How To Boost Email Invitation Open Rates

Despite big budgets and access to expert designers and copywriters, many brands fail to elicit the desired response from their email invitations. The reason? Email invitations that fall short of the mark. In order to ensure your attendance rates are optimal, you need to woo your guests with an engaging email invitation that piques their interest and results in an affirmative RSVP. To boost email invitation open rates and ensure your event is well-attended, bear these crucial considerations in mind:

Use the power of emotional appeal

If you want people to attend your event, you have to give them a good reason for doing so. This may sound obvious, yet far too many corporate email invitations focus on the facts: date, time, venue and so on. What they’re missing is the crucial emotional resonance factor, which determines the difference between a ‘Yes’, and a ‘No’. Include engaging, intriguing copy that piques interest and sets expectations long before the event in question.

Dot your i’s and cross your t’s

Your email invitation is often the very first interaction a guest has with your brand. As such, you need to create the right impression off the bat if you wantboost email invitation open rates. Unfortunately, poor spelling and grammar will do the opposite. It’ll also get your email invitation sent straight to the recipient’s’ spam folder. Free proofreading tools like Grammarly mean there’s no excuse for typos.

Start off with a clean slate

And by this, we mean a clean database. When it comes to guest attendance, quality trumps quantity every single time. Why send out invitations to 900 people, when only 300 of them fit the criteria of your target market? Remember that a few, quality leads are always preferable to a whole bunch of recipients who have absolutely zero interest in your brand.

Make friends with mobile

Thanks to an ever-growing dependence on our mobile phones, there’s a large chance that your guests will view their email invitations on the device they use to do everything else with: their phone. In fact, marketing technology firm Radicati predicts that “by 2018…80% of email users will be accessing their accounts via their mobile.” Mobile-optimised content is a must, and applies to email invitations too. Make sure that you test them out on several devices and operating systems internally, before you hit “send”.

Find and eliminate every single glitch in the matrix

It’s all too easy to let mistakes slip through the cracks when you’re planning an event. But that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. Test, test and test your email invitations again to make sure that all copy reads well, all links work and that it’s as easy as possible for guests to RSVP.

Use data to personalise your invitations

Successful Customer Relationship Management relies on creating, and sustaining, a relationship with your guests, which means that a generic, one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. To woo your guests, you need to address them personally. Use information you already have on hand about them to acknowledge them as an individual, as opposed to just another name. (Make sure that all guest data is regularly updated to avoid any damaging faux pas). If you’re inviting repeat guests, you’ll already (or should!) have plenty of information about each name on your guestlist: from their vocation and gender, to past brand interactions and purchase history. Don’t let this precious data go to waste if you want to boost email invitation open rates: put it to use to create highly-relevant invitations that are specifically tailored, and as a result, will garner a far higher response rate than if you were to send a standard, run-of-the-mill invitation.

Segment your lists

The role that the right data has in professional email invitation etiquette is a substantial one. As outlined above, guest information is the key to creating relevant and engaging brand touchpoints. If you’re running a product launch, for example. your guest list probably consists of brand advocates, EXCO members, high-profile influencers and potential customers. Each of these groups have their own agenda, reasons for attending your event and importantly, relationship with your brand. To further increase your attendance rate, segment your guest list accordingly, and then create bespoke invitations that contain information relevant to each sector.

Make sure your email invitations culminate in a well-attended event, by finding out more about our email invitation services.