Design Trends Archives • Tickets.com

CrowdConnect Email Marketing: Stop Sending to SPAM and Junk

Email Marketing: SPAM-less

Are your emails falling into SPAM traps? Event messages getting missed by potential patrons? Consider these tips to improve your message deliverability.

What is a SPAM Trap?

A SPAM trap is how an Internet Service Provider (ISP) protects subscribers from getting unwanted and unsolicited mail from ever reaching an inbox. If caught in the trap, your IP address and your ‘from domain’ will be blocked.

How does it affect my event marketing?

When your domain and IP address get blocked, your marketing messages don’t reach your subscribers’ inboxes, your deliverability rates sink, and restoring your venue’s reputation can becoming a large undertaking.

Here are some tips to keep your messages out of SPAM and junk mail:

Who Gets Your Messages…?

Make sure you create a permission-based subscriber list and continue to focus on those who engage with your messages. The Open Rate and Click Rates are key indicators in this area.

Content is King!

Create content that is relevant, engaging to your subscribers and keep testing to optimize your performance. Read more about A/B testing.
Using a wide array of styles, colors, and font sizes (especially larger then 12pt) can be a formatting no-no and easily make your subscribers think your email is SPAM. So, stick to a simple palate.

Subject Lines Matter!

Besides creating an incentive to read an email, subject lines can encourage subscribers to mark your messages as SPAM. Consider the following when creating your subject lines:

Using ALL CAPS can appear as if you are shouting. Make sure whatever you capitalize actually needs it – when in doubt – skip the CAPS.
Multiple exclamation points don’t necessarily create a sense of drama, they can come across as false enthusiasm. Instead consider focusing your subject line on relevant, thought-provoking copy.
Just like multiple exclamation points, using too many Emojis can affect your deliverability. Consider what Emoji is relevant, and how many, if any, are necessary for your target audience. Read more about using Emojis.
Special characters like “$” and “#” can also trigger your subscribers to think your email is SPAM. So, if you don’t need them, leave them out.
There are a lot of words that SCREAM SPAM and can quickly get you blacklisted. Make sure to avoid using words/phrases like: “Free”, “Best Price”, “No Obligation”, “Discount”, “Will not Believe Your Eyes”, “Why Pay More”, “This isn’t Spam”, “This Won’t Last”. Instead try focusing on subjects with personalization, such as “Hi [Name], do you want to go to a concert?” Check out this list of SPAM trigger words.

Interested in CrowdConnect the Tickets.com official email marketing platform powered by WhatCounts? Learn More.

Email Marketing: What Did I Send?

Email marketing is one of the most measurable marketing tactics you can use to track your ticket sales. You can look at everything from who opened your emails to what they clicked on as well as learn about their behavior. It all starts with knowing your reports. Are you ready to dive into your data?

What kind of reports are most often used?

The most commonly used email reports are deployment reports. These reports provide a detailed, in-depth overview of who receives, opens, and clicks on your emails. This information is essential in understanding the reach and impact of your sent emails, so you can go back and see what is effective and improve your email marketing and overall ticket sales.

Common metrics in Deployment Reports:

Total emails sent
Total emails delivered
Volume of unique subscribers that opened the email
Volume of unique subscribers that clicked in the email

Analyzing your email reports:

Consider what it is you actually want people to do after they read your emails before looking at the data. Are you just looking to see who read the email?

Looking at who clicked on your event? Hone in on that click-through rate.

In CrowdConnect you can quickly see and access your reports in a dashboard view for easy-to-read insights.

If you are a current client, learn more about Deployment Reports on our Knowledge Base.

Interested in CrowdConnect? Learn More

Email Marketing: What Do You Prefer?

Do you want to deliver carefully personalized, deeply engaging content to your patrons and subscribers? All you have to do is ask them.

A preference site campaign is a great way to provide your subscribers options. That way they can decide exactly what type of content to receive from you.

The more you know about a subscriber, the more targeted content you can create to increase their engagement. Sell the right event to the right patron.

What is a preference site?

An email preference site (or center) allows your subscribers to choose from a variety of settings to help improve your communication with them. Preference centers build trust and relevance into your marketing campaigns by giving your subscribers greater control over the communication flow. The more control you give recipients, the more likely they are to engage positively with your brand.

Consider what to ask.

Frequency of messages
Kinds of messages (newsletters vs. special offers)
Their personal interests: events / genres of events you offer (concerts, sports, etc.)

Did you know?

Personalization increases subscriber and patron loyalty. And as a result, subscribers are willing to share more information with you.

In CrowdConnect you can quickly build a preference site campaign that will help you reach your communication goals.

Interested in CrowdConnect? Learn More

Email Marketing: Sign Me Up!

Big event coming up? Without potential patrons to get the message, you are losing sales.

Establishing a direct, personal communication with your patrons is vital to increasing your ticket sales.

One of the easiest ways to increase patron acquisition is to create a sign-up form to capture email addresses, mobile numbers, and more.

What is an Email Sign-Up Form?

It’s a web-based form that helps you to collect email addresses of potential patrons.

Did You Know?

Even if you have a subscriber base – Marketing databases naturally degrade about 25-30% every year? Sign-up forms can help you with an acquisition strategy and ultimately improve your ticket sales.

Considerations.

The Look & Feel of the Form

Think about the patron experience you want to create. While pop-ups are very noticeable as they take over your webpage, some patrons may find them to be a nuisance.

Based on what you know about your patrons, you should choose the creative that works, for example: creating a lightbox or an iframe.

What is a Lightbox?

A lightbox is another word for pop-up. It is a module that takes over a webpage browsing window and prompts a patron or prospective subscriber to take an action.

When you use a lightbox or a pop-up, consider limiting its presence to the homepage and/or using a promotion offer.

For Example: You can get X% off your first ticket purchase if you sign up for our email newsletter.

Depending on the sign-up form, you may want to limit this to new site potential patrons rather than everyone who lands on the page.

Another option is to embed your form onto your website as an iframe.

What is an IFrame?

An iframe also known as Inline Frame is code that allows you to embed content into your website. With an iframe you can add your sign-up form onto your homepage or on a contact us page while keeping your full website branding(?).

Other options.

You can also create full page forms that you can customize and host in CrowdConnect.

CrowdConnect has an easy-to-use options so you can quickly build pop-ups, full pages, and iframe forms that can be hosted either in the CrowdConnect cloud or installed directly on your web page.

If you are a current client learn more about setting up the form that works best for you.

Pop-up Forms

IFrame & Full-Page Forms

Interested in CrowdConnect? Learn More

Email Marketing: Personalization & Dynamic Content

Personalizing content can get tricky when you are trying to message all of your subscribers.

Fortunately, dynamic fields make it easy to customize messaging without creating each individual email.

What is dynamic content in emails?

Dynamic content in emails are pieces of information from your subscriber contact within your email marketing database that be used to quickly pull information into your messages.

What are some examples of dynamic content?

Subscriber name
An image attributed to that subscriber

Why does personalization matter?

Adding personalization to messaging is the number one tactic used by email marketers to improve performance.

With CrowdConnect, the Tickets.com official email marketing platform powered by WhatCounts, we will help you get personal.

If you are a current client, learn how to set up dynamic content in your messages and start increasing your email engagement today.

Knowledge Base

Interested in CrowdConnect? Learn more here

Email Marketing: Image Size Matters

Does my image size matter in my emails?

The short answer is yes.

Too large of an image file can cause rendering delays, impact deliverability, and mess with your formatting. Too small of an image can become blurry or out of focus.

Here are a couple of standards used today to get you started:

Generally, best-fit images tend to be 600px-620px wide while the length is often adjustable to the design.

Text on images should be large enough to be legible when images are sized down on a mobile device. If there is a legal copy or small print that should be done with HTML live text if possible.

Quick Tip:

A background can help with email width if you want to extend it beyond the image to adjust with the subscriber screens.

Images typically can be one of the three file types: JPEG, PNG, or GIF format.

PNG files are best for retaining resolution and transparency (if that’s what you need).
JPEG/JPG files are sometimes smaller file sizes and work better for photos
GIF files are used to incorporate motion into your emails.

File type must be determined BEFORE uploading the image to CrowdConnect. Once the file is loaded, the file type cannot be changed.

Quick Tip:

Always include ALT text just in case your subscribers have images disabled.

There are many more factors to consider when creating your best and most appropriate email design.

If you are a current client:

Learn More

Interested in CrowdConnect?

Email Marketing: Emojis in Emails 🎟

Fun & Playful, Emojis: Can they help or hurt your emails?

It seems like a small thing, but the subject line in an email is a major factor in increasing your open rate.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – is the emoji in a subject line right for everything? Probably not.

And if we send too many emails with Emojis it can also have a negative effect on consumers which ultimately unsubscribe.

So, what’s the answer? Testing of course! Make sure you test your subject lines using A/B testing. This can help you determine if the Emoji is an attention grabber or an annoyance.

As you put your tests together, here are some best practices to consider.

It can be too much of a good thing: Just like WRITING IN ALL CAPS, too many Emojis may indicate spam to recipients.

Context is key: with thousands of Emojis you can customize your choice to be relevant.

Consider your target audience: A survey of 1,000 Americans showed that, millennials regard using emojis positively.

Email Tone: Emojis can change an email from formal to playful. If you are messaging something serious, maybe skip the Emoji.

With CrowdConnect, the Tickets.com official email marketing platform powered by WhatCounts, we will help you easily add and test Emojis to your ❤️’s content.

If you are a current client, learn more about setting up your new welcome series in CrowdConnect:

Knowledge Base

Interested in CrowdConnect:

Learn More