post by Ninja James

Nearly every event leverages email marketing to engage their target audience and drive conversions. It’s a staple of the event marketing mix. So much so, that emails are sometimes blasted off without too much thought about how to get the most out of your email marketing budget.

Here are 3 killer tips that are guaranteed to increase your conversion rates:

1. Don’t send the same email to everyone (mass marketing)

Most of the event emails I receive are a product of a mass marketing strategy. That’s not getting the most of of digital, as we explored in our recent post Mass Marketing is Killing Your Event’s Conversion Rate and ROI.

Email marketing is a great converter, at the right point in the customer journey. But it’s also a great opportunity to get to know your audience better, to help figure out where your customers are in their individual journeys towards buying a ticket.

If you can tailor your subject lines and copy accordingly, your open rates will improve significantly. The more ways you can find to segment your audience based on who they are, and where they are on the buyer’s journey, the higher your open and conversion rates will be.

2. Optimise email content for opens and click-throughs

Email is the first step on the journey to a ticket conversion. There are 2 goals with an email, opens and click-throughs. Without these, there is no conversion to a ticket sale.

Open Rates
Having a segmented email approach really pays dividends when comparing open rates with those of mass marketing emails. This comes as no surprise as the content is tailored to the user, and by default, so is the subject line.

Even if you are not currently segmenting your audience, testing your subject lines to achieve the best possible open rates is a sure fire winner! Here are some tips on how to Improve Your Open Rates With Awesome Subject Lines.

Click-Throughs
The next metric are click-throughs. You’ve got the open, now you need to send the user to somewhere they can complete an action (this is normally a landing page on your website).

I could waffle on all day, but luckily, SEMRush have a great article on how you can get those CTR’s popping!

Make sure your email is optimised for mobile

2016 is the year that email open rates on mobile will overtake those on a desktop. Don’t just make the assumption that your email reads okay on mobile, test and optimise it so that it works as well on mobile as it does on desktop.

According to Smart Insights, single column emails with a fluid width or responsive email templates have a significantly higher click-through-rate, thereby increasing your conversions.