Sheffield DM

With an eye to grow our event to become a mainstay of the Sheffield digital marketing community, we implemented an email strategy designed to capitalise on our growing presence across social media and new event attendees being brought in via word of mouth.

A key component of this initiative was to encourage members to join the Sheffield DM mailing list. Promotion of the list across various channels, including our website, Eventbrite pages, communications to ticket holders and at multiple points during live events has driven 139% growth of the email list over the past six events, now totalling over 500 unique subscribers.

With our approach to list-building showing success, we then turned our attention to maximising engagement with each email sent. We redeveloped our custom HTML template to encompass the Sheffield DM brand, focussing on keeping it lightweight and mobile-friendly, and highlighting the most important elements we wanted to communicate: where to register, who was speaking and the schedule for the event.

Pruning our communications down to the essentials, whilst simultaneously reducing the volume of emails sent out to just three per event (covering a two-month lead period), dramatically improved engagement:

• Fewer emails led to greater attention in subscribers inboxes and improved subscriber retention.
• Clear, concise subject lines about limited ticket availability encouraged opens and clicks.
• Clear calls-to-action resulted in growth to our Click-to-Open Rate and total ticket bookings.
• Sharing details of the next event at the end of each talk helped to organically grow the subscriber base, allowing us to further capitalise on previous points.

Now, we have a dedicated community who attend each event, engage with us on social media, request the opportunity to speak and invite new members, growing the list further.