Understanding how to leverage an email campaign to engage your readers and increase your reach can be critical to the success of your event. Email offers you the opportunity to share content, invitations and social media directly with your reader. Integrating a sign up form on your WordPress website can help to increase subscriptions.
Email marketing is a great way to build a community. One of the benefits of an email is that it is delivered to your readers without them needing to visit your website or navigate for information. You can update them and invite them to visit specific links for more information. More than 75% of event marketing is done through email.
Creating A Campaign
You can create multiple email campaigns depending on the needs of your business. In addition you can create multiple email lists to strategically leverage your email campaign. As you begin to leverage email for your business, you will understand how to create multiple lists and use them to increase the interaction with your audience. You can offer different information to each of these lists based on how you use them.
The email provider you select may also offer different strategies for your campaigns including RSS, A/B Testing, and more.
Some things to remember when creating your campaign:
- Did you offer a plain text version that works like your HTML version?
- Do all of the links in your email work and are they going to the right location?
- Are you using <alt tags and are they working properly, i.e, are images visible?
- Do you personalize your emails and if so, are you requiring that information on your subscribe form?
- Are you tracking your links with analytics?
- Are you providing an opt-out on your newsletters?
- Have you tested your email in different inboxes and browsers?
- Are you abiding by your email provider’s CAN-SPAM policies?
Leveraging Email Subscribers
You can elect to send the same newsletter to each of these lists throughout the year, but as you begin to plan your launch, you may want to leverage each of these lists in a different manner to market your launch. For example, you may want to offer members a significant discount by registering before you announce the product/services to the public.
As you continue to grow your list, you should be strategic in how you organize your subscribers. This can help you in leveraging this segment of your community.
Growing Your List
Understanding how to legitimately grow your list is as important as understanding what you can’t do. Here is a list of how to strategically grow your list:
- Collect business cards and follow-up with individual one-on-one emails.
- Introduce yourself and add a reminder of how you met, while providing some content that might be of interest to the recipient that would make them want to subscribe to your newsletter. For example, they can download a whitepaper or ebook by subscribing to your newsletter.
- Add a signup form on your WordPress website
- Add a signup form to your Facebook page
Some things to remember when creating your campaign:
Did you offer a plain text version that works like your list. So if you would like to market your event to a specific audience, ask someone at that organization to allow you to write some guest content for their newsletter and offer the readers a link to subscribe to your newsletter to stay current on your news and events
If you are an exhibitor at an event and offer attendees an opportunity to subscribe to your email list, create a “group” off of your main mailing list that describes who these subscribers are. This way you can send specific communication to them as well as your general newsletter, offering an opportunity to reacquaint yourself with them and eliminate being tagged as spam.
There are several situations that can cause your email account to be “blacklisted” by your provider. And while different email providers may have different standards, you should realize that the final decision maker is your reader. If they feel your email is being sent erroneously and mark it as SPAM, you have lost a potential member of your community. So while you may a large email list, it is more important to have an engaged community.
Email Providers
There are several email providers, including individuals and small agencies that can help you with your email campaigns. Here is a sampling: