Why a Clean Email Marketing List is Key for Events

An email marketing list with every contact from the past decade can look strong on paper, but it might be doing your event more harm than good.

Email blasts remain the most popular tool for event marketers in 2018, according to research by Eventbrite, and emails provide a powerful tool for getting your messaging in front of your target audience.However, if your email list isn't clean, relevant and segmented, you're sabotaging your event from step one.

Why regularly cleaning your event marketing email list matters

Over the years, an event team can collect thousands of email addresses – from website forms, event sign-up pages, ticket payment site and at your events themselves.You’ve probably put blood, sweat and tears into growing that list, so it may seem counterintuitive to start cutting people from it.Nonetheless, it’s an important thing to do. Here’s why:Numbers don't equal engagementYou might have 10,000 email addresses, but if the majority of these contacts never open your emails, no longer even use that inbox or are simply throwaway addresses, you have no prospect of engaging with them through email.Dirty data can prevent you from reaching guests who do careOn the other side of the coin from emailing too many people, if your database has outdated addresses, typos, or incomplete profiles, you run the risk of not reaching your guests who care and want to hear from you. No matter if John Smith is a guaranteed yes, you'll never know through email if you send to johnmsith@ instead of johnsmith@.Email providers can label you a spammerReturnPath, an email consultancy, report that major email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo monitor ‘engagement’ with marketing emails as a means of deciding if an email should be sent to the recipient’s spam folder. If you keep sending out messages to people who never open your emails, your valuable RSVP emails could end up getting stuck in more and more spam filters.Your data will be skewedYou need clear data to judge a campaign's success – such as the rate of emails opened and clicked for every mass email. If your email list is full of people who never look at your messages, you’ll actually be skewing your figures to look worse than they are, and not be able to accurately assess the impact of each step of your email campaign.

Tips for keeping a clean and lean event email marketing list

Here are some simple actions you can take to keep your email marketing list in shape:Regular tidying is keyMake it a quarterly task to cleanse your email lists of addresses that:

• Have bounced more than 2-3 times
• Have not opened any of your messages for several event cycles
• Send automatic replies (i.e. “I have left this company”)

By removing these contacts from your email lists, you will be sending content to people who are engaged - all while reducing your risk of being marked as a spammer.Consider re-engagement campaignsA re-engagement campaign is an email you send to contacts who have not opened any of your emails within a given period of time – you can think of it in terms of the number events you've invited them to, and if they've been silent on the last few, then consider them in need of a decision here.Segment these contacts out of your list and send a courtesy email mentioning that you’ve noticed they have not opened any of your emails and ask them if they wish to keep receiving your messages. As a bonus, you can offer them a little incentive, like a sneak peek of an upcoming event, or an earlier RSVP.If they ignore or decline, remove them – but this tactic may also trigger re-engagement from that recipient and win back useful contacts.Only send campaign emails to relevant recipientsAre you sending campaign emails to your entire marketing lists? Stop! Only send campaign emails to a relevant audience. For instance, if you’re running an event in Los Angeles that is only relevant to people who live there, avoid the temptation to send campaign emails to people on your marketing lists who live in Canada, who will be very unlikely to come.Let people opt outIn the era of heightened privacy regulations like the GDPR, it’s more important than ever to let your recipients opt out of your email list.Include a simple unsubscribe button in all your emails where people who wish to stop receiving them can do so. It’s a shame to see them go, but it’s better this way than for them to report your email as spam – which will only make email service providers more likely to blacklist you.

A clean marketing list gets better results – and more event sign-ups

While it might be painful to remove those hard-earned contacts from your email marketing list, in the long run you’ll actually be doing yourself a favor. Losing contacts who never open your emails or who simply don’t exist is not going to damage your event sign-up numbers, while it will also reduce your chances of being marked as a spammer.Most importantly, you’ll end up with a marketing list which is interested in your messages, wants to hear from you and is more likely to sign up to your events. And ultimately, that's what having a good, targeted guest list is about.‍