Consumers have become far more sophisticated with what they are prepared to receive, so simply bombarding them with email marketing is no longer a viable way to attract visitors to live events, so says a leading event industry communications expert. Kursha Woodgate spoke to the Talking Events podcast about the challenges faced by organisers in a world where people have become far more savvy about what incoming communications they respond to and what message they are prepared to listen to. “I think we need to get a bit cleverer about how we target people and how we find the people who are looking at any given event. Open rates for emails have been diminishing and there’s a lot of science behind email subject lines. What I’ve personally been using over the last 12 months are tools to help develop relationships over a longer period of time, helping to improve the chance of that customer opening an email when it lands.” Kursha was discussing the subject of event marketing and the many tools and methods that are now available. In particular, she looked at ways to capture the valuable email addresses of potential customers by getting them to proactively hand over that key piece of information. “Good content marketing starts with understanding your audience. Take time to create marketing personas and find out what content is relevant to them. The key thing is to give people valuable content, and that’s when they will willingly volunteer the information or email address that you’re looking for. Events create great content in their own right, so I think event organisers are actually well positioned to leverage content marketing in a better way than perhaps other organisations.” In a one-to-one episode of the podcast, Kursha also looked at how campaigns are measured and the question marks surrounding the effectiveness of event marketing campaigns.

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