’re using gives you the option to do so, pre­view how your mes­sage will appear on your tar­get audi­ence’s devices.

A test ver­sion of your email should also be sent out before you send it to every­one on your email list to con­firm that it func­tions prop­er­ly for every­one. You should begin includ­ing these as the last stages in review­ing your emails.

Conclusion

Using the right strate­gies and avoid­ing the wrong ones would help you under­stand how and when email mar­ket­ing is effec­tive. Hope­ful­ly, the insights of this arti­cle will help you get the most out of your efforts through email mar­ket­ing for pro­fes­sion­al events.

Now that you have the essen­tial knowl­edge on max­imis­ing email mar­ket­ing for pro­fes­sion­al events, it’s time to explore solu­tions to stream­line your event organ­i­sa­tion. Weezevent pro­vides tick­et­ing, access con­trol and cash­less pay­ment solu­tions and mar­ket­ing and CRM tools to make your event a suc­cess!

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