By: Taylor Surajram
While the world of digital marketing continues to evolve, email marketing remains an effective channel for live events organizations to sell tickets online.
All successful email marketers have one thing in common: they develop programs that are well defined, achievable and measurable. To reach their goals, they measure the right consumer activities so that they can take specific actions to influence them.
Whether you are using your own subscriber list, purchasing a dedicated blast from TheaterMania.com or hiring a marketing agency to help you promote your event, these are the four most important email metrics to monitor to make sure you are on track to sell out your event.
(1) Conversion Rate: Percentage of people who bought tickets/registered for your event.
When investing time and money into a marketing email, it is imperative that you understand if you are getting a positive return on investment (ROI) and selling tickets to your event. One of the best ways to do that is to make sure that you are properly tracking activities by using a campaign tagging method like UTM (Urchin tracking module) codes.
One easy way to influence your conversion rate is to make sure that the buyer journey is as seamless and quick as possible. You can (and should) do this by reducing the number of clicks to purchase by sending them directly from your email to your ticket purchase page. If the email recipient needs to click ten times to make a purchase, that’s ten opportunities for them to abandon the ticket.
Don’t be afraid to get creative! Consider including a discount, especially if only available for a limited time, that could help increase the conversion in your email. Or consider retargeting everyone who opened a prior email promoting the same event so that they are seeing your message multiple times.
Pro tips:
- Use a campaign tagging method for tracking
- As much as possible, include URLs that go directly to the ticket page to reduce the clicks to purchase
- Discount and retarget
(2) Open Rate: Percentage of people who opened your email.
Choosing the right subject line will influence your open rate. It is important that the subject line is interesting and reflects the content of the email.
When looking to increase your open rates, consider an A/B test with two subject lines to make sure you are sending an enticing message and getting the most amount of opens. A/B tests can test two subject lines to a sample of your audience, and which ever subject line gets the most opens can be used for the larger remaining audience.
Don’t forget to look back at your open rates overtime! Insight into the subject lines that performed well will help you optimize in the future.
Pro Tips:
- Be intentional about the subject line so that your audience is interested and informed.
- Use historical success as a guide to writing new subject lines
(3) Clickthrough Rate (CTR): Percentage of people who clicked on links on your email.
Once someone has opened your email, it can be assumed that they have an interest in what you are promoting. The next step is to influence them to click on a link to get more information or to make a purchase. Having a very clear call to action, making it obvious where to click and making it clear what will happen when people click will influence your CTR. Some examples of clear call to actions (CTA) include: Buy Tickets, Chose Your Date, Get 25% Off and Learn More.
Also consider having a CTA button or URL in the top half of the email. This technique caters to the people that want all the details right away and the significant portion of your audience that will be viewing the email on their mobile device.
When looking at this metric over time, you will better understand what details need to be included in your email and where they need to be positioned.
Pro Tips:
- Write clear CTAs and make it obvious where to click
- Make it clear what happens when people click
(4) Forwarding Rate & Unsubscribe Rate
These metrics can be interesting to look at and can help you to better understand your audience and how to influence them. By looking at these metrics and comparing them over time, you can learn what they are interested in, how they might behave over time and find opportunities to grow your audience.
Interested in finding new audiences and increasing your reach? AudienceView offers the only ticketing platform with audience growth built in. Contact us today to learn more!