Tackling Event Email Marketing Challenges: Key Insights from Experts

Email marketing plays a key role in event success. Yet in an age where the average employee receives 120 emails every single day, it can be difficult for event teams to make an impact with their email marketing efforts.

To help event teams get better outcomes from email marketing initiatives, we recently hosted a webinar called Beyond the bounce: Overcoming email marketing challenges for event professionals. It was full of actionable tips and insights designed to empower you to cover more ground with each campaign. Our star-studded webinar featured the following expert marketers:

• Kendra Ellis, director of client services at SmartBug Media
• LaShanda Jackson, global director of lifecycle marketing at Intuit Mailchimp
• Ghazwan Almoazen, global experiential marketing demand and communications director at DocuSign

At a high level, the webinar aimed to help teams like yours understand common event email marketing challenges, master the art of crafting emails that cut through the noise and captivate your audience, and devise an authentic event email marketing strategy that delivers real results.

Keep reading to learn more about some of the topics covered during the webinar. Then, click on the link to the full webinar.

The Truth About Email Open Rates

Traditionally, email marketers have been laser-focused on open rates, working tirelessly to craft compelling subject lines that encourage recipients to engage. If folks aren’t opening your emails, how can you expect to get good outcomes from email marketing campaigns?

But are open rates really the right metric to look at? Ellis doesn’t think so.

“For me, I don’t really look at open rates any more,” she said. “There are so many factors that play into skewing an open rate, so I really pay attention to deliverability, unsubscribes, spam, click-through rates and all of those metrics to determine the success or improvements that can be made with my overall email campaigns.”

Rather than trying to optimize open rates, Ellis encourages teams to prioritize engagement rates instead. In particular, focus on the frequency of your sends and your messaging to optimize engagement.

How To Get Past Google’s New Spam Filter Rules

Earlier this year, email providers like Yahoo and Google rolled out new email spam filter rules designed to protect user inboxes from unwanted messages.

At a high level, these rules force email senders to take the following steps:

• Authenticate their domains
• Offer one-click unsubscribing
• Honor unsubscribes within 48 hours
• Keep spam complaints under 0.3%

Together, the new rules beg the obvious question: How can you be sure your emails are reaching your intended audience?

Jackson stresses the importance of implementing best practices and keeping up with relevant regulations — like the CAN-SPAM Act.

“As email marketers, we need to make sure we are protecting them,” she said, adding that it is important to ensure your domain is authenticated. You want to make sure people know who you are and that somebody’s not pretending to send emails on behalf of your company.”  

At the same time, it’s critical to adhere to Yahoo and Google’s new rules — like offering the one-click unsubscribe option. Otherwise, your messages might never end up in attendee inboxes as more and more folks mark you as spam. 

Abiding by these rules will not only increase deliverability rates but also help you cultivate a list of people who are actually interested in what you have to say.

“As an email marketer, do you actually even want to send communications to someone who doesn’t want to receive it?” Jackson asked.

Don’t Flood Inboxes with Event Invites

Some email marketers might opt to flood recipient inboxes with messages. The thought process is simple: If you’re messaging all the time, you’ll stay top of mind, increasing the chances that recipients remember you and register for your event.

Almoazen cautions against falling into this trap.

“Audience fatigue is real and it’s happening,” he said. “For me, it’s all about hitting the audience with the right message at the right time.”

Rather than continuously blasting your audience, Almoazen encourages you to balance the story you’re telling for event promotion by hitting them at regular intervals. For example, you might want to send messages when you open registration, announce speakers, announce breakout sessions, and announce keynote and feature speakers. 

Segmentation is also important here. Since folks who are already registered are unlikely to go back to your event website, it’s important to keep them in the loop with event updates via email. Those messages will naturally be different from the messages you send to folks who’ve not yet registered.

Get Started: Tackle Every Email Marketing Challenge 

In addition to these insights, our expert panel served up a number of incredible tips. Here’s just a taste:

• How to create emails that capture and hold attention from subject lines to calls to action
• The vital role automation plays in successful email marketing strategies
• How to leverage data to continuously optimize your email campaigns
• And more!

To learn more about how to overcome event email marketing challenges and devise an event email marketing strategy that delivers results, watch the webinar in full on-demand.