One of the cheapest and easiest ways to promote your events is through email. In fact, we like it so much we wrote a blog with the 10 email promotion tips that every event organizer should know. And with the frequent changes that Facebook makes to their News Feed, email is one of the best ways to make sure your message is getting to your attendees.
Number eight on the top 10 email tips is all about segmenting your email list. Very simply, it's about sending the right message to the right person- RELEVANCY! This is a very powerful tool that can make a huge difference to your promotion efforts and it doesn't take that much more effort. If you're not doing it already, we're here to convince you. Here's why it matters:
Your Participants Aren't All the Same
No matter what kind of event you're running, not everyone is interested in the same thing. Most of you (I hope) are already segmenting your lists by the types of events people like to attend. For example, autocross, club race, track day, kart rentals, rally, social event, etc. If you have a member that only attends social events, they're probably not signing up for the next club race. So don't waste your precious time, energy, and email reputation, on sending them an email to register for a club race.
But even within disciplines, there are differences. Some of your participants may be just starting out while others are seasoned veterans. Or perhaps some of your attendees come out for 1 or 2 weekends a year and others are in the championship hunt. Different messages are going to resonate differently for each of these groups of people. So rather than send one generic email to everyone, tailor your message to be more relevant to the reader.
You'll Achieve Better Results
People are more likely to open email that's targeted to them. Let's say you send a last minute reminder to register for this weekend's event to everyone in your database. Do you think the people who are already registered for that event are keen on getting an email to register? No. And the more often they get email from you that's NOT relevant, the less likely they are to read your emails. Pretty soon they're ignoring all of your emails and you've just lost a key promotion tool and thus souring your email reputation. Let's hear what the experts have to say.
MailChimp is a leading provider of software to design and send email used by over 5 million people (us included). They did a study of 2,000 users who sent over 11,000 segmented email campaigns to almost 9 million recipients. The final result- relevant campaigns using segmented lists get better results. Here are two key statistics compared to the results of the same customer's non-segmented email campaigns.
- Open rate (percentage of the email sent that is opened)- 14.444% better than the list average
- Click rate (percentage of the email sent that resulted in the recipient clicking on a link)- 14.994% better than the list average
Those numbers could make a difference to your attendee counts! And it shows that it pays to take the time to craft a few different messages and send it to the appropriate people.
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