Increase ticket sales with these 7 email marketing strategies

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Written by Daniel Groves for Event Industry News

Digital marketing is an incredibly fast changing beast, there always seems to be a new way to reach new audiences.

Emerging technologies like AI are allowing marketing strategists to get more and more creative with their platforms; and according to them, they are reaching more people than ever before. 

There is, however, something to be said for the older methods – in this case, email marketing. A huge number of event industry experts still consider this method to be the most effective, and rely heavily on it to boost sales. 

It allows for a huge outreach, you can specifically target certain audiences, you can easily retain consumer information, and perhaps best of all, it’s affordable and automated!

So, Why didn’t it Work for me?

There are plenty of reasons that email marketing is a great thing- but that does not mean it is foolproof, or easy to execute effectively. 

There are many nuanced ways to create an effective email marketing strategy, but this unfortunately also means that there are plenty of ways in which a campaign can be run poorly. 

If you’re looking for the highest ROI possible then email marketing is the way to go, but how do you make it as effective as possible

Well here are some hacks that will ensure you increase your ticket sales, and boost your attendance. 

  1. Use a Strong Platform

It sounds like a horrible cliche, but it is all too true. Without a strong foundation on which to build, your project will collapse around you. 

The whole point of email marketing is that it is inexpensive, quick to achieve results and offers a great return per acquisition. But managing a poor strategy means frustration, stress and a resounding lack of sales. 

An email marketing platform will increase the deliverability of your emails, provide effective templates and aid you with ways to segment your audience for maximum return- and much more.  

  1. It’s Business, and it’s Personal

It’s so important to make sure your email comes across as personal, and there are several ways to do this. 

Everybody’s inbox is cluttered and bloated in this modern day and age, so ensuring your email comes from a personal account will instantly make it stand out against all the waste. Getting people to open and engage with your email is the very first step!

Using the classic [insert first name] to address the reader specifically will instantly draw them in. But ensuring that the content of the email is specific to them is the real trick.

Imagine sending a heavy metal fan an email filled with information about the classical music events upcoming in their area- a pointless email that will instantly disengage your potential client.

Targeting your specific subsets of clients is exceptionally important!  

  1. The Subject Matters

The subject line is your key to success. 

It is of no importance how good the content of the email is if the subject line is not catchy; it will be worthless.

You need to immediately grab the attention of your targeted client and draw them to open the email and read on. 

Here are some tips on how to achieve this: 

  • Keep it short and sweet
  • Make sure it’s informative and targeted to your audience
  • Including an unanswered question or surprising stat is often successful 
  • Adding a sense of urgency can initiate interest
  • Again, personalising the message is important
  1.  Brief is Best

Keeping your content short, and making sure it is informative is the absolute best way to ensure your audience is reading through the whole thing.

Avoid large bodies of text, break things up with subheadings or pictures. And keep it to the point; don’t have loads of subject matters in one email, it will discourage people from absorbing the information. 

  1. The Early Bird Catches the Worm

Promoting urgency and scarcity is an incredibly effective tool. Playing to people’s need to meet deadlines will often be the thing that gives them the final push to buy tickets.

Keeping people informed on how quickly tickets are selling out, and how many remain, will put them under pressure to make a decision. And what’s even more effective is adding a limited time offer, or bonus for purchasing the tickets within a set time frame. 

Gently urging your audience to act immediately will often yield great results. 

  1. The Call to Action

Surely adding more than one call to action is the best way to increase the amount of reactions from your audience, right?

Wrong. In fact, it has quite the opposite effect. 

Your email should be clear and to the point, so adding multiple choices for people means extra content that they potentially don’t want- as well as a choice they don’t want to make. 

Taking that choice away and giving them one option to act on something they are specifically interested in yields greater results every time.  

  1. Test, Test, Test

This is one of the things that people most often overlook. 

You’ve created a campaign, written an email, targeted a specific subset of your audience and you’ve sent them all off. Easy.

But now you realise that the link is incorrect, there is a spelling mistake in your subject line, or one of the links is broken. Well it’s too late. 

Mistakes and broken links are pretty much the worst that can happen. It’s going to instantly put off your audience, so all that great content is meaningless. 

Sending test emails of multiple versions to yourself, friends or colleagues will ensure that everything is working and in tip-top shape, before you send it out to the all important client. 

You should also be constantly updating and changing the content of your emails, whilst checking that any links are up to date and correct. As previously mentioned, nothing puts people off more than mistakes. 

The Final Word

So email marketing really should not be considered an old fashioned method. Many have come before it, and many will come after, but it is still regarded as the most useful and rewarding tool in an event manager’s arsenal.

It’s easy to see the results, it’s cost effective, it is largely automated and in theory will save you plenty of time and stress. 

However, delivering an effective email marketing strategy is not as easy as it sounds.

So be sure to follow these hacks and you’ll be much more likely to have some success with your email marketing. 

Use these tips to boost your sales, fill your venues and hopefully make your life much easier!     

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