How can events improve their email deliverability?

What is email deliverability? 📧

Put simply, it’s how many of your event’s emails actually make it to people’s inboxes and don’t get lost along the way by being blocked or going into spam folders.

High deliverability will help you:

  • Improve the likelihood of operationally important emails e.g. “Things to know before coming to our show” actually being read

  • Build a relationship and trust with your audience

  • Create value for sponsors and/or exhibitors

  • Increase your ancillary revenues (merch, subscriptions, ticket add-ons)

Why are you talking to me about this now?

As of this month (February 2024) updates from Gmail and Yahoo come into effect. These updates require bulk senders to:

  • Authenticate their emails

  • Allow recipients to unsubscribe in one click

  • Keep complaints under 0.03% or 3 in every 1000 people

What can I do to improve my event’s email deliverability? 📈

Here are some things you can do to comply with Gmail and Yahoo’s new requirements and improve your event’s email deliverability:

Authenticate your event’s domain

First things first, you need to authenticate your domain. This essentially tells Gmail and Yahoo that an email has been sent by your business, and that you are who you say you are.

There’s some pretty technical pieces to this, but helpfully if you use one of the bigger SaaS platforms to manage your email marketing, they should have a how to guide.

We’ve listed some common ones here:

Mailchimp

Hubspot

Braze

Make unsubscribing simple

One of the new requirements from Gmail and Yahoo is that you must make it easy to unsubscribe in one-click. That means, not making the unsubscribe link text the same colour as the background of your email or adding in a ‘before you go’ survey.

Consider who you’re sending an email to and why

When deciding whether to send an email or not, it’s crucial to think about which segment of your event’s audience you want to read your email. Distinguish between ticket bookers and newsletter sign-ups or afternoon versus evening ticket holders. 

Tailoring your message to each group, instead of a send to all, will increase your engagement and chances of driving further revenue. 

Clean your email lists

We know it can be scary to remove old data, especially if you have a large database, but there’s no point emailing people who don’t engage. It’s not going to add value for your sponsors and it could damage your reputation as a sender. 

Regularly remove unengaged sign-ups from your databases. As a rule of thumb, we view someone as unengaged if they haven’t opened any of your last 5 emails (This may be higher or lower depending on your email frequency and reasons for sending).

What could happen if you don’t follow these new rules? ⚠️

  • You’ll get more complaints from customers about emails not being received 

  • You’ll see open rates go down 

  • You could get a reputation as a bad sender, and may even get blocked from sending emails to Gmail or Yahoo users

What could happen if you do? ✅

Gmail and Yahoo have implemented these new rules to improve the experience for their customers. If you approach your email marketing in the same way you’ll likely:

  • Have high open and click-through rates

  • Sell more tickets and add ons

  • Create added value for your sponsors and exhibitors/traders

  • Improve your customers experience by making sure they have all the info they need to enjoy your event

Need a hand with your email marketing? Get in touch. 

Further reading 📖

We read various articles and watched a few different webinars to learn more about Gmail and Yahoo’s new rules.

We really recommend you watch The Marketing Meetup’s webinar for more info.