How to Market Your Event with Email Audience Segmentation

When it comes to marketing your event via email, forget about one-size-fits-all solutions. In general, it’s more effective to send targeted emails to small groups than to send mass emails to every single person in your contact list.

But segmenting your audience requires a bit of strategy. Before you can tackle targeted messages, you need to understand the basics of audience segmentation. So, let’s start from the top!

What is audience segmentation?

Audience segmentation is the task of taking your master email list and dividing it into subgroups. As the folks at MailChimp explain:

The subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. Subgroups can also be based on behavior such as purchases made in the past.

In this post, we’ll look specifically at how to use email audience segmentation for event marketing.

How should I segment my master email list?

There are endless ways you can divvy up your list, but here are a couple ideas specific to event marketing:

• By last event attended. Create lists based on how often people attend your events—i.e., create a list for people who show up to every event without fail, and another list for people who attend infrequently. You can tweak your messaging based on your audience.
• By type of event. Reach people based on their interests! For example, if you run a wine shop and you have customers that attend all of your educational workshops but never show up for comedy night, you can segment those customers into their own email list. That way, you won’t annoy your customers with irrelevant emails.

Why does audience segmentation matter?

Segmenting your audience isn’t just busywork. This extra step is worth the effort: It can lead to an uptick in conversions, which are the actions you want your audience to take, like clicking on links in your emails, registering for your events, and buying tickets.

Plus, by targeting your emails to your audience, you’ll likely see a higher open rate on your emails. Customers are more likely to open an email that seems like it was tailor-made for them than one that went out to the whole list.

In short: More personalized segmentation = more emails opens + more conversions. A win on every level.

Sounds good. How do I do it?

If you use an email marketing tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact, you can create new lists for your segmented audiences by following your service’s instructions.

If you don’t have an email marketing tool, not to worry. Our Promoter service integrates seamlessly with The Events Calendar, allowing you to streamline your email marketing. With Promoter running alongside The Events Calendar, you can stop exporting and managing lists through cumbersome email applications and manage all of your contacts right from your WordPress dashboard. Within Promoter, you can create new lists based on what events people are registered for and which events they attended. That’s makes it easy to create a targeted email based on a person’s event history.

Bonus: Promoter also gives you the power to create totally personalized emails. You can name recipients by name, show the number of remaining tickets for your events, and more.

Questions about how to manage email contacts in Promoter? We’re here to help! Don’t hesitate to contact us for guidance on how to make the most out of your email efforts with Promoter.