Are you using email marketing strategies to generate event planning leads, grow your audience awareness, and improve your brand image? If you aren’t, you should be. And if you’re not sure your current strategy is generating the results you want, keep reading. Here’s how you can step up your event planner game and tap into the power of email marketing to grow your business.
Start with a Lead Scoring Plan
One of the first steps to developing a successful email marketing strategy is to configure and optimize your lead scoring. It’s about reaching the right target audience, at the right time, with the right message. And it’s lead scoring that can help you identify the high-value prospects and separate them from lesser-priority leads. As an example, if you have data for one prospect who’s visited your website and clicked to learn more about your event planning services, that candidate is a higher conversion priority than another prospect who’s not yet even visited your website.
Create Email Templates That Convert
Yes, emails need to be personalized and customized to each recipient. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make smart use of email templates. Consider creating various stages of your email process through a series of email frameworks. You can customize the templates as you need to without having to recreate the wheel every time you stage a campaign.
The Key to Engaging Email Content
With your email templates outlined, you can then dive in to design concise and engaging email messages. Don’t be too wordy, and keep them brief without overselling. Use plain, easy-to-read fonts and a simple email design. Highlight important details and keep things conversational whenever possible.
Subject Line Success
Your email subject line should inspire the recipient to keep reading and see more. If it’s not piquing curiosity or providing value, and especially if it sounds canned or salesy, your recipient will file it away without reading it. Explore attention-grabbing subject lines posed as questions or probing statements.
Email Marketing Schedules and Timing
Use your buyer personas to help you identify the best time and frequency for connecting with your target audience. You can create an email marketing calendar that is more precise about when you send messages when you offer specials, and when you follow up for the best results. The data does change frequently, but it’s often best to reach out to one prospect weekly to once per month, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays being great days of the week for sending.
Call to Action Strategies
Every email template you create for your event planning business should finish with a prompt to do something. Calls to action are mission-critical to email campaign success, and your recipients want you to tell what you want them to do next. The most effective CTA versions are those that feel urgent, inspire excitement, or leave your prospect intrigued to see more. Here are some tips:
- Use action words and verbs in your CTAs.
- Keep ‘em short and sweet.
- Tap into FOMO to create urgency.
The Power of A/B Testing
Since there isn’t a magic wand solution that works for every event planner’s business model every time, A/B testing is your best strategy. Try testing two different subject lines to see which achieves better open rates. Change up different CTAs and analyze the results. Just remember that when you’re A/B testing, keep every other aspect of your email message the same, so you can validate an authentic apples-to-apples comparison.
Email Automation
Email marketing is most effective when you can commit to a timely schedule and send messages to broader email target lists. Sitting down to hit send one at a time isn’t going to get you very far, either. Embrace email marketing automation platforms to help curate and prioritize email lists, manage message templates, and effectively send to the masses according to your email schedule. And the data these platforms provide will only help you improve your strategies ongoing.
Connecting with Social Media
Email marketing works well as a stand-alone outreach method. But it works even better when you integrate it into other marketing strategies, including social media. Tie your marketing strategies together, including blogs, video channels, newsletters, and your website. When you send an email campaign out to your target list, consider posting a similar message on your event planning social media channels. Drop a link online to a blog you have posted about a similar topic. And watch the multi-channel outreach improve your email open and conversion rates.
Create Referral and Loyalty Programs
In addition to any email marketing campaign you have to generate new leads, consider creating separate roadmaps for leveraging your existing client base and collaborator networks. Generate incentives and offer value to vendor partners and past clients who already love your services. They’re champions of your brand and can be great sources for new leads and referrals if you know how to make it beneficial for them.
Consider these email marketing insights to improve how you generate leads for your event planning business. And get all the actionable intel you need to grow your business at The Event Planner Expo 2023! Be sure you're on the official waitlist and don’t miss it!
