Last-Minute Event Marketing With E-mail
In a perfect world, you’d start promoting your business-to-business (B2B) conference or event about six months in advance. But this is the real world. And sometimes, the timing is a less than ideal. That’s when it’s time to pull out every e-mail creative and marketing trick in the book.
Recently, I was called to rescue an event that was only two months away — with only a handful of registrants to date. Here’s what I did.
Start With a Sure-Fire Registration Booster
Before I was called in on the project, a typical “mark your calendar” e-mail had been sent, with the typical low registrations. The event’s topic was relatively new, and no e-mail list of specific job titles was available. Instead, the e-mail was sent to a general IT list.
To rev registrations to the next level, I went for the never-fail interactive e-mail. The objective was to get prospective attendees to self-identify. The subject line asked the audience to take a quiz on the topic. Those who answered “yes” to any of the questions would find the conference of interest.
I did a Google search on the topic and was lucky enough to locate an article that explained the challenges IT folks were confronting in relation to the topic. From there, turning challenges into quiz questions was a relatively simple matter.
Segment Your “Most Likely to Attend” Prospects
Once we got a bit of excitement going for the event, we mined the mailing list for prospects fitting the best-attendee profile, based on the little information we had.
The marketing manager, who was also called in at the last minute, really drilled down to segment a broad list in an intelligent way. She decided to segment:
- High-level IT executives who had participated in the company’s leadership programs on this topic
- Attendees of the company’s other events who participated in individual sessions on this topic
- IT folks from the four major industry verticals where this topic was generating buzz
For the first two groups, it was enough to have the e-mail’s first paragraph say, “You’ve been following [this topic] along with us for a while. Now we’d like to invite you to a dedicated event on [this topic].”
But for the four major industry verticals, it would have been a disservice to the client to just do simple versioning, such as “As a government IT executive, this topic is important to you.” Instead, I researched the verticals to find out what they found interesting. Each vertical got a distinctly different subject line, and in some cases, a completely different e-mail message, based on its particular interests.
Ask Partners to Promote the Event to Clients
Vendors and media partners are strongly interested in making your event a success because they want to bring in the same audience you do.
We created a generic invitation with room for the vendor’s name in the subject line and for the vendor’s logo in the headline.
Result: Event Is Now Poised to Succeed
Only a month later and with another month to go before the event, the event has rebounded. A healthy number of attendees registered, and the company feels confident it can generate the rest of the registrations needed.
When things get tough, pull out your highest performers from your e-mail archives. Then drill down and find your best audience. Finally, let your partners help you by inviting their clients to be yours.
[Source: Karen Gedney - www.clickz.com - May 2007]
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