Implementing an email marketing program that enables your exhibitors to reach out to the registered attendees to build floor traffic provides added value to both you and the exhibitors. However, the program can be a little more complex than sending out normal email blasts. Here are a few tips from our three years and a million plus emails worth of experience.
1. Bad things can happen if you don’t keep your email list confidential. Fortunately the number of shows that “give the list away” is on the decline, primarily because of attendees concerns about data privacy and the newly enacted SPAM laws in the US and Canada requiring the recipients to be able to easily OPT-OUT of the process. No good comes from letting the confidential information about your attendees get into unauthorized hands.
2. Provide a centralized OPT-OUT so attendees can remove themselves from the email list at anytime. This cannot be accomplished if you give the list to each exhibitor. An attendee opting out of an email from exhibitor A will not stop emails from the rest of the exhibitors if each has their own OPT-OUT function.
3. Don’t irritate your attendees by over-saturating them with email blasts. Setting up a strict schedule that limits the total number of exhibitors sending emails and the number of emails sent per day will help to avoid this. These metrics will vary by size of show and the makeup of the audience but limiting the program to 15% of the exhibitors and no more than 3 emails per day seems to be a good guideline.
4. Be sure to test the emails against the most popular email clients to insure that they can be read by the attendees and look the way the exhibitor intended. HTML rendering varies significantly from client to client. Recognize that the quality of the exhibitor emails not only affects their reputation but also the show organizers.
5. Insure that the emails can be easily read on mobile devices by helping your exhibitors include mobile friendly HTML code. The current statistics suggest that upwards of 60% of attendee emails will be opened on one.
6. Provide an Internet reporting portal where the organizer and the exhibitors can see how well the program is doing. Be sure that your reporting site doesn’t include the attendees’ contact information. A one page overview of the number sent, open rate and unique clicks including the links clicked is a great way to communicate the program’s effectiveness to the exhibitor and avoids a lot of phone calls.
7. Maintain a central file of hard bounces for the emails sent by all exhibitors. It is important to insure that you OPT-OUT bounces to insure that your IP address is not black listed. It is also important to understand what emails are causing server SPAM reports to better educate exhibitors on what content is causing their emails to be rejected. We find that attendee reported SPAM is rare but server reported SPAM arising from content-based algorithms can be significant.
