Email Marketing through Event Invitation

Type of Email marketing – marketing through Event Invitation

There’s no better way to reach an audience and increase attendees than through email marketing.
An event invitation email is a campaign designed to increase awareness of your event and encourage people to attend.

 

Invitations have been used in society since before Roman History time periods. Event invitation emails are simply the digital-modern version of traditional handwritten scribe invites.

In fact, according to Eventbrite and Emma, 40% of event creators say that event invitation emails are the most effective event marketing materials.

How do I create an email event?

The first step to sending out your email invitations is to plan the event that you need to invite people to.

Once you have all the details figured out, then comes the fun part: creating the event invitation emails.

To create your email event, you will customize a personalized event invitation email template to send to subscribers.

Are event invitation email templates important?

Yes. Event invitation email templates are important because they cut down time, provide consistency, and allow you to connect branding with your emails. Templates allow your emails to have quality design features that do not need to be hand coded, so event invitation email creators need to do less work but receive more return.

 

Also, customized event invitation email templates allow you to choose a combination of text and images to convey event details (again, without any hand coding).

The 6 key elements of an effective event invitation email

In order to get the maximum amount of awareness and attendees from your event invitation email, try including these 6 different elements in your campaign.

1. A targeted list

Depending on how you built your email list, it might be made up of people from all over the world.

However, if your event is being held in downtown San Francisco, then chances are people from Australia aren’t going to be able to attend (unless it’s a big event worth traveling for.)

So, to keep your open, click-through, and response rates high, it’s better to segment your list and send your campaign only to those nearby.

By doing so, we ensured that only those who had the ability to attend the event received the campaign, and those outside the area didn’t receive irrelevant information about an event they couldn’t attend.

So, next time you’re creating an event invitation campaign, try segmenting your lists using features like geolocation segments and only send the campaign to subscribers who are able to attend. This way, you’ll receive fewer unsubscribes and higher open, click-through, and response rates as a result.

2. Value Proposition

In an event invitation email, the value proposition should be a short statement that concisely explains why the recipient should attend the event. So, when creating your company event invitation email, make sure to include a value proposition that clearly outlines what the event is and the benefits of attending, as this will increase people’s motivation and compel them to click-through and purchase tickets or RSVP.

3. Detailed description of the event

Now that you’ve caught your subscriber’s attention with the value proposition, it’s

Now that you’ve caught your subscriber’s attention with the value proposition, it’s time to back it up with a detailed description of the event that outlines exactly what attendees can expect to see and do at the event and what they will get from attending. So, when creating your next event invitation email, make sure to include a detailed description of the event. You should aim to answer questions potential attendees might have, like what will happen at the event, what they will learn, who they will see or hear from, etc. By answering these questions in your description, you’ll increase people’s motivation to attend and compel them to click-through and purchase tickets or RSVP.

4. Time, location & other event details

Despite your best efforts to choose a central location and appropriate time, not everybody on your list is going to be able to make it.

By including the details of the event, such as time and location, in your invite email, you help people quickly identify whether this event is something they are going to be able to attend and increase the chances of them clicking through to your site to RSVP or purchase tickets. So, in your next event invitation email, make sure you include any relevant details about the event that people might need to know. If it’s a physical event, this could include time, location, dress code, parking details, transport information, etc. Alternatively, if it’s a virtual event like a demo or webinar then make sure to include the relevant URLs, dial-in numbers, access codes, login details, etc.

As an added extra, it can also help to include a link to a calendar event that automatically adds itself to your subscribers’ preferred calendar (Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, etc.) when clicked. This helps remind people when your event is taking place and increases the chances they’ll attend.

5. Social Proof

Even if your event is free, people are paying with their time and may have some natural hesitation and anxiety about attending.

This can be caused by any number of things, including:

Concern that your event isn’t worth their time and/or money,
Worry that your event isn’t relevant to them,
Doubt that your event will deliver the value you claim it will.
So, in order to help get people to click-through from your email, purchase tickets, and attend your event, you need to take steps to reduce that anxiety.

A great way to do this is by including social proof elements, such as testimonials or expert reviews of your event, in your campaigns.

When you are creating your next event invitation email, try to include elements of social proof like testimonials from previous attendees, expert reviews, or even attendee numbers from your last event to reduce anxiety and reassure readers it’ll be worth their time and money.

6. A prominent call to action button

Now that you’ve provided all the information recipients need about your event, it’s time to include a prominent call to action to get them to take the next step.

While you might be tempted to simply tell people about your event and hope they turn up, there’s actually a much higher chance they’ll attend if you get them to commit to it via a registration or ticketing process, even if registration or tickets are free and the process is largely arbitrary.

This is because, according to renowned psychologist Robert Cialdini, when human beings commit to doing something (like attending an event), they are much more likely to go through with it even when the consequences of not doing so are minor.