Event email marketing: How to build excitement for your next event

By Kaleigh Moore November 21, 2023

Occasion e mail advertising and marketing is a key technique for constructing anticipation to your subsequent occasion—whether or not on-line or offline. This put up explores key occasion e mail advertising and marketing examples and methods to assist.

When a survey asked event marketers their only technique for getting the phrase out, the outcomes have been attention-grabbing:

The most effective technique wasn’t word-of-mouth. It wasn’t social media.

It was e mail.

Over 75% of the occasion entrepreneurs polled mentioned e mail advertising and marketing was their choice. They reported 45% of their complete occasion ticket gross sales got here from e mail advertising and marketing campaigns.

That makes occasion advertising and marketing easy, proper? Join an e mail platform, tie in an event marketing platform like Eventbrite, and also you’re good to go.

However simply because one medium is the most efficient doesn’t assure future outcomes.

To make occasion e mail advertising and marketing give you the results you want, you might want to be taught what it’s and the best way to use it. You’ll want announcement and drip marketing campaign emails to pump up pleasure properly earlier than the occasion. And some examples to point out the way it’s performed gained’t damage, both.

Let’s dive in.

What’s e mail advertising and marketing for occasions?

E mail occasion advertising and marketing is a newsletter-based technique for constructing urgency and a spotlight for an upcoming get-together. A very good e mail occasion advertising and marketing technique has a couple of completely different options:

• Constructing pleasure and anticipation for the occasion, which helps you promote extra tickets
• Saying, with excellent readability, the important thing particulars—such because the date, the time, and the best way to get to your occasion
• Offering hyperlinks and particulars in case your occasion is web-based
• Answering questions concerning the occasion upfront. This creates much less confusion when the day lastly comes

These steps sound intuitive sufficient. However bear in mind: occasion e mail advertising and marketing may be completely different than your regular e mail advertising and marketing methods.

The standard technique is likely to be to filter new potential clients to your lead magnet. The advantages you’ll be able to obtain from this technique can construct over time, without end.

Occasion e mail advertising and marketing greatest practices

E mail occasion advertising and marketing is extra like constructing a marketing campaign round a narrative. It has a starting, a center, and an finish: the occasion itself.

If you wish to do it successfully, you’ll have to maintain a couple of greatest practices in thoughts:

Personalization

An occasion ought to really feel extra “actual” than most newsletters. 

Occasions imply assembly folks face-to-face, both on a webcam or in individual. It’s one factor to get a possible buyer to enroll in a lead magnet. It’s one other factor to get them to decide to attending, say, a convention.

With e mail advertising and marketing platform, you’ll be able to incorporate personalization features aplenty:

• Use a platform like AWeber to robotically enter every subscriber’s distinctive first identify
• Use subscriber segmentation and tag every consumer with a selected class so you’ll be able to ship them event-specific content material
• Add code to your web site and interact with subscribers primarily based on their explicit site-browsing habits

Arrange your marketing campaign accurately from the get-go, and your occasion emails will come throughout as eerily telepathic. 

However there’s nothing unusual happening. You’re simply training good personalization habits and skipping these publication subscribers who may not have an interest.

Buyer segmentation

Talking of customer segmentation: you wouldn’t invite an e mail checklist of cat lovers to an occasion at a dogs-only park, would you?

Not should you needed anybody to point out up.

With buyer segmentation options, you’ll be able to tag particular subscribers. Or you’ll be able to drill down even additional, separating subscribers by the sorts of occasions they may need to attend.

You probably have a far-reaching viewers, for instance, you’ll be able to tag “NY-Occasions” for subscribers native to the New York space.

Segmentation ensures that you simply don’t waste any time by campaigning to crowds of people that haven’t any intention of ever attending your occasions. 

It’s not sufficient to have a “[CUSTOMER_NAME]” field at first of your e mail.

Use buyer segmentation tags to make sure each e mail feels related to each group you’re participating. Your purpose? Determine particular niches of subscribers who might be enthusiastic sufficient to order a spot at your occasion.

Making the occasion appear actual

There’s a humorous factor that occurs with on-line interactions. We frequently neglect we’re interacting with different folks. As Psychology Today notes, one survey discovered that faculty college students had the best enhance in well-being after they interacted with folks in individual.

 Merely put, on-line interactions don’t register fairly as “actual” as face-to-face interactions do.

And that may be a tough promote. In any case, you in all probability acquired most of your subscribers from on-line interactions. 

Now, with occasion e mail advertising and marketing, you’re asking folks to start out seeing you as an actual individual. You’re asking to alter the context of your relationship, which requires a unique model of engagement.

Begin by making the occasion appear actual:

• Open loops that may solely shut in individual. For instance, possibly somebody enters a contest on-line—however they’ll solely acquire the prize in individual. 
• Use compelling visuals. Do you may have snapshots from a earlier occasion? Embrace them. Even when your occasion is totally on-line, embody headshots for each visitor who will seem.
• Share a private story. Does the occasion come out of a private story or realization you had? Share it together with your viewers. In case your occasion is a lecture or net convention a few particular matter, discuss concerning the private circumstances that led to your discovery of that matter.

Find out how to use e mail advertising and marketing to spark curiosity in your occasion

E mail advertising and marketing is like some other sort of promoting. Besides this time, you need greater than a click on. 

You have to inspire folks to show up, enroll, and even pay a hefty sum of money simply to get in.

These are huge asks. You probably have a younger publication subscriber base, they’re particularly huge asks. You should still be in the course of constructing familiarity together with your viewers.

To make sure your occasion sparks sufficient curiosity, construct the next methods into your marketing campaign:

Get your announcement in early

Ever discover how Hollywood doesn’t kick off a film marketing campaign with a full film trailer anymore?
It’s normally a collection of teases. They’ll launch footage from the set years upfront. Or they’ll hype up a quick “trailer tease” on YouTube.

Lastly, the complete trailers grow to be blockbuster occasions themselves: typically they debut throughout halftime of Monday Evening Soccer.

The ultimate trailer. Tune in to Monday Evening Soccer on @ESPN to observe it stay. #TheRiseOfSkywalker pic.twitter.com/QAme0H5j0D

— Star Wars (@starwars) October 19, 2019

The important thing to this technique is beginning early. Plant these seeds of pleasure. Get on peoples’ radar properly upfront of the occasion.

Pleasure begins together with your first announcement e mail. So now’s the time to start out brainstorming.

Brainstorm your e mail topic strains

We’ve acquired a couple of concepts for best practices on email subject lines. Let’s do a quick assessment:

• Preserve them beneath 45 characters. This ensures folks can learn an entire thought with out clicking. In any other case, your topic strains may fade into ellipses in your recipients’ inboxes.
• Use the “sentence case” to your headers, which retains issues informal. These emails ought to appear to be they’re coming from previous buddies.
• Create a “curiosity hole.” This implies you must introduce a thriller together with your topic line. If readers need to resolve it, they’ll really feel compelled to click on the e-mail.

Then write down a listing of your greatest concepts for announcement topic strains. 

And right here’s the trick: sleep on them. If you’re contemporary, take a look at them anew. Ask your self which one popped as essentially the most compelling.

Chances are high, that’s your winner.

Construct an occasion touchdown web page

True: an occasion isn’t a static factor. It should come and go. Constructing a web site can really feel like overkill when you understand that is only a momentary marketing campaign.

However you continue to want a centralized hub the place folks can discover key data and join marketing campaign emails.

Inside AWeber, you’ll be able to construct a selected touchdown web page with buyer tags. This fashion, solely the publication subscribers who is likely to be occasion attendees will get the segmented emails.

You may as well use the touchdown web page as a possibility to do among the legwork.

Any occasion goes to have Steadily Requested Questions:

When and the place? How will you attend? How a lot do tickets price?

You’ll probably repeat this data in social media posts and emails. However having FAQs up on a touchdown web page will make sure the solutions are there for anybody who needs them. 

(Extra on constructing your touchdown pages in a second.)

Start capturing photos from the venue—or use inventory photos

If you happen to’ve already booked a venue, use that venue’s present photos to make the occasion appear extra “actual.”

It’s one factor to say you’re renting an auditorium. It’s one other factor to point out an image of 100 empty seats and write the headline: “Three extra days…”

If you happen to don’t have entry to these footage, you’ll be able to at all times select inventory footage, together with these related to the occasion’s metropolis, to assist construct anticipation.

Or ask company for headshots you’ll be able to embody in your touchdown web page and emails.

Pictures are so necessary to our perceptions, they’ll even influence our memories. The extra visible your marketing campaign will get, the extra “actual” it would really feel when the week of the occasion rolls round.

Create periodic reminders

A typical story has a three-act construction:

• An inciting incident, which pulls the story out of its complacency and creates urgency
• A second act of more and more complicated issues and escalating pressure
• A climax the place the destiny of the story hangs within the stability

You don’t have to show your occasion emails right into a novel anytime quickly, true. However you ought to have a free sense of this construction as you construct anticipation to your occasion.

Enter “periodic reminder” emails.

If the announcement e mail was your inciting incident, these interval reminders will fill the area of a protracted second act. 

And that may be a problem. The thrilling first announcement and the third-act buildup to the occasion are sometimes essentially the most thrilling components of an e mail marketing campaign.

What do you do to create periodic reminders in between? Listed below are a couple of concepts:

• “Unpeel the onion.” Like an ideal thriller author, solely unveil one clue at a time. Create intrigue by presenting photos, prizes, and different components out of your occasion out of context. Preserve your viewers guessing, then slowly reveal what every layer of the onion means to the final word occasion.
• Give away the small print. No have to be coy concerning the logistics of your occasion. As a substitute, permit folks so as to add occasions to their calendar—together with dates, instances, and net addresses.
• Construct your reminders in sequence. It’s extra enjoyable in case your emails run in a selected order, with every e mail increasing on what you wrote within the earlier version. For instance, Canva sends instructional emails the place every lesson provides mini-skills on prime of the emails that got here earlier than.
• Create a drip marketing campaign. Schedule your “second-act” emails as a drip campaign from the outset, which helps you create a pure chronological timeline that seems like a narrative unfolding.

Collect FAQs and retailer them in your touchdown web page

It’s solely pure: an occasion goes to garner some questions.

When? The place? Who?

If you happen to deal with your occasion e mail advertising and marketing marketing campaign as a true-blue marketing campaign, then each marketing campaign wants that landing page. 

That is the “gross sales web page” to your occasion. And like gross sales web page, it ought to anticipate—and reply—each buyer query beforehand.

Begin with Steadily Requested Questions you understand folks may have. The 5 Ws: who, what, the place, when, and why. 

Clarify what folks can anticipate to get out of your occasion, even when it’s one thing so simple as a enjoyable evening out.

And as questions are available, don’t neglect to notice these and jot down your solutions. Ideally, your touchdown web page might be an entire “hub” of any and all data associated to your occasion.

All that’s left for the shopper is to ask themselves by coming into their e mail tackle. From there, you’ll be able to tag them to a segmented e mail checklist and get them began in your drip marketing campaign.

Get entangled on social media

Occasion e mail advertising and marketing could also be one of the best ways to get folks to enroll, however you continue to want folks to find your emails within the first place. And social media may be a good way to attract them in.

One technique is to maximise your use of hashtags:

• Create an event-specific hashtag (like #Your-Occasion-Right here-2024) to construct a hashtag “hub.” Anybody who needs to submit their put up, connect a photograph of their invitation, or announce they’re attending can use this hashtag for visibility.
• Use event-adjacent hashtags to get extra eyeballs on your posts. These are significantly efficient when you may have industry-specific hashtags you should utilize. Individuals in your {industry}—who might already be in search of occasions—can discover your posts with a easy search.

And maintain at it. Possibly your hashtag posts gained’t draw 500 likes and engagements in a single day. However each new put up retains your occasion on the prime of the search outcomes each time somebody seems to be for the hashtag.

Social media can also be an ideal place to start contests and prizes to create pleasure. You’ll be able to even use Re-posts on X and different social shares as methods folks can enter, drumming up much more engagement out of your viewers.

Within the instance above, an occasion for Ukraine Assist reveals off the best way to create social posts:

• Inspiring, high-contrast visuals to attract the attention
• Important data: who, when, the place, what, and why
• Hashtags like #PossibleWithU assist improve the visibility.

Ideas for constructing urgency when it’s crunch time

Now we enter the third act of your marketing campaign: the climax. 

It’s crunch time.

Your software for constructing urgency right here ought to be to play on shortage. Shortage is straightforward: the much less of one thing there’s, the extra folks will need it. 

Shortage is a pure match for occasion e mail advertising and marketing as a result of an occasion is inherently scarce. It solely occurs as soon as. And likelihood is, there are all kinds of alternatives to spotlight shortage:

• You might solely have a certain quantity of on-line company
• There are solely a sure variety of seats or areas
• A venue might have a most capability
• If the occasion is barely taking place as soon as, your viewers may miss it
• A restricted variety of VIP spots

That latter level is vital. Creating “VIP tickets” may be a good way to encourage new sign-ups while you’re nonetheless within the “Drip marketing campaign” section of the general marketing campaign.

For instance, “Withings” watches as soon as created a Cyber Monday sale with the next headline:

“Tomorrow is just too late.”

It’s an instantaneous eye-grabber. 

Why is tomorrow too late? If I take motion now, am I one of many fortunate few?

If you happen to don’t have particular VIP affords, you’ll be able to construct urgency with distinctive incentives. Possibly time is working out on a prize contest. Possibly there are solely so many prizes you may give out on the door.

These incentives are significantly helpful should you’re approaching the occasion date and nonetheless don’t have sufficient signups. Some clients could want one last nudge earlier than they decide to your occasion.

Sorts of occasion emails (with examples)

Utilizing story construction, you must break up your occasion emails into three main classes:

• The announcement is the inciting incident: you need to shock folks, pull them out of their lull, and inform them what they’ll get by attending your occasion.
• The drip marketing campaign emails are the lengthy second act: slowly construct urgency, reveal new solutions (similar to thriller company), and remind folks of what’s coming.
• The pleasure emails might be your huge climax: constructing urgency for the occasion.

Announcement emails

XXIX’s ten-year social gathering announcement e mail begins with a enjoyable “incitement” sentence: Unsubscribe should you don’t like events.

Properly, all of us like events. Now they’ve our consideration.

Listed below are the keys to this announcement e mail’s success:

• A gap sentence that challenges the reader and creates a little bit of a curiosity hole. Don’t inform me I don’t like events!
• It will get the announcement out early by mentioning a key milestone: XXIX turning 10 years previous. There’s the reply to your “why.” It additionally makes the occasion date a bit simpler to recollect. 
• The e-mail provides particulars instantly so people who find themselves already can begin saving the date and placing the tackle of their calendars. Sure, it’s good to create intrigue, however you don’t need to be mysterious concerning the logistics.

Right here’s one other instance, from TwitchCon:

With the boldness of “you’re going to be there,” this announcement e mail will get straight to the purpose:

• It explains why you’d need to attend TwitchCon in Paris: “Get able to rejoice all of the stuff that makes Twitch particular.” And it solutions one other “W” query by explaining who might be there.
• It makes use of social proof with particular faces and usernames of well-liked streamers. This instantly attracts the curiosity of those streamers’ followers.

Drip marketing campaign emails

Bloomreach makes use of particular particulars to attract your curiosity. If you happen to’re a part of their viewers, there’s probability you’ll discover one thing at this occasion you’ll like.

• This e mail for Bloomreach re-invites folks by mentioning the particular occasion particulars they need to know. But it surely doesn’t have the massive “splash” of a launch e mail. As a substitute, it tackles the meat and potatoes of the explanations to attend the occasion, together with particular subjects and audio system.
• Contains fundamental particulars about when the occasion is, together with an above-the-fold call-to-action for people who find themselves instantly .

Now let’s take a look at an identical instance from a 2023 convention from Maze:

Keys to success:

• Discover the time right here, a enjoyable, urgency-building transition to the ultimate leg of the marketing campaign. 
• The e-mail nonetheless highlights what the enjoyable of the occasion is likely to be: “Be a part of on-line on September 19 for X, Y, and Z.”
• The e-mail mentions the DJ leisure whereas discussing particular audio system on the occasion, providing you with extra causes to hitch in.
• It finishes off with a powerful name to motion: registering at no cost.

Pleasure emails

It is nearly time! ⏰ We’re again tomorrow for G2E 2022.

Comply with alongside on our pages this week, October 10-13, as we share highlights from the present. It’s not too late to register: https://t.co/WolNcdnYIY pic.twitter.com/ZqgBUO69EM

— International Gaming Expo (@G2Eshows) October 9, 2022

Though not an e mail, this tweet with an animated “timer” builds urgency and anticipation by letting you watch the seconds tick away.

• Discover the road “it’s not too late to register,” together with a powerful CTA. It might be a tweet, however it reads like an e mail.
• The animation highlights how shortly time is passing, which builds urgency—even when it’s unconscious.

Sundance’s upcoming 2024 movie pageant makes use of some related ideas:

This e mail for the Sundance Movie Pageant doesn’t go off-brand with last-minute contests and prizes. But it surely does spotlight {that a} “countdown” is starting:

• The e-mail builds urgency by highlighting that the lodging is promoting “quick.” Even when folks suppose they’ve loads of time left to register, there are different components of logistics you should utilize to construct shortage.
• The e-mail contains particular occasion particulars, which is important at this stage of occasion advertising and marketing emails.
• Lastly, the e-mail features a new provide that may assist nudge individuals who have been on the fence about attending.

Construct an occasion e mail advertising and marketing marketing campaign

An occasion e mail advertising and marketing marketing campaign continues to be like different campaigns you’ve tried. It ought to have a selected touchdown web page, populated with all kinds of data. It is best to use buyer segments to personalize your messaging.

What’s completely different? Each occasion is a narrative with a starting, a center, and an finish—a climax that culminates within the occasion itself. If you happen to can construct urgency as much as the tip, you’ll have a profitable marketing campaign.

But it surely all begins with a succesful e mail platform. An e mail platform that enables for efficient consumer tagging, buyer segmentation, and automatic drip campaigns to assist construct pleasure.
Don’t have an account with AWeber simply but? Sign up for free today. In any case, the clock in your subsequent occasion is ticking.