Hosting an event and want to send event invitation emails that would get tons of people to take part? This is the guide for you.
Except…as an email marketer myself, I know how complicated this can be.
Days deciding on an event announcement flow, hours organizing your email timeline, looking at a blank email page thinking where to start and what to write… Not counting the coffee and energy drinks included in the process.
It’s not a good feeling.
So how do you write an event invitation email that would get people to participate?
It has a lot to do with what people actually want to read and know before deciding to attend your event or not.
Stay with me, I’m about to cover:
- What you need to know about event invitation emails
- Key elements to make an event invitation email template
- 19 best catchy subject lines for events
- What 19 event invitation email templates can teach you
- How to write a reminder email for an event
- How to set up event invitation email campaigns
Here we go!
What You Need to Know About Event Invitation Emails
Running events is about logistics, agenda, speakers, venue, etc. You know about it all because you’re hosting, what does your audience know?
Like Jon Snow, they know nothing.
It is necessary to ensure participants learn about your events’ details so they would consider participating.
It is a simple equation.
If they don’t know much they won’t understand. No understanding, no interest. No interest, no participation.
No participation, no revenue for you and you end up in debt.
That escalated quickly.
Your event invitation email is a core contributor to your event’s success. It is the medium that would make you able to inform and sell your event to your target audience.
With event email marketing, you’ll be able to:
- Send exciting and engaging messages to promote your event
- Send out mass email messages to potential attendees
- Schedule to increase your email open rate while assembling your event
- Create a personalized email experience
- Thank and follow-up your event attendees
- Reach out to those who missed out
You don’t need to sit and send emails at each step of your event and preparation. With email marketing automation you can automate your whole event email campaigns and save time.
You could use that time to get partners and contact speakers for your event.
4 Key elements to include in your event invitation email template
Like making an omelet, you need the perfect recipe to ‘cook’ your winner event email invitation.
Here are 4 elements to making an email invitation.
1. The must include details: Time, Date, Location & Duration
Whether you’re running an event online or in a venue, these details must be included in your event invitation letter:
- Exact date and time
- Location details
- Duration of the event
Emphasize on the venue address, you might want to include parking information. It is best to embed Google Maps in your address section.
If you’re inviting people for a webinar, ensure you incorporate relevant links and login information. Include time in a way that complies with the timezone of your audience.
Forgetting an important detail can affect the performance of your event and ticket sales.
In case you made an oopsie and forgot to share an important detail, it’s not the end of the world.
You’ll need to address your contacts with an apology email and share with them the missed information.
2. Use catchy invitation phrases
Going creative with your invitation phrases can increase your contacts click-through rates.
Open your invitation with a warm welcome and make your email as friendly as possible.
Example: “We’d love to see you among us at (event name)“
When writing your closing sentence, make sure to respond to your contacts’ ultimate question: “What’s in it for me?”
Your contacts will only take action when they can relate to what you’re offering.
3. Make the design of email invitation appealing to the brand
Alongside email copy, make your invitation email design appealing for readers.
Keep your email design with a singular focus.
Choose a section of your event email and make it the focal point and make it the center of attention.
Do not confuse your reader with many conflicting messages or elements, your reader is going to get confused about what your email is about.
You can animate your invitation email with GIFs or videos. If your event is annual, it is good to include a short video of the previous edition of your event.
According to Hubspot, email opens on mobile are 46%. For that make sure to place a wide reachable call-to-action button for mobile users.
4. Create a catchy email subject line for the event
Picking the right subject line for your event email invitation is as hard as naming your son or daughter.
It is the element that would grab your recipients’ attention and get them to read about your event message.
In other words, your email subject line is the fine line between whether your audience will know about your event or not.
Here is how to change the game.
Create a successful subject line is one that:
- Is personalized
- Generate curiosity
- Communicate urgency or scarcity
- Communicate social proof of concept
- Include important announcements
To help you brainstorm your winner event subject line, here is a list to inspire you.
19 Best Catchy Email Subject Lines For Events—That you can experiment with
Deciding on the best email subject line would:
- Drastically increase the open rates of your email campaigns.
- Higher click-through rate
- A higher click-through rate gets more subscribers to your web pages.
- Increases the revenue generated from your campaigns
Here are the 19 best email subject line for event announcement:
- “Announcing {event name}”
- “{event name}, Are you ready?”
- “Turn in on {date}”
- “The {event name} programme is live”
- “See how you can {verb+adj} at {event name}”
- “Let’s meet at {event name}”
- “Coming soon “
- “The {event name} excitement is coming for you”
- “See who’s speaking at {event name} “
- “All the shows”
- “Coming to a city near you”
- “What’s new at {event name}”
- “Get ready for {event name}”
- “{event name} passes are here!”
- “Don’t miss out {event name}”
- “See you in {month}”
- “Our annual 2019 meeting”
- “The countdown is on!”
- “The {event name} is back!”
If still undecided you can rely on Automizy’s free email subject line tester. It would help you decide on the best subject line to use based on data from over 1 million campaigns.
Not only scoring, but the free subject line tester provides subject line templates you can use to increase your email open rates.
You might also consider using emoji in your subject line.
In increase email open rates, make sure to set up resending the email campaign to non-openers, using different subject line.
What 19 Event Invitation Email Templates Can Teach You
I’ve collected 19 inspiring event invitation email template examples to help you come up with your own event email template, content and design.
You can recreate all the templates included here inside Automizy without any coding skills needed.
1. Provide enough information about your event
The goal of the following event invitation email template is to provide contacts with a ‘landing page experience’ and make a decision. Without having to leave the email.
2. Use creative imagery
The design is what blows life into your meeting invitation email. It makes it friendly and inviting.
A direct title and content while the reader continues reading the rest of the email for more information.
“You’re invited” It feels exclusive for readers.
3. Promote your event tour dates
This event invitation email sample could be used to promote upcoming event dates. Perfect to use for a music concert, theatre plays, touring events, movie announcement, etc.
4. Promote conference tickets
The success of a paid event depends a lot on the efforts of tickets’ sales. Promote your ticket sales launch date through a similar conference invitation email template example.
For such an email, make sure your main call-to-action has a color contrast from the body so it stands out.
5. Send targeted event invitation emails
Targeted email marketing has proven its success with increasing email ROI. It helps you send personalized emails to increase open and click-through rates.
Segment your contacts by their demographic data so you can create a better performing event email campaigns.
The following event invitation sample of a Post Malone concert is sent only to contacts living in Boston, informing them that Post Maline is coming to town.
6. Highlight your event address
A responsive invitation email in a series of emails to promote an event for a very relevant global topic, GDPR and how it’s going to affect businesses.
I love how they highlight the address with embedding Google Maps to their invitation email. They don’t want anyone to get lost or arrive late.
7. Announce registration
Obviously, you won’t be like “Hey this event is here but tickets now.” You don’t want to do that.
First, you’ll want to send an announcement email about your event, tease it a little, trigger curiosity. Then you announce that registration is open and those who are interested can book a ticket.
Here we have a well-designed registration announcement email from Google Cloud.
8. Answer why prospects should attend your networking event
Your contacts will ask the question: “What’s in it for me?” And you better be prepared with an answer right from your formal event invitation email.
“How consumer trends are transforming the media industry”
That is the title of the following event email sample from Salesforce that gives enough information on why their prospects should attend the event.
9. Promote your business training location
You could send the similar business training invitation email when announcing your upcoming seminars.
After the event announcement email, I recommend you send targeted emails based on the geo-location of your contacts.
Targeting each city’s audience with personalized emails and event subject lines.
10. Include a referral link
Some people don’t want to participate at events solo. A good company would make it more interesting and fun.
Include a referral link in your invitation email to motivate contacts to share your event with their friends, colleagues, etc.
In the following event invitation example from Design + Finance, there is a call-to-action link “Share with your friends” to make it easy for your prospects to share your event.
11. Send event reminder emails to maximize your attendees
Even though you sent webinar invitation emails and your contacts did confirm attendance doesn’t mean they will show up. Some might forget about your event.
Send reminder email for your event to notify and remind your contacts.
12. Launch pre-registration event email campaign
Managing an event is about maximizing your attendees to meet your business goals. This could be done through:
- Event announcement emails
- Early bird ticket sales
- Pre-registration campaign
- Last minute ticket sales, etc.
Here is a pre-registration event email sample that could help you increase your attendees and by the end increase your revenue.
It is smart to include two call-to-action buttons, one at the top of your email and one at the bottom. It depends on your invitation email length.
13. Trigger curiosity to drive traffic to your website
Your speakers can be the reason why your audience would be interested in attending your event. The following event email sample does trigger curiosity by announcing the event speakers.
Instead of listing the speakers in the email, they drive readers to visit the website to meet the speakers.
14. Include your event pricing as a checkout email
Right after you communicate all the required information about your event, your contacts are at the bottom of your event sales funnel.
A hard sell won’t hurt at this point to sell more tickets. Here is a unique event email example to promote ticket sales for your leads.
15. Live stream event email invitation
I hope you realize a sold-out event, but with a Mamba Mentality, there are even more verticals to make your event bigger.
Hosting a live stream for your physical event can only go right for your business. At least contacts who did not make it to your event can watch it from the comfort of their homes.
16. Remind your contacts to register for your event
Event reminder emails do not work only as a reminder to attend the event.
You could send registration reminder emails for your event before it is too late for your leads to decide whether to attend or not.
17. Invite your subscribers to your webinar
Webinar invitation emails are the success factor for your webinar.
Your webinar email is the place where you can set the right expectations for your audience about what they will learn.
Tell your subscribers what’s in it for them, and eventually, they will book a spot.
18. Include a trailer video in your event announcement email
Who said trailers are only for movies? And if an image is worth a thousand words, what would be the worth of a video?
Here is an event invitation email template that includes a trailer video about the conference.
19. Motivate customers to attend your special events
Some businesses run occasional special events and parties.
It is the case for restaurants, clubs, and pubs to send party invitation emails.
A special occasion could even a karaoke party that you want to make a success.
Unique, on brand design invitation email sample that creates a special experience for customers that continues to build loyalty for their brand.
How to Write a Reminder Email For an Event
Sometimes you want to remind your contact not to miss your upcoming event.
Consider sending a gentle reminder before the ticket booking closing date and the actual event date.
For physical events send a reminder 1 day before the actual event date.
Yet, for online events, I recommend sending friendly reminder emails a couple of hours before the event starting time.
Here are some general rules for sending friendly reminder email for event:
- Be brief
- Be friendly, yet direct
- Have a clear call-to-action
- Have a direct subject line
Now that you know how to write an invitation and reminder email for an event, let’s take a look at how to set it up.
How to set up an event invitation email campaign
An event invitation email marketing is about sending emails to:
- Existing leads in your email database
- Newly acquired leads from landing pages, ads that promote your event.
Both are managed differently on your email marketing provider.
Let’s go through each separately.
Set up event invitation emails for your existing contacts
Notifying your existing contact about your upcoming event is not only one announcement email that you send.
Your invitation email campaign is a drip campaign that consists of more than one email, with the objective of:
- Announcing your upcoming event
- Nurturing your contacts
- Qualifying leads to motivate tickets purchase, booking, etc
- Sending reminder emails
- Updating and informing your attendees.
Let’s walk through the process in steps.
Step 1: Import your contacts
The first thing to start with is log in to your Automizy email marketing provider. If you do not have an account yet, you can register for free and start using it.
Click on “Add contacts” and select “New list”. After naming your email list, you can choose to import your contacts manually or import a CSV file from your computer.
If you’re managing your contacts on CRM tools, you can sync your contacts to Automizy without the hustle of exporting and importing contacts.
Once you have your contacts imported or connected you’re ready for your second step. Create your event invitation drip campaign.
Step 2: Create a drip campaign
Now that you’ve imported your contacts, you have to craft your emails’ content and set up your event workflow.
You can add your drip emails into Automizy real quick with a couple of clicks.
Make sure that your emails are coherent and consistent so you reach your drips’ full potential.
You can create your drip email campaign workflow visually in Automizy’ visual automation campaign builder, and it would look like this:
Also, apply “waiting periods” between your drip emails. You don’t want to send all 3 or 4 emails in the first 24 hours. That’s spamming.
Once you have your drip emails ready, click on “Publish” to start your event invitation drip campaign.
Choose “Yes, pull in old & new contacts” to start sending emails to your contact list.
Step 3: Confirm attendance for your event participants
Confirming attendance and reserved seats for your event attendees is a common case for webinar email campaigns.
Even though webinars are held online, it is always considered an event for you.
When you send your webinar invitation email, you want your contacts to click the CTA to book a seat and confirm their attendance.
It would help you learn about the expected number of attendees, or maybe you want to verify your contacts email address with double opt-in emails.
In such a case you need to set up a webinar invitation email workflow with conditions.
Important: Apply a “wait period” before you set your condition.
Give your contacts some time to interact with your email. It will also help you to be more accurate when it comes to segmentation.
After the promised confirmation period, apply the condition “Has clicked a link in email” and split your automation for the two branches “Yes” branch and “No” branch.
Since your first email would include a CTA to confirm the registration, apply a condition to segment those who confirmed and those who didn’t.
Users go on the “Yes” branch if they’ve clicked on the confirmation CTA in the first email. In this branch, contacts receive a webinar confirmation email with further information.
Also, a reminder email on the day of the webinar to make sure they attend it.
Contacts who did not confirm registration, receive a different email with dates of the upcoming webinar.
That is one event invitation email sequence from Automizy. It is completely customizable and you can always adjust it to your event goals.
Create an event email sales funnel for recently acquired leads
When you’re promoting your upcoming event, interested prospects would register for it through:
- Your website forms, page, popup
- A landing page you’re running
- Lead ads
- Chatbot, etc.
It would be one acquisition channel or more, depends on your lead generation efforts.
At Automizy we help you connect your different lead generation sources to your email list, and put your event registrants into an email marketing sales funnel to increase your event’s participants.
Here is the whole process in steps.
Step 1: Create your event registration form
You can easily create an opt-in form in Automizy in which prospects who are interested in your event can register.
The forms you create in Automizy are fully customizable to match your brand, and you can easily embed it to your website or have it as a stand-alone web page.
To create your event registration form, register to Automizy for free and benefit from our free built-in form templates.
Absolutely effortless.
Or you can connect your CRM tools to your email list and let your leads go directly to your triggered event email marketing campaigns.
Step 2: Trigger you event invitation emails
First thing first, you need your choose your triggers and select when you want to send your emails.
In Automizy, you can create personalized and automated email workflows that can get triggered when a contact:
- Gets added to your event opt-in list,
- Submits a registration form on your website,
- Clicks a link in an email, or
- Gets a tag.
Triggers allow you to start email automation and apply actions to event registrants. That’s when you put your event registrants into your email sales funnel.
Step 3: Nurture and motivate your leads to take action
Your desired customer action in your event email marketing is:
- Prospect registration
- Registrants’ confirming their attendance.
- Leads converting to paying customers (ticket sales), etc.
It always depends on whether you are running free or paid events.
The magic is, whether your event is paid or it is an online webinar you need to nurture and qualify your leads to maximize your event attendance.
After you did set up your email automation trigger on contact joining “Event registrations” email list, you need to put your leads in a well-designed event email sales funnel.
By the end of this event email drip campaign, your leads would know all the details related to your event.
At this point, your leads are more likely to convert to customers and attendees.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve seen the recipe to cook your best examples of event invitation emails.
I hope the event letter templates we shared inspired you and helped understand how you can persuade people to convert and show up at your event.
Are you hosting an event soon? Invite me, I’d love to meet you.
