91% of consumers check their email every day. But if you’re looking to convert potential attendees from just opening your email to buying a ticket to your event, you’ll need to stand out and highlight exactly why they should buy a ticket from you. 

To start making email your most influential advertising tool is to understand how you rank against your competition in several key metrics.  

To make your event email marketing more effective, there are 3 key metrics you’ll need to pay attention to. The open rate, click-through rate, and the unsubscribe rate. The average stats for event emails are: 

• 26% of recipients open their event emails 
• 4.95% of recipients click links in their event emails 
• 0.8% of recipients unsubscribe to their event emails 

There are several ways you can use these metrics to optimize your event email marketing campaign. 

Open rate 

The open rate of your emails is the percentage of recipients that opened your email. With an average of 26%, it means out of the number of emails you send marketing your event, only 26% will actually open that email. The common range of opens can be between 21-30 %. Music events tend to have a higher rate of opening at around 29%, and professional events such as conferences have an open rate of just 23%. 

If your current email open rate is below these averages, there are several things you can look at to increase the rate of people opening your email. 

A good place to look is the subject line of your email. You need to be specific in your message with a sense of urgency. You should use 50 characters or less in your event email subject line. If you’re sharing promotional codes or a save the date email with a time limit set to it, make sure that’s included in the subject line. For example, “25% off ticket price for 24 hours with this code!” If you have the opportunity to include the recipient’s name or city in the subject line, this kind of personalization can see an extra 20% in open rates! 

It may also be worth looking into the name of the sender of your emails. It might be worth testing sending emails from your company name, from your own name, or maybe even the name of a popular speaker at your event (if applicable and with permission), as well as looking into what time you send your email. 

Click-Through Rate (CTR) 

A normal average click-through rate (CTR, the percentage of people who click a link in your email) for an event email is 4.95% — so just under 5% of people who receive event emails will click on a link in that email. Music events tend to have the best results, with an average CTR of 5.43%, while classes and workshops have just an average of 4.08% CTR. 

One of the most effective ways you might be able to increase your click-through rate is to add more links in your event emails and ensure your links are as close to the top of the email as possible. For example, if you have a “Buy Tickets” link at the bottom of your email, add it to the top, or include an alternative link to find out more details on the event. 

The best way to develop your CTR is to be more specific with your targeting — with your email list or your content. A good example is segmenting your email list by geography to reach a more local audience or send a discount to previous event attendees. (If you’re like many Helm Tickets event organizers and use MailChimp for your email marketing campaigns, you can sync your account with Helm to automatically transfer attendee email addresses and other data between systems. Find out more here. 

If you don’t want to narrow down your email lists, it’s worth testing your content to see if one kind is more responsive than another. You can create two versions of your email (version “A” and version “B”). Send version A to one set of subscribers and version B to another more restricted set. Then you can send the better-performing email to the remainder of your email list. 

Unsubscribe Rates 

The average event email has a rough unsubscribe rate of around 0.8% — so just under 1% of people who receive your event email would unsubscribe from your database. If your rate is above the 1% average, the top of the median range for event emails, it’s worth looking to become more targeted in who you’re sending your emails out to, as well as asking for feedback in a prompt on your unsubscribe page. It’s essential also to be sure to include another communication option on your unsubscribe page. Just because someone doesn’t want to receive your emails doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear from you on Facebook or another channel. 

Having great email marketing is just one of the many ways to increase your ticket sales to your next event. Helm Tickets’ promotional tools and integrations are all there to make the process that little bit easier!