6 Ways to Create Better Emails that Drive Event Signups

With thousands of emails going out to our customer’s delegates everyweek via the Mitingu platform we’ve noticed a thing or two about the kind of email that drives event signups or sales. We’ve analysed over 12,000 thousand invites and responses to find out what it takes to create the best email for driving event registration;

1. Be Attractive

Start off with a well designed, clean, crisp and clear email template that is well branded and easy for the recipient to read and follow. Consider whether the email needs to be all text based. Could you include a 15-second video from one of your event speakers, or an interesting infographic relating to your event theme or content? If you’re sticking with text, make sure paragraphs are succinct and ask yourself if paragraphs can be broken down into lists or bullet points.

2. Get Personal

Think about how you can tailor your emails to your database to ensure relevancy, then decide on how best to segment your email list based on the data you have. Think about location. Do you have customer personas that you can divide by? Or perhaps you know the recipients’ purchasing type or history. If they’ve attended one of your events before, you could segment based on attendance history or preferences they provided in a previous event feedback survey.

Users of Mitingu who have been smart with their segmentation, creating very relevant, personalised emails, have seen a clear engagement boost, with 49% of event signups occurring in the first 5 hours.

Mitingu makes this really simple, no matter what your understanding of data and databases is. The platform enables you to tag delegates so that you can then segment your email sends based on this information.

3. Get Organized

This tip may seem obvious but we’ve seen this happen too many times so we’ve had to include it. Schedule email sends to delegates as a single campaign rather than ad hoc send outs to lists here and there. Where ad hoc emails have been sent in Mitingu we’ve seen that emails have a disjointed look and feel or the communication is completely disjointed, i.e. some delegates miss out on receiving further event details altogether.

4. Don’t Ask Too Much

We’ve seen a real mix of event emails littered with a comical number of calls to action and those that have almost left out a call to action in its entirety, i.e. the link is typed out but not hyperlinked to the event page or signup form!

You may have an agenda that delegates can download, links to speaker bios, location map, sponsors or a registration page. Be careful that you’re not asking the recipient to click to view or download these pieces of information if it’s not the main goal of the email. We recommend choosing the most important call to action and emphasising this at each individual stage of engagement.

5. Be Unique

Steer away from taking too much inspiration from the typical event emails that you see in your inbox. This includes emails covered in sponsor or partner logos, and full of event jargon such as, “Hurry, early-bird discount ends soon” or “Don’t miss out.” These phrases have become noise so try to think about how you can make your headings or copy standout in a unique way. Rather than an overly sales focused message, could you offer the recipient a useful, unique piece of content that relates to the event? Perhaps you could provide an interesting snippet from a whitepaper or book that delegates will receive at your event.

6. Get Social

Ensure that your email or aspects of your email content can be easily shared by the recipient. For example, if you embedded a video make sure there is an integrated social feature that allows the recipient to share it with their network. Even the most simple email can include a social share option by including a prompt for the recipient to share the key event information. However, remember tip 3. when deciding on where to place this button or option in your email.

If you’ve got great content that’s undeniably interesting and relevant, paired with good design and spot-on targeting your event signups should have a high score on our engagement scale. If you’re experiencing a lower than expected (or wanted) engagement from your event emails, we’d be happy to share the insight we’ve gleaned from Mitingu. We can also provide you with a quick walk-through of how the platform can make all of the above much easier, leaving you with more time to question, test and refine your event email engagement.