Event invitation with space availability display

Initial situation
How can a company interactively get in touch with potential participants, advertise the planned annual event as attractively as possible, fill the available places as quickly as possible? And how can you present yourself as an innovative partner to the targeted trade audience, thereby setting yourself apart from the competition? The only pure push medium with which a company can write to customers and interested parties (with existing permission) in an equally targeted manner is the e-mail channel. For the email Marketing Day 2015, around 5,000 addresses were sent an invitation by email.

Solution
The following features have been added to the template:

The number of seats still available was injected into the email in real time. This dynamically at the time of opening by the recipient. This achieved a scarcity effect.
The registration form for the event was integrated directly into the e-mail. This eliminated the need for the recipient to detour via a landing page, and the contact data was already pre-filled. This feature is supported by many current email clients.
Tweets related to the hashtag #EMMT15 were loaded in an integrated Twitter feed in real time. Each time the email was opened, the latest posts were injected, giving the reader a lively event.

Within 12 hours, 150 registrations were received, and the 200-participant event was fully booked after 3 days. The shortage thus had a very direct effect. After that, capacity was expanded, which meant that new email openers again found available seats. DEvent1a’s direct sign-up form was integrated directly into the email as an A/B test for only half of the recipients (A group). The other half received a call-to-action button to sign up via the form on the campaign microsite (B group). The percentage of signups was a significant 27% higher for the A group. The live Twitter feed motivated some of the participants to publish their own registration and thus had its effect as a viral multiplier. Other dialog steps – last update shortly before the event, label printing and attendance check at the event, follow-up survey and downloads of the presentations shortly after the event – were controlled and automated directly from the marketing system. The event was a self-contained cycle.

To the invitation

Technology and innovation
The combination of the flexible e-mail marketing software ELAINE in conjunction with the dynamic application of the template was decisive. Despite the lack of standards for e-mail clients but thanks to profound knowledge of the possibilities to “tweak” the display of available seats in real time and the registration form directly in the e-mail on most common clients, the technical hurdles could be overcome in the first place. The success can be measured almost in real time and the actually static email channel suddenly becomes very dynamic. The integration of the live tweet has rounded off the integrated template and created a gamification effect.

Advantages