BrightTALK TM Optimizing email promotions for webinars
How to optimize email promotions for webinars Email continues to be the most effective medium for promoting webinars. After you ve spent time crafting an effective email, you need to make sure it gets in front of the right people. It s important to not only target the right audience at the right time, but also to test and measure your communications to optimize performance and drive more registration. This brief will provide best practices on targeting, timing, and measuring your webinar email promotions.
1 Targeting When planning the email promotion of your events, it s important to recognize that different people have different needs. Only send invitations to those who would be interested in the specific content you are promoting. Here are three types of lists to consider for your sends: Subscribers. If they ve attended your events in the past, it s more likely that they will be interested in viewing more content from you. This also includes any blog subscribers who have opted in to receive content updates. Prospects. The people you ve identified to be interested in what you do will likely be interested in your content. Separate yourself from the noise by emphasizing the valuable knowledge and actionable advice prospective clients will gain by attending your event. Customers. If your content is about best practices, create stickiness with current clients by highlighting your area of expertise. Show customers that you are helping them achieve their goals by providing original and valuable insights.
2 Timing Promotional emails should be delivered at strategic times before and after the live event. Make sure you re sending these three emails: Registration confirmation. You ve successfully gotten someone to register for your webinar. Now you need to make sure they attend. Send a confirmation email with the details of the event and a link to save it on their calendars to make it easy for them to join. Starting now. One of the most important emails to send is the live day reminder email. People often register for a webinar in advance and forget about the details. Sending this key email 15 minutes before the live event boosts attendance significantly: BrightTALK data indicates that this email has a 35-45% click-through rate and is responsible for nearly half of live event viewings. Post-event. It s important to send a follow-up email after the presentation as well. Not all registrants can attend live; in fact, on BrightTALK, 60% of webinar viewings happen in the 24 hours after the live time. When scheduling your sends, consider when your target audience is most likely to be checking email and willing to put time on their calendar to attend a webinar. BrightTALK data indicates that the best time to reach a recipient s inbox is between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. local time on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
3 Measuring Accurately tracking analytics is critical to improving email performance over time. There are plenty of metrics to measure, but three of the most important are: Bounce rate. This number indicates how many emails you sent were not delivered, whether due to something like a bad email address (hard bounce) or a full inbox (soft bounce). This metric can give an indication of how much you need to clean your list. Open rate. This metric shows how many recipients opened your email. Reviewing open rate figures can also help indicate how clean your list is. If your open rate is especially low, it can likely be attributed to one of two factors: weak subject lines or bad email addresses. Click-through rate. This percentage looks at the number of people who clicked on at least one link within the email. Boosting CTR can be achieved by making changes to the copy, design, and/or calls to action. Regularly running A/B tests is also key to improving email performance. Test different subject lines, copy, and design to determine what works best for your audience.
About BrightTALK BrightTALK provides webinars and videos for professionals and their communities. Every day thousands of thought leaders are actively sharing their insights, their ideas and their most up-to-date knowledge with professionals all over the globe through the technologies that BrightTALK has created. For more information on BrightTALK marketing solutions, please contact us. North America Europe Email: sales@brighttalk.com Email: sales@brighttalk.com Phone: +1 (800) 230 6051 Phone: +44 (0) 20 7397 8407