Benefits of using an ESP for Event Marketing Campaigns
What is an email service provider?
Email is undoubtably the number one route for event marketing campaigns to potential visitors and an email service provider (ESP) can be hugely beneficial to event organisers to manage, streamline and enhance campaigns.
For those of you who are unsure about what an ESP is, it is essentially a piece of software specialising in sending bulk email campaigns to subscriber lists with advanced capabilities that can help improve the communications you send out.
The following post assesses the benefits of using an ESP within the events industry to help you assess whether an ESP could be beneficial for you, or whether you are achieving the most out of your current platform.
Benefit No.1 – It helps you avoid being blacklisted / identified as a spammer
Sending bulk emails from an email address from a regular email client (for example your work email) could be extremely detrimental to your business. Regular email clients are not designed for sending bulk emails and as such, if identified doing so, can be regarded suspicious and listed as a spammer. If this happens all internet service providers (ISP’s) could block the domain from sending any emails which could end not just your marketing campaign but the use of the domain for regular work-related communications. ESP’s have this covered and are recognised by ISP’s as a safe sender reducing the chances of you being identified as a spammer.
Benefit No.2 – Helps you stay compliant
With GDPR firmly in place, managing your email marketing and subscriber lists has become ever more important. Giving the recipient of email marketing communications the ability to opt-out from future emails and new subscribers to opt-in is a must. Most ESP’s will have list management capabilities built into the solution although this may not be the most effective way to manage your subscriber lists. If you have a centralised database / CRM preference centre in which you manage your contacts this could well be the more efficient option as a preference centre, as having multiple subscriber lists stored in different places will increase the likelihood of human error. Furthermore, having an integration between your CRM / database to your email service provider will improve efficiencies, reduce time spent managing subscriber lists and reduce the possibilities of errors occurring.
Benefit No.3 – Email creation tools
Most ESP’s offer up the ability to create professional email campaigns using pre-built templates or html code offering aesthetically pleasing email designs. These templates can be saved meaning you won’t have to keep creating emails from scratch thus saving time, allowing you to focus on the email content and attracting more visitors to your event.
Benefit No.4 – Advanced Features
ESP’s offer many other advanced features that aren’t available in a regular email client. Features such as tracking will allow you to see and compare open rates of each campaign down to the areas of the email that the recipient clicked. This can offer great insight into improving the design and content of future email campaigns including the areas of interest to your subscribers. Further features such as A/B testing offers the ability to test the effectiveness of multiple email designs/content within a single campaign and further features such as segmentation will allow you to segment your email content based on subscriber interest. Ensuring your registration forms are gathering the correct information is essential when it comes to segmentation as this is a valuable insight into your audience which will allow you to customise the content they receive.
In summary an email service provider has many benefits when marketing your events, which can help you create professional email campaigns, assess the impact of the campaigns and help you stay compliant with legislation. There are many different solutions available from Mailchimp and Constant Contact to AWeber and hopefully this post will allow you to assess whether you are achieving the most out of your current platform or whether its time for an upgrade.
Here at JET we specialise in event registration and recognise the importance of email marketing within the events industry. As such, our JET Connect email marketing tool has the advanced features and capabilities you’d expect with the other providers but has been built specifically to work with your event data, allowing organisers to constantly improve and monitor their marketing campaigns in order to grow their events year on year and to see the visitor journey from initial email to attendance at the event. If you would like a conversation around our email marketing solution and registration services, please get in contact today.
