BE BRAVE! Send Emails To Drive Attendance To Your Virtual Events

This week, we are staying in the realm of email, and diving into some best practices in terms of what and when you should be sending emails if you are hosting any type of online event. 

As we are all very well aware of, we’re living in an age where almost everyone is working remotely, companies are now putting on more online events such as webinars in order to stay engaged with customers they can no longer have face-to-face contact with at conferences or in-person sales meetings. 

Along with promoting your upcoming online event on your website, social or with paid search ads, we find that the most preferred method to garner attendees at your virtual event is through email promotion. 

Email is a great tool not only to invite potential customers, but to also remind them of their upcoming event. And, it’s a great way to follow-up with interested prospects or customers post-event as well.

I know, we all get a lot of email and let’s face it, it's 2020, and we all have a ton going on. You may be thinking, ‘Do I really want to send someone a bunch of emails for my event?’ Here’s the truth, you do! The reason you want to reach out by email is that, if someone is not interested, 2 things will happen:

1. They will unsubscribe -- let them go, it’s ok, they weren’t interested in working with you anyway. Really believe us! Stop texting them too. Oh wait, that’s dating advice. ...Back to email, Or,
2. They will ignore the email -- and not register for your event. That’s ok too. They didn’t unsubscribe but they just couldn’t fit the event into their schedule. They have not cut off communication from you. There’s a chance to connect with them later.

So, be brave, go ahead make that virtual event, in a future post we can talk about best practices for virtual events. In the meantime, our goal is to always leave you with a tool to support our Marketing advice. And, this week we have created this handy HEEDGROUP Email Event Scheduler document that outlines the following cadence for emails supporting your event: 

Schedule of when to send your initial event invites

1. Schedule of when to send a reminder to RSVP to your event
2. Schedule of when to send reminders to people who have RSVP’d
3. Schedule of when to send thank you emails to people who attended 
4. Schedule of when to send thank you emails to people who RSVP’d, but did not attend 
5. Schedule of when to send final email to people who neither RSVP’d or attended

We promise if you follow this email schedule, you will find out who is interested in learning more about you through your online event. This schedule takes into consideration that you have a list of prospects and customers that you want to email about an online event. Yet, another blog coming up from HEEDGROUP will cover how to build that list. Have a great week everyone!