How to make the best email invitation for your conference?

There are many ways to inform potential visitors of your conference. Social media, word of mouth and good old mail still plays a role. But the best marketing channel for a conference invitation is still the email campaign. In this article, find out what you need to take into account in any case.

Build up the excitement

For a small meeting, one email is enough. However, a conference invitation often takes place in several steps.

Do you already have a reputation for organising events? Then, you can already tell people the date and location (for example, conference venues in London) of your conference as early as possible by email. Maybe even right away after an event, when people are still enthusiastic about it.

In later emails, you can mention a bit at a time about the most important speakers and what they’re going to talk about. Coordinate this well with the speakers who at that moment can share the content.

A unique value proposition

What problem will your event solve? There must be some urgency in the conference invitation.

For example, will new legislation be introduced that can affect your branch? Or are there usable recent technological developments that your target group is not aware of?

The average London resident receives so many emails that you need to make an effort to stand out from the rest. Therefore, make sure that you have a nice layout and a punchy but short text. It needs to be clear within one sentence why people cannot miss this conference. Keep a light tone in any case because nobody likes a pushy sales pitch.

Make use of exclusiveness

Folks in London like discounts. Early bird tickets or discounts for last year’s participants works well, too.

For example, emphasise the exclusive discounts only in the email campaign and not on the website or on social media. Indicate clearly until when the tickets with discounts or other advantages can be ordered.

Peer pressure works

If there are a few more seats at the event space in London, it cannot do any harm to send a last-minute email to the sceptics.

Offering additional discounts seems attractive (to sell all the tickets), but you risk having less people at the following conference (because why buy tickets so early if others also get discounts?).

What works best is peer pressure (or social proof) in the invitation. What guests are coming as well? Are there interesting names or well-known names? That’s nice, (but takes more time) if you can show what LinkedIn contacts from this sceptic are also going to the conference.

A/B testing is possible and should be done

With services like MailChimp, you can simply test several versions of the conference email invitation for their effectiveness.

For example, use variations in:

• Subject line
• Text length
• Choice of images
• The location and text of the call to action
• Speakers highlighted
• Time of sending

The best part is that everything is measurable. You see right away how many people click on the A, B or C (or more) versions and which approach is more efficient.

A nice and precise call to action

Too often mails with a great layout that are well written are sent without any precise call to action.

The entire email talks about an event at London venues, but where can people register?

Create a big obvious button for this.

You can simply put ‘book your tickets’, although sometimes a creative call to action has a better result:

• I want a 37% early bird discount.
• Look at who else is coming (and get a 37% discount).
• We want to see you again! (get your discount here)
• Put it in my Google calendar (and I will decide later).

By doing tests, you can see what works best.