Event marketers are turning to automations more and more to power their email marketing. Why? Automations let you mimic personalized one-on-one communications in a scalable way, because they’re triggered off of customers’ unique actions. They’re a good way to engage customers at exactly the right time with the right messaging, all while being hands-off.
Imagine receiving a personalized abandoned cart email from your favorite artist after adding tickets to your cart, but forgetting to complete your purchase. You’d probably be excited and a little more incentivized to get tickets for the show! Plus, marketers who leverage automations like abandon carts see conversion rates as high as 50%. Convinced? Let’s dive into the three automations you should set up for your events brand today to start selling more tickets.
Welcome Series
Welcome email automations prime your email for good deliverability and higher overall engagement. These emails trigger when fans first sign up for your email list, which is a good time to send an email because they’re excited to hear from you and ready to engage. Because these automations are set to send when fans sign up, they’ve averaged the highest open rate of any marketing email, at 91% opens.
Plus, with 74% of fans expecting a welcome email when they subscribe to an event’s email list, not having a welcome series might leave a bad impression. Not only are welcome email automations expected, they boost your engagement with three times more opens, clicks, and revenue per email compared to regular promotional email campaigns.
Insomniac’s welcome email is a great example of a straightforward design that cuts to the chase with a clear CTA that links to their events list.
Quick Tip: To optimize for click-through, we suggest using a ‘Confirm Your Subscription’ CTA in your first welcome automation email.
Winback Series
Winback email automations are a smart way to re-engage fans who haven’t opened or clicked your recent emails. Maybe they haven’t been interested in your recent events, or perhaps they went on vacation and haven’t checked their inbox. Either way, it costs 3x more to gain a new attendee than it does to re-engage an existing one, making winback automations an important piece of every event marketers strategy.
Winback email automations are set to trigger when a subscriber hasn’t engaged with X amount of your recent emails. By designing an email specifically to pique their interest, whether it’s a straightforward “Still want to hear from us?” subject line or a discount on your future events, these emails are your way of making sure that subscribers who still want to hear from you continue to receive emails moving forward.
Winback emails show high success rates, with 45% of subscribers who received a winback campaign opening a subsequent message. This means that 45% of the fans who aren’t engaging with your emails, currently harming your overall deliverability and retention, could be brought back with the right communications.
Related: The Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide to Building an Effective Winback Series
They’re also one of the best ways to churn unengaged subscribers from your list. Ultimately, continuing to send the same generic email campaigns to these unengaged subscribers will damage your deliverability, especially to active subscribers who actually do engage with your emails.
Tip: We often see event marketers experience a high drop-off in engagement because of poor segmentation. Subscribers stop engaging because the brand is sending mass, untargeted emails about events that aren’t relevant to their subscribers’ interests. Thus, their emails increasingly land in spam where, even if a later email includes an event or artist the subscriber is interested in, they won’t see it. That’s why it’s important to segment your subscribers, whether it be by venue, artist, or music genre to keep them actively engaged while maintaining healthy deliverability!
Abandoned Cart Automations
According to Eventbrite, up to 70% of people who start a checkout don’t buy tickets at all. That’s a lot of potential revenue lost (two to four trillion dollars a year from abandoned carts!) that you can recover with a simple abandoned cart email automation.
Abandoned cart automations trigger when a fan adds a ticket to their cart without completing their purchase. Your ESP will typically let you set a time delay between when a fan abandons their cart and when your emails are sent (we recommend a delay of 3 hours for the best click-through rate), so your emails will hit inboxes at exactly the right time. With an average open rate of 43% and click rate of 20%, abandoned cart automations are a prime example of how you can leverage automations to boost engagement and improve deliverability.
Related: Why Event Marketers Should Be Sending Abandoned Cart Automations
The best part about abandoned cart emails? They’re being sent to fans who have shown purchase intent–they’ve already added the ticket to their cart! That’s why abandoned cart emails average a 10% conversion rate, which is a lot of ticket sales you could be recovering.
Wrap Up
Want to learn more about how email automations can boost fan engagement, increase ticket sales, and improve your deliverability? Check out Hive’s Ultimate Guide to Email Automations for Event Marketers for step-by-step tips and email ideas for your automations.
This article was originally published by our friends at Hive.co
