Email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools for promoting events, offering a direct line of communication with your audience.
However, simply sending out emails is not enough to guarantee success. To maximize the effectiveness of your event marketing emails, it's crucial to understand and address common pitfalls that can prevent your messages from being opened.
Here, Audience Republic Customer Success Manager Aaron Stathi explores the top five reasons your event marketing emails might be falling short, and offers actionable insights to help you improve your email strategy.
1. A Poor Subject Line
An email subject line is a brief summary of the email's content, crucial for email marketing as it determines whether the recipient will open and engage with the message.
"The fan already has lots of different emails they're subscribed to. So how do you make yours stand out? Through having a strong ask or insight in your headline to entice them to open the email.
"Also, lack of relevancy is an issue. This is a consequence of not segmenting. Maybe your email isn’t relevant to everyone in your mail list. So they're just going to simply ignore it. Or, worse, open it and unsubscribe.
"The last one is having spammy words in your subject lines like ‘free’ and dollar signs. These are all trigger words to get caught by Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and they'll instantly move your email to the spam section unless your email’s already warm with the fan."
2. Posting at the Wrong Time of The Day
Timing marketing emails correctly is essential to maximize open and engagement rates by aligning with your audience’s most likely periods of attention and availability.
"It comes down to understanding your fan base and the times that they would engage with their inbox. So if your fan base is made up of uni students, it's unlikely they're going to look at your email during work hours from nine to five. However, if you send it on the lunch break, perhaps from 12 to one, or six to 7pm, you've got a stronger chance that the fan is going to open and engage with your email.
"It's also possible to send too many emails. I would say once a week is good. Again, it comes down to your fan base and what they're after. I know in E-commerce it's very common to get a daily email. But for events, a weekly email is okay."
3. Poor Sender Reputation
Poor sender reputation refers to a sender's low credibility due to factors like high bounce rates, spam complaints, and low engagement, leading to emails being filtered as spam or not delivered at all.
"The third reason is a little more technical. It's just from having your credentials not set up prior with DMARC policy, your DNS settings not having the DMARC record updated properly, or the CNAME records updated properly. So it's worth just taking a bit of time to go to your domain hosting provider and looking in the DNS settings to make sure that all the records are up to date with that. Audience Republic can help you with that."
4. Lack of Personalization
Otherwise known as sending generic, one-size-fits-all messages that fail to address the individual preferences, behaviors, and needs of recipients.
"People tend to tune out of a company-issued email that’s just asking for things from them right away, instead of adding just a little personal touch, or a little bit of humility and a sense of character of who the event provider is. Personalization wins.
"So when you add your name to it, when you write a little thought piece, people tend to engage with the email a lot more strongly. And they will go with what you ask of them, whether it's to go to a page or podcast or ticketing page to look at a presale ticket or general admission ticket."
5. Design and Formatting Issues
Poor layout, unresponsive design and inconsistent visual elements can negatively impact readability, user experience, and overall engagement with the email.
"One reason why your emails are getting opened but not engaged with is a cluttered layout.
"I've seen this with people where the headline is great, where it might say ‘Join us for a Special Event with Band X.’ But the very first thing you see when you open the email is a banner with a generic company name. And that's really wasted real estate space, where they could have really used that to put up the banner of the event in the location to reinforce the headline, and then go into the copy.
"But instead they're cluttering the space unnecessarily, because they feel they need to add a lot of content into one email. But instead, if they know that they can just subtract and just make it really clear with one great image, a bit of short copy, the call to action button, the ask is very clear."
To find out how Audience Republic can help your event achieve higher open and click-through rates with your email marketing, speak to a friendly member of our team now.
