Email Best Practices for Promoting Events
Email is a great way to promote your event and communicate with attendees, vendors, and participants. You can target specific groups through user segmentation, ensuring that the right message goes to the people who most want/need to hear it.
You can create an effective email marketing campaign with a bit of up-front preparation.
Create an Email Communications Calendar
As you are planning your event, be sure to create an email communication calendar, so you know when to send out emails and to whom. Things you might want to consider:
- Pre-launch/save the date emails to build excitement for your event.
- Registration emails that provide additional information and details about your event. The more people know about your event, the more likely they are to commit to attending.
- Event registration reminders for those who have not yet registered.
- Event details for those who have registered.
- Vendor/speaker-specific emails
- Follow-up email to people who did not open your original email through user segmentation.
- Thank you emails — use this opportunity to highlight statistics from the event or simply offer your appreciation. Follow-up emails are also a great chance to send surveys or feedback forms about your event - or promote other upcoming events.
Use an Attention-Grabbing Subject Line
You might have the best content about a fantastic event within your email, but if your subject line doesn’t entice people to open the email, it may get moved to the trash. Subject lines that create urgency or excitement often have higher open rates than those that are generic. The best subject lines are short, descriptive, and give the reader a reason to open your email.
FROM Lines
The FROM line identifies who is sending the email. Unless everyone on the sender list can identify you personally (University President, College Dean, etc), keep the focus on your department or team, rather than a single employee.
Example: PSU School of Business, rather than Jane Smith.
Have a Clear Call to Action
It’s helpful if every piece of email marketing has a specific Call to Action (CTA). Think of what you want your reader to do upon opening and reading your email and make it easy for them to complete that task by including an obvious hyperlink or a button at the end of your email, such as the following examples:
- RSVP
- Register for the event
- Visit website
- Download a registration package
- Fill out a survey
- Sync event reminders with Google Calendar, iCal, Microsoft Office, etc.
Keep it short and sweet
Try to keep your email brief but informative. People often sift through lots of emails each day and won’t have time to read lengthy copy. Make sure you get important points across quickly; use bullet points and add spaces between paragraphs for easy scanning.
If you want to provide extra detail, try linking to a website or having a PDF attachment people can download.
Evaluation: Open Rates and Other Metrics
How can you tell if your emails are effective? The Emma email marketing service offers metrics on every email you send. You can compare these numbers with those from other email campaigns you’ve sent, and you can evaluate them against industry averages, in order to get an idea of whether your emails are succeeding.
Successful email marketing requires experimentation and testing. If your open rates start slipping or they are performing below the industry average, try sending on a different day of the week or an hour or two earlier in the morning, for example. Experiment with different subject lines, email frequency, content, images and more. You can even try A/B testing to determine what resonates with your audiences and utilize that data in designing future emails.
Using Embolden Brand Templates in Emma
PSU’s Emma accounts come with email templates that reflect PSU’s Embolden brand, making it easy to create email designs that are in line with the university’s distinctive look and feel. To use these templates, log in to your Emma account, click “Create New Campaign,” click “Regular Email,” fill in the email name, and click “Shared Templates” in the upper left column under “My gallery.” Here you’ll find a variety of options that you can select and adapt for your purpose.
Mailing Lists: Working with PSU Foundation for Alumni Email Lists
If you would like to invite alumni to your event, you can request a list of your department’s alumni through the PSU Foundation. To request the list, email the Foundation’s Data Team. Make sure to request the list at least two weeks before you need it.
You will need to request a new list of alumni or donors for every specific email communication you plan to send. The reason for this is because emails and addresses are constantly being updated or removed (when people opt out), so you will want the most updated list to reflect those new updates.
If you receive any email updates, address updates or opt-outs, make sure to email those to the PSU Foundation to be updated in the database.
Sending to All Staff/All Students
If you have an event that you want to share with all PSU faculty and staff, or all students, or both, the best way to reach these audiences is to send the information to Virtual Viking, which goes out to all students on a weekly basis during the academic year, or to Currently, the weekly faculty and staff newsletter. For more information about when it is appropriate to email large groups of staff, faculty or students, refer to the Mass Email Requirements, Guidelines & Best Practices guide.