Giving our event holders the power to exploit email for the success of their events is an important part of the Eventbrite service pledge.  We continue to put a lot of thought and development work into our email features and capabilities.  So stay tuned for exciting new email-related product announcements very soon.  We’ve also been working hard to ensure that emails sent through Eventbrite enjoy world class deliverability, stay out spam filters and reach their intended recipients with a near-100% success rate.

Given so much email horsepower under the Eventbrite hood, for this month’s installment of How to Promote your Event Online, I thought I’d take a look at making the most of email.

As a general comment I will say that more is more.  We certainly make it easy to send lots of email to your invitees as well as to those who’ve already registered to your event.  And since use of Eventbrite email services is entirely free, we encourage you to take advantage as much as possible.  All we ask is that you send emails conscientiously and keep the quality of your emails high.  We live in an age of automated (form) emails, so a little creativity and personality can help your invitees become and stay interested in your messages.

To that end, here are some email content ideas and suggestions based on things I’ve seen work for some of our event holders.

But before we delve into content, first a question of timing.  How long before your event should you send your first invitation? is a question I hear all the time.  The best answer here is the least desirable for the thoughtless person — “It depends.”  So the trick here is to be thoughtful.  Some things are obvious.  For example, the bigger a deal an event is, generally the farther in advance you hear about it.  This is not necessarily a function of how difficult to pull together an event might be — although that can certainly be the case.  This is generally because the producers of big, expensive events like to milk the PR and build up buzz for a good long time prior to the event.  If you have a lot of buzz to build in advance or want to extend the exposure window for your sponsors, go ahead and start early.  I’ve seen annual events send out invitations as soon as the week after the event.  This can be masterfully done when you combine the first invitation with the after-event wrap-up in one email.  When people are still feeling good about the event they just attended might be a great time to hit them up for the next one.  Capitalizing on post-event goodwill in the form of a super-earlybird discount can be very effective.  The one caution about beginning your email promotion efforts very far in advance of your event is that you have to be prepared to sustain and even build activity as your event date gets closer.  It would be absurd to send out a single invitation a year in advance of the event and expect for anyone to show up.

Likewise, it is easy to annoy your invitees if you barrage them with invites and reminders too frequently. It is an art to be able to continuously talk about something without appearing to sell it.  Successful event promoters learn and master this art.

For starters, an invitation doesn’t have to look like an invitation.  It doesn’t have to say “Come” or “Register” anywhere.  Once you appreciate that the content of your “invitation” can be anything that makes people register when they get it, you can begin to see some of the possibilities.

One idea is to talk to your invitees like they’re already going. Don’t make the subject of the email the fact that the recipient has not yet registered for the event.  This makes people feel alienated and somewhat hostile.  Don’t browbeat your invitees with recriminations like “Why haven’t you registered yet?” or “There are only 3 days left before the event!”.  Those types of messages work against you.  Most people don’t like it when other people try to create urgency for them.  Most people prefer to create urgency for themselves.  So the trick is to make people feel anxious that they aren’t yet registered for your event.  You want to make them begin to worry that if they don’t go they’re going to miss something worthwhile.

Come up with ways to foster a feeling of inclusion among those who are already going to your event.  Think of the club effect.  It’s human to want to join something that others around you are joining. Use email to let people know that benefits are accruing to those who have already registered.

If you have sponsors, don’t forget to give them visibility in the invitations.  This sounds academic, but is overlooked surprisingly often.  And don’t just drop some logos here and there. Give your sponsors the opportunity to engage your invitees with their content.  I’m sure they all have recent blog posts they’d love to have people read.  These kinds of collaborations with event organizers can give sponsor sites a significant boost in readership from a targeted audience, not to mention just plain traffic.  They’ll reward you for that with great material, which, if chosen thoughtfully, can do a great deal to drive registration to your event.   A great recent example that comes to mind was the Apps for Democracy event, which brought an obscure government web resource to the attention of the Washington DC tech elite.  Win-win.

If the organizer of the event is itself a company, then link to your own blog posts and news areas when you send invitations and registration reminders.  Choose content that builds towards the event.  Even if your invitee audience is somewhat “captive”, as is the case with many company events, you can still take advantage of the attention-opportunity you create when you send somebody an email.  Use this space to highlight key ideas of a presentation you intend to make, to foster discussion around a topical area, or even to have people vote on things — like the speaker presentation order.  This latter is a quite powerful driver of registrations, as many people will sign up just for the opportunity to influence (even in some small way) what will happen during the event.

Event-related content that is available in advance of the event only to those who register is also very compelling.  For many seminars and classes, a big part of the draw may be the desire to obtain the class materials.  Reward people who register early with PowerPoints and things that will build expectation and make the recipient feel special and ahead of the game.  If you have expert speakers and presenters scheduled for your event, work with them to provide preview samples of their content in your email invitations.

Many of these ideas involve linking from the email invitation to an external resource — a blog post, a web page, etc.  While this is generally recommendable, since it offloads content from the body of the email and gives you more room to deliver your messages, don’t forget that the goal is to convert the recipient – to make them register.  So, make sure that these external pages have links back to your Eventbrite registration page.

For many noob event organizers, the question may yet remain “Yeah, but what makes for a ‘perfect’ email invitation to an event?”  As we’ve spent some time illuminating above, the successful email invitation can take many forms.  But if I were going to send just one invitation to my event, I would probably try to include a schedule.  More so than almost any other factor, I would say that giving your invitees a clear picture of what is going to happen during the event and at what time, drives registrations.  People like to know what to expect.

Related posts:

1. How to promote your event online, part 2 — Facebook Welcome to the 2nd installment of a new series...
2. How to promote your event online, part 1 — Twitter Lots of folks will tell you to use Twitter...