Promoting your event and getting signups using email marketing isn’t difficult.  Here are 6 tips to help you signup registrants and raise event awareness.

1. Relevant Banner Image with a Great Tagline

A picture speaks a thousand words, and this holds true for e-blasts too! To give your prospects something to look at, find a timely and eye catching image and use it as the header for the email invitations. Remember, you want to “inspire” the prospect to sign up.  You can tie the image in with a great tagline that sums up what is in store for them.One New Zealand Business Coach had fantastic results with an image of the penguins (left) for several informational events he held throughout the year. It so happened the whole country was buzzing about a stranded Emperor Penguin that made its way across 2000 miles of Ocean from Antarctica to New Zealand. Kiwis watched in anticipation as the penguin was nursed back to health.  Timely and eye-catching! Given that many of your recipients may read the email invitation on their smart phone make sure the email invitation is designed with a mobile viewer in mind and have a text version as well just in case they don’t enable images.

2. Prominent Registration Button

The email invitation is designed to get your prospects to click the ”Register” button, and you need to make sure they’re aware of this from the start by placing it near the top of the email where they’ll spot it the second they open your email. Try to keep the email short and avoid making the prospect scroll down the page to find out all the details. If the description is long add a secondary call to action at the bottom of the email so that it’s visible in any view.

3. Easy Registration Process-

So, you inspired your prospect to click the Register button and now you want them to be able to sign up easily. To maximize conversion,  create your  landing page in OM3 and easily include a sign up using the new drag-and-drop online survey and form-builder tool.

The landing pages should be created to match the e-email design, and can be set up with a form that can request any kind of information you want from the prospect.  Also, the registrants will be entered in a database, so you won’t lose track of who signed up.  For those who make it to the registration page, but don’t finish the process,  you could also incorporate a form abandonment campaign that will send emails and try to attract the registrant back to register.

In a recent case study RFID Journal was able to recover 22% of their abandoned event registrations. Click here to read more  about the RFID study.

4. Keep it Short & Sweet-

Don’t include too much copy in your blast, as busy readers may just ignore it entirely.  Make the amount of text palatable to the prospect and describe the basics of the event and why they should attend.  Make sure they understand the value and the take away. If you need to add more descriptions do so on the landing page for the registration or via a link from the email to Learn More.

5. Make Day of Week, Date, Time & Venue Obvious-

Make sure the prospect can easily find the details of the event, date, time and venue. Include the day of the week, so the prospect doesn’t have to search elsewhere for this information.  Also, double check that this is accurately displayed on both your email and your landing page. You don’t want to have to send out an “oops” email to your list again correcting the mistake!

6. Add Video to Promote the Event or Speaker-

Often your event will involve a speaker/author, and they’ll have promotional videos online that you can access. You can use these in your blast and this way the prospect can get a real taste of what’s in store for them. If you don’t have a video, use a photo of the speaker (with his/her book) and include a short bio.

So there you have it, a few simple guidelines and suggestions for you to create an effective email invitation that will inspire your prospects to sign up for your events. It’s a simple recipe that often yields great results!

Want to try this with your next event but don’t know where to start? Click here and let us know. We’d be happy to help!