How Symphony’s E-mail Marketing Tool can Significantly Advance Event Communications

by Damien

Emails still have a huge part to play in marketing strategies and within the events industry. Used correctly, email can be a cost effective tool for event managers to use to market their event, and increase communication with potential delegates.

Endorsing your event with an effective email campaign is a great way of engaging with people in your target market and allows you to direct them through to a registration platform whilst interest and awareness is still high. Not to mention, email marketing is cost effective in comparison to the more traditional methods of event communication, such as personalised printed invitations.

Symphony’s email marketing campaign tool allows you to easily build and send your own campaign emails and is extremely versatile. Creating emails is a breeze, Symphony allows you to:

Build and send your own campaign emails
Create e-mail invites, reminders and post event follow ups
Manage recipient lists from Symphony reports or spreadsheets
Monitor views, click-throughs & bounce-backs

With Great pPower Comes Great Responsibility

Before you begin sending various emails to your recipient lists, consider the basic principles of email and plan out a schedule of sends. Think about the following:

What do want the email to achieve? Is it a one-off invite? Or are you going to send a series of communications?
Consider the design and content of the email. Is the key information above the fold? Or are you sending HTML or plain text emails?
A strong call to action – What is it you want people to do? Register onto the event, forward to a friend, provide menu selections etc.
Timings – How soon are you going to start promoting your event? When do you need to close registration? What time/day are you going to send communications?

So often email can be overlooked, and the proper care and attention not paid to the basics. Sending out invites through Outlook for example is bad practice and doesn’t look very professional. Just remember, this could be the first time your delegates have seen anything about your event, so make those first impressions count!

Don’t be Caught Short, Create Sharper Eshots

There are many bench marks that can be set to measure an emails success. When promoting your event, think about the aims of your eshot. The email could be used to:

Drive event registrations
Build relationships with delegates
Promote the event
Encourage referrals and forwards
Sell event related services/products

The eshot template will need to be consistent with the branding and look of your business and/or event. It will need to endorse the benefits of attending the event and compel people to register via a registration page or website. If encouraging traffic to a dedicated event website, ensure the look of both the site and email are consistent and keep call to actions consistent in where they feature on all pages. Furthermore keep the registration process clean and simple.

You may also wish to consider usability, think about highlighting key information above the fold and identify exactly what you want the recipient to do with clear and concise call to actions.

Symphony provides you with a number of easy to use html templates that can be customised to reflect your company’s and/ or your event’s brand. You can even import your own html designs.

Failing to plan is planning to fail

As well as sending pre-event invites you also have the opportunity to stay in touch with your attendees through a series of planned eshots. Perhaps you want to follow up on the people who had not registered with a reminder of the approaching deadline, or simply send event updates at specified times; automation is the simplest way of achieving this. Symphony’s email campaign tool provides all of this and more, saving you time and hassle!

Whatever you decide to do with email around your events, whether it is a single invite or a series of automated communications, it shouldn’t be overlooked as a cost-effective and efficient means of communicating with the people you want at your event.

For more information as to how Symphony can help you manage a crowd, call us on +44 (0) 114 279 4990. You can talk to one of our event management experts or alternatively watch one of our online videos.