With GDPR coming into force in a few days time, here’s a handy checklist to ensure your event website is on the way to GDPR compliance.

Email marketing remains one of the best performing activities available to market your event.  Great news if you are already using email marketing as part of your event marketing strategy, but how closely do you keep an eye on your email analytics? Do you use the data gathered to refine, improve and get your email campaigns working harder for your event? In this post we will look at 5 email marketing analytics metrics and how paying close attention to these can help you keep more subscribers, get more opens, get more click throughs and ultimately sell more tickets.

The engagement for your event email starts the moment it lands into the recipient's inbox.  This is where your subject line needs to do the work of enticing your potential reader into opening your email to experience the glorious work you have put into the email design, layout and most importantly the content, ultimately all this good work is a waste of time and money if the email is left unread.  

Nearly every event leverages email marketing to engage their target audience and drive conversions. It’s a staple of the event marketing mix. So much so, that emails are sometimes blasted off without too much thought about how to get the most out of your email marketing budget.

• Have your new subscriptions hit the wall?
• Are you churning subscribers at a faster rate than you can acquire them?
• Are your open rates decreasing over time?
• Are you marketing to a diminishing email list?
• Is your average sale price falling?

The time your event website takes to load up is important, it really is a case of ‘every second counts’ and studies carried out by Kissmetric show that page abandonment doubles with an increase in page load time from 2 to 4 seconds. Losing visitors because of slow page load times will mean you are losing potential ticket purchasers or exhibitor stand bookings.

Many event companies use 3rd party ticketing sites, such as Seetickets, to handle their ticket sales, and why not these guys do a sterling job.  But what happens to your analytics when you pass the visitor from your event website to the external ticketing website? Well for most that is the end of the road, no data, no insight, no good.

What type of cake’s do your attendees like? You might not have this fine grain of information about your customers yet (or really need it) but these days ignoring your data is effectively the same as ignoring your customers. However this data on it’s own means very little unless you use it to make decisions that have measurable results and work toward reaching your event objectives.

Event marketers work tirelessly to put new visitors into the top of the funnel and hopefully into the buying process, but not many invest time into looking at what these visitors do once they are dropped there.

Figures from Salescycle indicate that abandonment rates during the checkout process are on the rise. In fact their studies estimate that this has risen by nearly 15% in the last 5 years, what might be more concerning to anyone who is selling event tickets online is the average abandonment figure is estimated to be a whopping 75.6%.

The time your event website takes to load up is important, it really is a case of ‘every second counts’ and studies carried out by Kissmetric show that page abandonment doubles with an increase in page load time from 2 to 4 seconds. Losing visitors because of slow page load times will mean you are losing potential ticket purchasers or exhibitor stand bookings.

Ok, you’ve added Google Analytics to your website, so it’s time to sit back, relax and watch that useful web data roll in. After all, Google Analytics gives you everything a marketer needs straight out of the box, right?

Wrong! There’s still some configuration work to do to get your Google Analytics account to a minimum viable reporting tool! Here’s our handy checklist for your Google Analytics minimum configuration.