Email Marketing for Conference promotions

With the lifting of almost all Covid related restrictions, face to face conferences are back. This is a multi-billion dollar industry, with knock on positive impacts in other sectors, such as travel and hospitality. Thousands of people attend an event somewhere globally every day, which are an important way to share new ideas, keep updated and of course from a sales point of view.

Ready for take off

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Following the disruption caused by Covid, many conference organizers have struggled to fill conference halls and auditoriums. Recessionary fears and inflation are two further factors causing organizers headaches.

So how best to find and attract attendees to conferences? Below are two suggestions, based on real world experience. Firstly for an international conference and secondly for a local / national smaller conference. The main difference between the two, being how far ahead to start an email campaign.

Email Campaign Structure Recommendations

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For an international, multi-day conference, we recommend the following timing for the messages:

1. Three months ahead of the conference. Brief headlines and most important keynote speakers. Early sign up discounts, link to video of previous event.
2. Two months ahead, add further detail to the agenda, focus on keywords of interest to your audience. Early sign up deadline warning.
3. One month ahead, final deadline warning, further keywords highlighted, new speakers announced.
4. One/two weeks ahead, depending on logistics, “Last chance” deadline warning, final further keywords of interest.

For a more local, single day event, the following structure works well:

1. Six weeks ahead of the conference, brief headlines and most important keynote speakers. Early sign up discounts, link to video of previous event.
2. Four weeks before the conference, add further detail to the agenda, focus on keywords of interest to your audience. Possible early discount deadline warning.
3. Three weeks before the conference, final deadline warning, further keywords highlighted, new speakers announced.
4. One week ahead, depending on logistics, “Last chance” deadline warning, final further keywords of interest.

The Conference 1500

With this in mind, Marketwise has created a specific email marketing package, aimed at Conference promotions.

This package has the following structure that we have found, supports finding a good number of new conference attendees.

• 1,500 contacts, specific to the conference. For example, focused on a particular disease, scientific discipline, technology or business area.
• Four messages sent to all the contacts
• A full statistical campaign report.

The package scales up and the “1500” reference refers to the minimum size supported.

Expected Results

It’s always hard to predict what results would be achieved, but based on our experience, with a well targeted audience and a good message, you should expect between a 10% and 20% open rate. This should lead to around 0.75% to 2% of your audience that will fully convert and apply to attend. In actual numbers, that’s 10 to 30 people from the original 1500.

Nothing is guaranteed of course, but these are achievable figures and usually make for a positive Return on Investment from the email campaign.

Summary

Email is a great way to promote a conference or other event. Marketwise’s Conference 1500 service can provide you with a highly specialised targeted audience for an email campaign in the science and B2B sector.