EVENTS CEOs' MARKETING SERIES - Part 4: The email marketing performance problem - and what to do about it
For many B2B event organisers, email has long been the channel that is most relied upon to generate attendee bookings for conferences and exhibitions.
But deliverability issues seem to be occurring at an alarming rate, and email performance has become difficult to measure due to spam filters and bots.
What is ‘bot traffic’ and how does it damage your email deliverability?
Security bots often scan emails before a human sees them, triggering false opens and link clicks. This inflates your metrics and can flag your emails as suspicious, hurting deliverability and pushing emails into spam folders.
Bots also sign up to mailing lists using fake email addresses, leading to high bounce rates that damage your sender reputation and make future emails more likely to end up in spam.
This does not mean that email should be abandoned or dialled down. Email will continue to be an incredibly important way to communicate with your prospects and customers. If you are experiencing issues with email deliverability and performance, you need to accept that:
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Your email marketing probably needs a different approach, and
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You need to be using a range of channels beyond email to reach, engage and convert your customers and strengthen your email performance.
Use multichannel marketing to strengthen your email performance
To ensure your email marketing is effective, you need a smart, integrated approach across all your marketing channels and campaigns - where all channels work together to reinforce messages and drive stronger performance based on a multi-touch customer journey.
What does this mean in practice? To improve your email marketing performance, here are 8 things you should start doing straight away if you aren’t already.
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Make sure most email campaigns you send are targeted and personalised with only relevant and up-to-date contacts used in your email lists, organised into segments based on their reasons for attending the event and their stage in the customer journey. This means each email send is likely to be to a smaller, higher quality list resulting in higher engagement rates and therefore a lower risk your emails will end up in spam traps.
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Build larger relevant data sets and email them at least once every two weeks in the lead-up to an event, ensuring every email is focused on some new and valuable content (e.g. post-event report or showcase video) or an enticing product update (e.g. new speakers announced). Sending regular emails to more people may seem like the wrong thing to do, but if the quality and relevancy of what is sent to them is high, and you insert valuable content into every second or third email (rather than just constantly pushing ‘book now’ message and bland, generic copy about ‘unrivalled networking opportunities’), you’re likely to get higher engagement and be recognised as a welcome sender. Do continue sending your ‘early bird’ focused emails, but only in the weeks the early birds run out, rather than highlighting this as your key message too often.
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Set up automated emails within your marketing system triggered by certain actions taken (e.g. web form completions). These emails need to include messaging that is helpful, engaging and likely to be saved and/or shared. Make sure these emails don’t go out to bots by blocking bot traffic from your website. Well set up automated emails will enjoy a very high engagement rate which will boost your deliverability.
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Turn your website into a conversion engine. Your email marketing won’t work well – as outbound campaigns or automated -- if your website is not optimised to engage and convert the people who click on your emails. The added benefit of making sure your website actively encourages people to fill in forms is that this data can then be added to your email database (with the right permissions in place) to continually build your list of relevant and engaged people to email about your event, further boosting your email ‘score’ when it comes to avoiding spam traps.
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Run well planned and well optimised PPC & Paid Media campaigns alongside your email campaigns. Make sure these are well targeted and highly relevant based on where the customer is in their journey and where the event is in its cycle. Run these across multiple platforms and campaign types for best impact across your whole funnel. This will reinforce your email performance as digital ads should appear to the same people your emails are hitting, as well as members of your target audience who are not receiving your emails, either because they’re not on the database or your emails are falling in spam or being ignored. Also remember that every person who hits your website from a digital advert and then goes on to complete a form on your website becomes a warm prospect on your email database! PPC/Paid Media, when well run, continually improves the quality and grows the volume of your email lists, which is something that should never be overlooked!
Note the golden rule for PPC/Paid Media to ensure your ROI is visible and strong: make sure your conversion tracking is properly set up so that you can measure conversions as well as impressions and clicks.
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Put in place an automated advocacy tool such as Gleanin to efficiently and effectively turn your attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and team members into active promoters of your event. Advocacy marketing builds trust and expands your reach through credible, peer-led sharing. When your email recipients see how well-respected peers are advocating for your event, they are more likely to open and click on your emails! And once again, when advocacy reaches people who are not on your database, they can be added to your database when they visit your website based on advocates messages, and then go on to complete a form to register their interest or enquire about an event. When you use advocacy tools you also grow your database, as long as all elements of your multichannel campaigns are joined up and deployed well.
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Ensure a strong presence in all relevant social media channels via unpaid posts and engagement alongside your paid activity. A consistent, authentic presence on social platforms strengthens your brand and builds community. Use organic social to stay top-of-mind throughout the event marketing cycle. When done well, this strengthens your brand and reinforces your messages going out via email.
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Set up powerful partnerships and get the most out of them! Partnering with media outlets, trade bodies and associations that align with your audience is still an important part of event marketing! These partnerships lend credibility and help you tap into established, trusted networks, driving awareness, engagement, and new leads as these 3rd party audience members hit your website and download content, etc. Make sure you are strategic about who you align with to maintain brand integrity, and be smart about making sure your marketers are rigorous in their follow through so that you get maximum value from these partnerships.
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Track the right metrics to make the right decisions. Accurate, insightful reporting is the final piece of the puzzle. Without it, you're forced to guess at what’s working and what’s not. You need a clear view of performance across all channels, from initial engagement to final conversion. Benchmarking, engagement scoring and data-driven attribution should be in place to get the kind of insight you need on the performance of your email marketing and other channels. You should be able to predict how well your event is going to do many weeks out -- even before the bookings start flowing in -- if you know how your audience is reacting to your marketing.
For a deeper dive into how to build better measurement into your strategy, read our blog: EVENTS CEOs' MARKETING SERIES - Part 2: Measuring your marketing to unlock growth
As you can see, boosting your email marketing performance is very possible and about more than just being great at email marketing! It’s about using multiple touchpoints in your customers’ world to reach them, build awareness, and create a strong, trusted brand while reinforcing key messages through multiple channels - making sure that when your target customer gets an email in their inbox, it’s not from a stranger!
Ready to unlock more from your multichannel marketing?
If your current approach is not working or you’re not sure how to get a multi-channel approach into place, get in touch and we’d be happy to have a chat.
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