Event email marketing strategies to improve deliverability

Event email marketing remains a cost-effective cornerstone for promoting events, reaching out to attendees, and driving engagement. However, amidst overflowing inboxes and tighter spam regulations, ensuring the deliverability of event emails and maximizing open rates presents a very real challenge for event planners in 2024.

With your event communications centralized online, leveraging email campaigns effectively can positively impact your event’s success. From boosting registrations to enhancing pre-event engagement, a well-executed event marketing strategy can make a world of difference.

So, making sure your hard work pays off and your emails actually land in your audience’s inbox is essential.

The importance of email deliverability

It’s simple – if your emails fail to reach your intended audience, your event marketing efforts will be in vain. Therefore, ensuring optimal deliverability needs to be top-of-mind.

Deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to successfully land in recipients’ inboxes rather than being filtered into spam folders, bounced, or blocked entirely. Several factors influence deliverability, including sender reputation, email content, recipient engagement, and spam complaints.

Email deliverability challenges in 2024.

In February 2024, the email marketing landscape underwent a significant transformation. Major email providers, such as Google and Yahoo, updated their policies and guidelines, presenting new challenges for event marketers.  

Stricter email regulations signify a heightened focus on combating spam, protecting user privacy, and enhancing the overall email experience for recipients. While these changes provide a proactive step towards safer email security and safeguarding brand reputation, they have resulted in global impacts on email deliverability.

Ultimately, reviewing your email sending practices to align with these new standards is crucial. To meet these new rules, you need to comply with the following:

• Authenticate your emails
• Allow recipients to easily unsubscribe from marketing emails in one click
• Process and honor unsubscribes within two days
• Not exceed set spam rate thresholds of 0.3%

Thankfully, there are some very effective practices you can implement to ensure you meet these requirements.

How to improve email deliverability and open rates

If you’re sending to opted-in, highly engaged contacts who love receiving your emails, you don’t have much to fear. But, if you’ve seen engagement rates plummet and your deliverability affected, you’re going to want to pay attention to these next few points.

1. Authenticate and verify your email domains

To enhance security and prevent spoofing attacks, email service providers now require senders to implement robust authentication and verification mechanisms.  Ensure that your email sending domain is authenticated using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols.

This helps email providers verify the legitimacy of your emails and reduces the likelihood of them being marked as spam.

If you’re an EventsAir customers, our expert support team can help you authenticate your domains appropriately.

2. Craft quality, valuable content 

Create engaging and relevant content that adds value to your recipients. Avoid using spammy language, excessive punctuation, or misleading subject lines (for example: FREE TICKETS!!!!!!). This may sound simple, but there are certain phrases and words that may automatically land you in someone’s spam folder.

3. Include unsubscribe links for marketing emails

For marketing and promotional emails, bulk senders will be required to give subscribers the option of unsubscribing with just one click directly within their email campaigns. Making it easy to unsubscribe from your messages also greatly improves your sending reputation.

4. Maintaining email list hygiene

Regularly clean your email lists to remove inactive or invalid email addresses. High bounce rates and low engagement can negatively impact your sender reputation and affect deliverability. If your audience has not heard from you recently, and is not expecting to hear from you, then there is a chance they will mark your email as spam.

Specifically, if you’re buying email lists, or emailing people not subscribed to your mailing list, you’re very likely to exceed those new spam thresholds.

5. Maximize your engagement rates

By aligning your sending practices with the above you should not only see marked improvements in deliverability, but you will also enhance the overall performance of your email marketing campaigns.

Why?

Because you’re focusing on recipients who are genuinely interested and engaged with your event.

If you layer these practices with segmentation, you can deliver even more relevant and personalized content to each recipient, further increasing your engagement and positively influencing your deliverability. Plus, you have the added benefit of avoiding audience fatigue by only delivering the right message at the right time.

Conclusion

While stricter regulations have posed challenges for event marketers, it also enhances the quality and effectiveness of email communications.

Adapting to these new requirements requires proactive action and implementing best practices for email sending. Remember, achieving success in event email marketing is an ongoing process – you will have to continuously refine and adapt your practices to evolving trends, audience preferences, and changing policies.

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