The marketing goals are clear: attract people to your event, ensure they turn up and engage productively with the fantastic show you’ve put on, and hopefully decide they’ll attend the next one. And with these timeless targets, comes a huge reliance on an equally venerable tool… email marketing.

However, marketers in all businesses are finding that this instrument has become blunted over time.. people often get 20-30 emails in the run up to an event, and open rates are down, fatigue is up, and in this social and tech savvy world, people are only responding to something a little more, well, personal.

But as possibly better funded marketers around the world adopt marketing automation techniques to address this, they may look to the events industry with a little bit of envy, because as it turns out, there are 3 major ways that event organizers virtual roundtables are supremely placed to improve the quality of their email marketing beyond recognition.

You know more about your audience

Whether it’s from last year’s registration form, or through your attendee’s engagement with your web portals or mobile event apps, you know your audience’s hot buttons in a way other businesses can only dream of. Joining up your digital attendee engagement with email marketing so their web and mobile behavior enhances their profile is a game-changer. Interests, demographics, habits and behaviors are all within reach to ensure that you can fine tune your messages so they really speak to your recipients.

And not only that, you can send messages to them based on what people like them have been showing interest in too.

You’ve got more variable content

While other businesses are busy producing multiple slants on their limited product portfolio, event organisers are sitting on a goldmine of varied session and speaker content, subject matter streams, product information and where applicable, a huge array of exhibitors offering something for everyone. Automating the matching up of recipient’s interests and a unique set of suggestions fine-tuned to pique their interest, makes every email personal, more focused and more effective by far than the current carpet bombing approach so frequently seen.

Your programmes all point towards your event date

This third luxury means that when it comes to your automated marketing programmes, you are able to carefully plan a crescendo that marketers in other industries can only dream of. People’s actions or lack of them can define ever more convincing messages as the event approaches and you can pursue different goals simultaneously: convince the unregistered to register, the registered to attend and the attending to engage with recommended content.