Most of our clients do some form of email marketing to promote their upcoming events.  Some create very sophisticated invitations in terms of graphics, fonts, colors and links, and some use very simple communications that look more like personalized letters.  Some email to the same list multiple times and others send just a single email.
So, which approach leads to higher registrations?

If you are like me, you get inundated with offers for free white papers that promise to tell you how to execute a successful email marketing campaign.  After reading a half dozen of these free white papers, here’s how I boil down the keys to email success:

• The quality of your list is the key determinant of success.  Your list should be email addresses for people who have requested that you send them invitations.  
• Content is the second most important element.  Write a strong subject line.  Make the content relevant to the reader.  Have a clear call to action.  Optimize the top 250×250 pixels with compelling information, so that the reader will scroll down “below the fold”. 
• For some people, you have to contact them multiple times to get a response.  Successful fundraisers know that for some donors, they need to send up to 4 reminder letters to secure the next year’s gift.  The same thing is true for event marketers.
• Measure the business result — how many people who received the invite then went on to register for the event.  Tracking just open and click-through rates doesn’t tell you how effective your email marketing is — it only tells you that someone read it.

What’s been your experience?  Have you got a winning formula for email marketing for your events? 

MeetMax and our sister company, Wall Street Webcasting, provide live and archived webcasts for 1000′s of conference sessions each year.  So, it is probably no accident that with the economy being what it is and event organizers working hard to maximize registrations,  I’ve heard from a number of people about how they would like to use webcasting to build attendance at events virtually.  Here are just two:

    * An international academic conference is planned for a week in a large city in Asia.  The organizers expect 2000 people to attend the 100 conference sessions in person, but they want to expand their reach by producing a shortened version for people to attend remotely.  Ten sessions will webcast live with viewers able to submit questions to the speakers via email.  The 10-session online version of the conference will then be available in an archived version for viewing later.  Different registration fees will apply for attending in-person, attending the live webcast version, or viewing the archived conference webcast.
    * A regional venture conference gives CEOs of start-ups an opportunity to get their story out to potential funders, partners and the media.  To expand their audience beyond local funders, they want to webcast the presentations.  To convey the sense of excitement in the room live, they will incorporate a Twitter feed into the webcast screen and display in the presentation room the Tweets from people attending both in person and remotely.