10 Email Marketing Tips for Venues
Email marketing is a great way for venues to connect with their customers. It’s a direct line of communication that allows you to keep your venue top-of-mind, and it’s a great way to share information about upcoming events, special promotions, and more.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss 10 tips for getting started with email marketing for venues, but first, here are just a few of the many reasons why venues should use email marketing:
- Emails are often read in real-time – These days, people can read emails right from their smartphone, which means they often read emails right away. That makes email a great option when you need to get your timing right.
- Emails are personal – Email is a great way to create a more personal connection with your venue. You can address customers by name, share pictures and videos, and even include links to personal profiles.
- Email marketing is affordable – One of the great things about email marketing is that it’s relatively affordable. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on design or copywriting, and email marketing software, like the Marketing 360® Nurture app, makes creating and sending email campaigns easy.
- Email automation helps you save time – With email automation, you can set up email campaigns that send automatically based on triggers, like venue visits or ticket purchases. That means you can spend less time manually sending emails and more time focusing on other aspects of your venue business.
Now that you know a little bit more about email marketing, here are our top tips for getting started with email marketing:
10 email marketing tips for venues
#1. Establish your goals
Before you start any kind of marketing campaign, it’s important to establish your goals. What do you hope to achieve with email marketing? Do you want to increase ticket sales or drive more traffic to your website? Do you want to build customer loyalty or trust in your brand?
Having goals is important. Not only will it help you measure your success, but it will also help you choose the right email marketing strategies to achieve your goals.
Having a goal from the get-go will help to guide your email marketing strategy and give you something to work toward.
Pro tip: Keep in mind that you can have more than one goal — you can even have different goals for different customers. For example, with leads, your goal may be to get them to convert, but with established customers, your goal may be to get them to write a review or book another event.
#2. Build your email list the long way
There are two ways to build your email list — the long way and the short way.
The short way is to buy an email list or rent one from a list provider. This can be tempting because it’s fast and easy, but we don’t recommend it.
For one thing, you have no control over who’s on the list or how they got there, which means there’s a good chance that many of the people on the list are not actually interested in your venue.
Additionally, buying email lists is against most email marketing platforms’ terms of service (TOS), so if you’re caught doing it, you could get kicked off the platform — and that’s not something you want to happen.
The long way is to build your email list the old-fashioned way: through organic growth. This takes time, but it’s worth it in the end because you’ll have a list of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
There are a few ways to do this:
- The best way to build your email list is to start with a group of people who are already interested in what you do. For example, if you have a venue blog, you can add an opt-in form to your website so that visitors can sign up to receive your emails.
- Another way to grow your email list organically is to offer incentives for people to sign up. For example, you could offer exclusive discounts or early access to tickets in exchange for email addresses.
- You can also add a sign-up form to your venue’s Facebook page, or run contests and giveaways on social media that require an email address to enter.
No matter how you do it, remember that the goal is to grow your list organically with people who are actually interested in what you have to offer. Don’t waste your time — or theirs — with a list of people who don’t care.
#3. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe
It may seem counterintuitive, but making it easy for people to unsubscribe from your email list is actually a good thing.
First of all, it keeps your list clean — if someone doesn’t want to be on your list, there’s no point in keeping them there. Second, it shows that you’re confident in what you’re sending and that you’re not afraid of people unsubscribing.
Plus, it’s the law. The CAN-SPAM Act requires all email marketers to provide a way for recipients to unsubscribe from their list in every email they send.
So how do you make it easy for people to unsubscribe? Include an “unsubscribe” link in every email. This is a simple, one-click link that will automatically remove them from your list.
Make sure the unsubscribe link is easy to find — it should be in the header or footer of every email, and it should be prominently displayed.
The last thing you want is for people to have to search for the unsubscribe link or contact you directly to be removed from your list. That’s just annoying, and it’ll only make people more likely to mark your emails as spam.
#4. Clean up your email list on a regular basis
It’s important to clean up your email list on a regular basis to keep it healthy and effective.
Every time you send an email, a small percentage of people will unsubscribe. This is normal, and it’s actually a good thing because it means that people who aren’t interested in what you’re sending will no longer receive it.
However, if the number of unsubscribes starts to grow, it’s a sign that you’re not sending the right content or that your email list is no longer interested in what you have to offer.
In either case, it’s time to clean up your email list. This means removing people who never open your emails from your list and keeping only the people who do.
This will help to improve your email open rate.
#5. Segment your email list
Another great way to improve your email open rate is to segment your email list.
Segmenting your email list means dividing it into smaller groups based on many different factors, including demographics, interests or behavior.
This allows you to send targeted content to specific groups of people, which improves the chances that they’ll open your email and actually read it.
How do you segment your email list? It depends on what information you have about your subscribers. You can segment based on things, like age, gender, location, interests or purchase history.
You can also segment your list based on how often people open your emails or whether they’ve clicked through to your website from an email.
The more you know about your subscribers, the better you can segment them and send targeted content.
#6. Personalize your emails
Personalizing your emails can go a long way to making them more effective.
People are more likely to open an email that’s addressed to them by name than one that isn’t. Including your recipients’ names in the subject line of your emails can lead to higher open rates.
Plus, personalizing your emails shows that you care about your subscribers and that you’re not just sending the same generic email to everyone on your list.
How do you personalize your emails? It’s easy — just include the subscriber’s name in the email. Automation can help you save time and eliminates the need for the arduous task of personalizing each email manually.
Personalizing your emails is a great way to stand out from the competition and increase your email marketing ROI.
#7. Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly
More and more people are reading emails on their mobile devices, so it’s important to make sure your emails are mobile-friendly.
If your email isn’t formatted correctly for a mobile device, it will be difficult to read and could even end up being marked as spam.
How do you make sure your emails are mobile-friendly? Use a responsive email template that will adjust to any screen size.
Additionally, use large font sizes and plenty of white space to make your email easy to read on a small screen.
Finally, keep your email content short and to the point — no one wants to scroll through a long email on their phone.
By making sure your emails are mobile-friendly, you can improve your email open rate and ensure that your subscribers actually read your emails.
#8. Focus on providing value
When emailing your subscribers, it’s important to focus on providing value.
If all you do is send promotional content, your subscribers will quickly lose interest. However, if you mix in some valuable content with your promotions, they’re more likely to stick around.
What counts as valuable content? It varies from subscriber to subscriber. However, some examples include helpful tips, interesting articles, exclusive deals or coupons and behind-the-scenes content.
Focus on providing value to your subscribers and you’ll be more likely to keep them engaged and prevent them from clicking the “unsubscribe” button.
#9. A/B test your emails
One way to find out what works best with your subscribers is to A/B test your emails.
A/B testing is a process of sending different versions of the same email to different groups of subscribers and seeing which one performs better.
This allows you to determine which type of content, subject line, design or call-to-action works best with your audience.
Once you know what works, you can use that information to improve your email marketing ROI and increase the effectiveness of your emails.
A/B testing can be time-consuming, but it’s worth it if it means you’ll be able to send better emails that get better results.
Start by testing small things, like your subject line or call-to-action. Once you have a feel for what works, you can start testing bigger things, like the design of your email or the type of content you include.
The important thing is to keep testing until you find what works best for your audience.
#10. Use email marketing software
One of the biggest reasons to use email marketing is that it’s quick and easy, and comes with the potential for a high ROI. But, in order to make it quick and easy, you need the right email marketing software.
There are a number of different email marketing software programs that can help you with your venue’s email marketing.
Email marketing software can help you automate your email campaigns, personalize your emails, track your results and more.
By using email marketing software, you can save time and effort while also improving the effectiveness of your venue’s email marketing campaigns.
The Marketing 360® Nurture app gives you everything you need to grow your venue with email marketing. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Marketing 360 venue marketing platform.
