The Event Success Blog
Helping you achieve event success with tips and insights on event management.
8 Ways To Improve Your Email Marketing Messages
When wrapping up your latest email marketing campaign, do you ever feel that nagging concern that there might be more you can do to spice things and increase your conversion rate? Whether you’re getting the word out about your event using Ettend’s built-in email feature or conducting a complex campaign with a comprehensive service like our sister-company iContact, these tips will help ensure you’ve crossed all the T’s and dotted all the I’s.
Let’s start with the subject line
Is it compelling? The subject line is the first and sometimes only thing a customer sees from you in their inbox. It needs to grab their attention, often having to shout over the plethora of other newsletters and marketing emails.
An important way to ensure your subject line grabs readers is to convey a sense of urgency or limited time frame. Leading people to follow your call to action sooner than later is especially critical for events, where you need to fill up attendance as soon as possible.
The all crucial message body
Is your message 100% clear? Trying to present too many ideas or angles loses the impact of your primary goal in this message. Make sure there is a headline or title that will grab the reader’s attention and clearly convey your offer or promotion.
Do you have a call to action? This one should be obvious, but given how many poor marketing emails we receive on a daily basis, it is definitely worth covering. Make sure that you are driving people to do something: visit your website, register for your event, or use a coupon code for limited time savings. And on that note…
Offer an incentive! Purely informational emails certainly have value, but your opportunity to convert readers to customers is small, so take advantage every chance you get. Going hand in hand with our earlier tips, offer a special discount that your readers will see as ‘just for them.’ Combine this with a limited redemption time frame, to build urgency, and you’re building up a winning offer.
Just the facts. Rambling on and burying your important points in a wall of text is one sure way to lose your audience. Keep your prose short and to the point, with just enough narrative that it doesn’t seem like you are shouting at your audience.
Start your paragraphs with scannable sentences. If your readers only read the first sentence of your email, would they get the gist of your message? Would they have read something that enticed them to read the rest? We are all competing with every other distraction a person has in their inbox and on the internet, so having clear and pointful opening sentences are a great way to make sure readers take away at least part of the message.
The big picture
Offer value to your readers consistently. Looking beyond this one email, if you are able to consistently provide value to your readers, they will be much more likely to open your email when the next one arrives. Just think about how you handle your own inbox: if one message always has good content for you, and another doesn’t, which one gets opened more often?
Look at your own inbox. There’s no shame in observing tactics that you like and making them work for you. Pay attention to the marketing messages that come in to your inbox and figure out what about them keeps you opening the messages. Also pay attention to the ones that don’t get opened: why are they left to never get a single impression? Take what you learn from this analysis and apply it to your own ventures.
Are there other items on your email marketing checklist that we didn’t cover here? Leave a comment with your favorite tactic to ensuring you always have successful emails going out.
For more great email marketing tips, be sure to check out the blog of our sister company, iContact, an industry leading email marketing service.
5 Tips To Integrate Video In Your Next Event
You likely already know the importance of multimedia at most any event. Integrating video into your next event can drive new levels of engagement, build anticipation pre-event, and add value after your event is over. The good news is that integrating video doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive, thanks to technology that makes basic video capture and sharing painless.
An inexpensive digital video camera can be had, many times under $100 depending on your needs, and any competent website or service can upload your video or embed it from YouTube to ensure your audience sees it. If you are in the mood for something more polished and with some actual production value, you can always support your local community and hire an upcoming videographer without breaking the bank.
The ins and outs of how to produce the actual video could warrant an entire website dedicated to the topic, but for our purposes today we’re just going to talk about how to integrate video into your event and get value out of it too.
1. Pre-event teaser videos
If you have speakers at your event, consider requiring them to submit a short video explaining what attendees will learn or gain from their presentation. There are lots of strategies to take with a big chunk of content like this: splitting it up and releasing individual videos over time to drive interesting, making individual videos available with your event schedule so people can get a taste of exactly what they’re interested in, or offering all the speaker interviews and event information in one well polished video.
Whatever video format you decide on, make sure it is compelling, reasonably short (1-5 minutes), viewable on your event website, and sharable via the popular social networks.
2. Record speakers and presentations
This is the honey pot of the video content from your event or conference. For most events, the speakers or other learning opportunities you’re offering are the reason people are attending and you are in business. Event speakers are well suited for video recording, allowing you a great number of possibilities in how to use that content.
The biggest caveat here is of course making sure your speakers are okay with you using the content. Professional speakers make their living doing just this, so some may prefer to keep it limited to paying parties, but hopefully your speakers see the light of having their services promoted and shared.
Once you’ve got this honey pot recorded, there are lots of options for how to repackage the content. Consider options that add value to your event like providing the videos to attendees, creating a highlight reel for future promotion, or working with a speaker or two to promote their talk for the next time you work together.
3. Interview speakers and attendees
Every person at your event has a story to tell, at least about what they learned at your event. Take advantage of this opportunity and give people a simple prompt that they can answer in 5-10 seconds. What did you learn today? Which speaker was the most interesting? What was the funniest part of the show?
Don’t forget about your speakers either. Many speakers truly want to educate people on their subject matter and won’t mind talking with you for a minute or two. This content could make great fodder for pre-event teasers and promo for your next event.
4. Make a montage of the attendees’ favorites
As part of your survey process, if you don’t already, get your attendees’ feedback on which parts of your event they enjoyed the most. Use this list of the top 5 or 10 attendee favorites to determine what to showcase as a highlight reel or montage and share this on social networks and your website as “Attendees’ Favorite Sessions” or “Top Speakers Voted by Attendees.”
5. Add value for your sponsors
It’s always a good idea to remember your sponsors in everything you do. It won’t cost you anything extra to feature sponsors in your video, but you generally want to incorporate them naturally into your video. You want to showcase how your attendees and guests will interact with the sponsor’s brand organically at the event, as part of all the other aspects of this footage we have discussed here.
How have you integrated video into your event? Is there anything you have done or are thinking of doing? Share it in the comments!
Ettend’s Exemplary Events: May 19th Edition
Welcome to the series of posts from Ettend where we highlight some of the coolest events our customers are planning!
What is it: Non-Profit Marketing Bootcamp held in Portland, OR by fundraising experts WVDO
Why it is cool: We love any event that supports non-profits and that is WVDO’s sole mission.
The most exemplary part of their event website is: the entire content package is concise and clear, telling people just what they need to know AND doing a good job of selling the event. Their content follows many of our own event website content tips!
5 Reasons Near Field Communication Is Coming To An Event Near You
Near Field Communication is a technology that has been thrust into the spotlight of late. In this post we’ll be discussing why NFC is so great, but as with anything there are a lot of downsides with NFC and we’ll cover those points in another post!
An alternative to QR codes that has even more potential, NFC is a short range wireless technology that is based around an un-powered “dumb” source and a “smart” device (i.e. your smartphone) that initiates the communication process. The un-powered device is very similar to RFID, containing ultra-slim circuitry that is actually powered by the radio frequency field of your NFC-enabled smartphone.
When your smartphone is placed within 2 inches of an NFC-tagged item, such as a sticker or poster, the NFC technology in your phone reads information from the item. From there, the possibilities are endless and only limited by the services that choose to integrate NFC capabilities.
If you want to know more about NFC, don’t miss our in-depth article at Engage365.org. And stay tuned next week for our contrasting article on why NFC won’t be making a huge splash!
• Easy & simple to use: QR codes are cumbersome at best and URLs/phone numbers are easily forgotten. NFC is instant and persistent.
• Mobile payments: Google is conducting a trial with Mastercard and Citigroup in San Fran and New York. Wave your smartphone and pay for goods. No register, no paper receipts, no hassle!
• Effective call to action: Smartphones are still new & exciting, making a “wave your phone here” call to action very compelling. It also requires a minimum of effort from the user, making it easier for them to answer that call to action.
• Endless potential applications: Visit a URL, load a video, run a custom application, accept a payment, or anything else you can dream up. Not only are the applications endless, but you can explicitly target the action to your customers as you know exactly who they are.
• Support from Google and other industry giants: Google is behind NFC in a big way, switching some of their offerings from QR code to NFC, including NFC in the Nexus S “Google phone,” and conducting a massive mobile payment trial. NFC will also be featured in most every smartphone launched in 2H 2011.
Do you have plans for NFC or are hearing anything else about NFC? Shout out in the comments with your thoughts.
3 Ways To Bring Your Event Website To Life
For many events and meetings, there is more to the big day than just the who/what/where/when. You’ve got prior event photos, new guest speakers, after-parties, or even something dreadfully important like a venue change. These are all important things that should be showcased and you can use them to prevent your event website from becoming a static, dusty old property.
Photo galleries, not just tons of photos
If you aren’t gathering photos from your events in the first place, then it’s time to join the digital revolution and start snapping some pics. Take your collections of photos from past events and showcase them in an individual album within your event website.
If you don’t have past event photos, then photos of your venue are just as useful. Work with your venue contact to either be supplied some especially gorgeous photos of the venue or maybe head out and shoot your own. Be sure that the photos are in a separate, clearly labeled section. Overloading your main event page with photos is a big no-no, as we discussed last week.
Blogs, detailed content, free resources, etc – keep it fresh and relevant
Fresh content is the heart of all these strategies. Whatever you want to call it or whatever information you want to share, you need a section that can be regularly updated with new content. For many events a blog makes a lot of sense: share updates on other events you’re running, share teasers of some of your event’s features, or point your attendees to other resources relevant to your event.
Of course, the fresh content on your event website doesn’t have to be a chronological blog. If you have guest speakers, multiple event sessions, or other special aspects to your event, then you have enough going on to fill a few articles. Publish this detailed, unique information in clearly labeled, separate sections of your event website to give your attendees even more to get excited about. Do you have recordings or resources from previous events, or perhaps free articles/white papers related to your event? Share them on the website and add value for your attendees.
Gather and share feedback
Attendee feedback is crucial to the survival of any event and your event website can be a perfect vehicle to show how you are listening to attendee feedback. Regardless of whether you gather your feedback through online survey tools, which would make a lot of sense for event planners already using an event website, the event website can be used to present feedback from prior events.
Detail the good and bad feedback from your previous events and let prospective attendees know how you’re improving with every new event. Whether the venue has gotten larger, new speakers have been added, or you decided to offer an open bar, offering this information answers questions that prospective attendees likely already had about your event track record and gives them a great feeling about your upcoming event.
Ettend’s Exemplary Events: May 3rd Edition
Welcome to a new series of posts from Ettend where we highlight some of the coolest events our customers are planning!
What is it: Season 3, Bout 6 of the London Rollergirls roller derby league
Why it is cool: Two teams of five players on roller skates, circling around a small arena with the intent of blocking the opposing team from “lapping” the other team. And by blocking, we mean knocking the utter sense out of opposing players.
The most exemplary part of their event website is: the team logos and bout photos! Roller derby teams typically have extremely competitive and in-your-face names, with team logos to match. And their posters, like the one below, are downright sinister.
Visit London Rollergirls’ event website
Event Website Content Tips – Part 1
So you’ve got a spiffy event website setup and you’re clacking away at the keyboard, letting people know the latest and greatest about your event. But, where should the where & when details go: at the top or bottom? How many words should you spend on your “why my event rocks” speech? What about speaker information or photos from prior events?
Don’t worry, we’re here to help with some tips drawn from some of the most successful events on Ettend.
Know Your Audience
You knew this one was coming, didn’t you? Understanding who you expect to be visiting your event website is crucial. If you’re driving traffic to your site from sources that have already sold attendees on this event, then you don’t need to go all out on content. Include the who/what/where/when and, if applicable, some content to upsell attendees, and call it a day.
If this site is your one-stop source for all information and ticket purchasing, you’ll obviously need to include all the pertinent details and put your best foot forward with marketing content.
Just the facts, m’aam
The who/what/where/when details of your event are critical to have front and center, without necessarily monopolizing your content. Prominent placing in areas like the header or sidebar are an easy way to ensure these details are seen and keep the bulk of your page available for marketing content, upsells, or multimedia.
Stick to the necessary facts only on your main page, which generally correspond closely to the who/what/where/when axiom. For the more in-depth, but still common, questions, an FAQ section off the main page is a great parking place for other errata.
Too long, didn’t read
Most people browsing the web these days have a short attention span when it comes to reading. People like to scan text for the parts pertinent to them and since a wall of text isn’t scannable, it is most often skipped entirely.
Avoid long sections of text by breaking them into smaller sections and even including small, pertinent images in-line with the text. Bolded, larger font headings are also a good way to make sure people find the content they need. When writing, be sure to ask yourself this question: if someone only read the first sentence of this section, would they take away the most important details?
Multimedia is good, in small doses
Photos and videos are a great resource for attendees to get a feel for your event, but be careful not to overdo it. Excessive photos on the main page can slow your website and distract from the important information there.
It is ideal to include photos in a separate section on the site, but images in the header and complementary photos in the content are encouraged as well. Embedded video should not be set to automatically play in any situation and for the most part should not be lead your content without any preamble or introduction.
YouTube is a fine source for free video hosting, but keep in mind that there is no guarantee on the video loading and playing smoothly. Paid services will offer most consistent and guaranteed bandwidth, which is something to consider for mission critical videos.
We hope you have enjoyed the first part of our event website content tips. Copywriter and web marketer are just a couple of the many roles an event manager is expected to assume, so we hope this post has helped make those jobs at least a little easier.
Got questions or feedback on this post? Leave us a comment!
Ettend makes implementing tips like these fast and simple with our intuitive web design editor and fully featured content interface. Check out our features, some fully functional sample events, or give us a try. New customers can use coupon code NEWBIE25 to get a $25 account credit.
Ettend’s Exemplary Events: April 21st Edition
Welcome to a new series of posts from Ettend where we highlight some of the coolest events our customers are planning!
What is it: LIQUID: An Acquisitional Affair is an executive speaking and networking event in Atlanta, presented by Mogul PR and Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Why it is cool: The economy may be unsteady still, but opportunities are out there for those who seek them. These types of events are a great way to open doors and everything about LIQUID‘s presentation is top class.
The most exemplary part of their event website is: hard to choose! From the simple, classy color scheme to the well constructed header and footer images, we love it all. They even take advantage of our sponsors feature to share some of the love with the groups that help make their event possible.
Would you like a side of free email marketing with your event?
Hopefully if you’re reading this blog you’ve heard of iContact, our parent company that has shared our focus of being easy to use, powerful, and cost effective since before we joined forces in April of last year. iContact’s specialty is in email marketing, which our experience has shown goes hand-in-hand with event marketing. After all, running an event generally entails emailing your potential attendees!
Our friends at iContact announced some big news yesterday with their new Free Edition product. If you ever had any email marketing needs, you can now use all of iContact’s features and more than 20 different design templates to reach up to 500 subscribers. Not only is this a great value for small business and individual users, but it is now just that much easier for anyone to try everything iContact has to offer.
This new plan complement’s Ettend’s free offering on RSVPs, donations, and free tickets in your events. Ettend has always had an email marketing feature built-in, which offers convenient one-stop communication for your events with text or HTML messages. Now you can easily create your own WYSIWYG HTML formatting, embed surveys, manage fully detailed contacts, and much more for free. And Ettend’s affiliate feature makes tracking ticket sales from those emails a piece of cake.
What do you want to see from iContact and Ettend?
Whether you are an iContact or Ettend customer, we want to make it easy for you to leverage both services to help best support your business and needs. So, where do you want to see us integrate and add features first? What would help you reach more people with more effectiveness and efficiency? We’ll be watching for your input in the comments!
Track ticket sales, optimize event marketing with affiliate links
Chances are that you as an event organizer have had some help getting people to your event. Whether you asked your friends to spread the word, sent emails to prospects, or hired a marketing organization, somebody probably helped you drive attendance in the form of ticket sales, registrations, or whatever your event’s goal is.
These affiliates can be a very important resource for the success of your event and tracking their contribution is an important part of identifying your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Given the great importance of the internet in event marketing, tracking the performance of your affiliates is a key part of any online event registration system.
Ettend has had an affiliate tracking feature since we launched over one year ago, which allowed event organizers to create unique affiliate links. These links would track site visits and ticket purchases, but only when the purchase was while visiting the site from that link directly.
Based on feedback we’ve gotten from customers, we recently implemented a change behind the scenes with the affiliate system. Now when somebody visits your event site with an affiliate link, that visit is tracked for 30 days. If a ticket purchase is made any time in that 30 days, regardless of whether they used the affiliate link or visited the site directly, it will now be tracked. This is done through the use of a cookie; you can learn more about cookies here.
Of course, an affiliate tracking feature doesn’t just have to be used for third parties. You can also easily track your own promotions through various channels. Create a separate affiliate ID for your emails, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever other avenue you want to track. Armed with real-time performance data of the links driving people to your site, you can make the right decisions about where to focus your efforts and which areas might need to be reconsidered.
If you’ve got a hankering to try out the affiliate feature with your event, you can find it under the “Promote” section in your account and there are full instructions in our FAQ section. If you don’t have an Ettend account yet, you can create one for free and try this and all our other features for free. Our loyal blog readers (who haven’t used a promo code in the past) can also try out selling some paid tickets with this $10 promotional code: AFFBLOG10.
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