The PR Shop

WITH DAVE BULLARD

OF EEYORE AND EMAIL

What if I told you that there was a tool available for your public relations and marketing efforts that was cheap, available to everyone and effective with the young people and young families that are the most valuable targets of our events?

“I already have it,” you’d answer. “Facebook.” Nope. Instagram? Tik Tok? Twitter? No, no and no.

Email. Plain old email. Homely, simple old email. Normally overlooked in favor of the shiny tools of social media. The Eeyore of the Hundred Acre Wood of marketing.

Email is nearly as old as the internet itself. Since 1971, it’s been possible to type a bit of text and send it to someone using an @ sign as the code that says this is a message going from one person to another. Because email is so old, so normal, it’s easy to take it for granted as a marketing tool. Don’t.

The Pew Research Center says about 70% of all Americans have a Facebook account and about 70% of those Facebook users check it daily. Doing the math, that means that about 49% of all Americans check in on Facebook at least once a day. Facebook is the king of digital marketing, right? That’s what they tell us.

But think about this: More than 90% of all American internet users check their email at least once a day. 90% versus 49%.

Now think about this: Your customers have to go to Facebook. Email comes to them and is ready and waiting when they open up their laptops and fire up their phones to see how their world changed overnight. Facebook only shows your content to a small portion of the people who’ve signed up to see your news. Email goes to everyone who wants it, every time.

The highest users of email? People ages 25 - 44, according to Statista. That’s the group we event marketers tend to covet most – young adults and families with young children. A survey by Adobe found that young adults actually prefer email over texting and chat. Email use cuts across all ages and ethnicities. And yet we focus our attention on social platforms at the expense of reliable, simple email.

Here’s a plan to help you rediscover the value of email:

Be regular. Set a schedule to send regular emails to get people caught up on what’s new and interesting. Think about a schedule made up of three schedules: One for the offseason, one for the buildup to the event, and one for the time right around your event. In the offseason, once a month might do. It will remind people you’re around and keep you top of mind.

Think about some kind of promotion for the offseason that will generate interest. At the New York State Fair, we have run offseason sales of discounted admission tickets on Cyber Monday and at the day that marks six months to the Fair in order to keep the buzz going.

During the buildup, be more frequent. You should have more news, so there’ll be plenty to talk about. Once a week or once every two weeks should do. And near the time of the event, be in their inboxes daily or nearly so.

Be interesting. Adopt a more informal, chatty style for these emails. (You may have to convince superiors or board members that these are not formal press releases.) Remember that you’re talking to one person, so make it conversational. No big words, no jargon, no dense sentences. Keep it simple.

To make your news more interesting, ask yourself a simple question about anything you want to discuss: “What’s in it for the reader?” Telling the reader you’ve got 45 curated artists is not going to motivate them to come. Instead, tell them about the incredible art that will brighten their homes and enrich their lives. The features of your event are irrelevant to them; they come for the benefits they derive from those features. Talk about the benefits.

Be brief. People get a lot of email and delete many emails just from the subject line. Spend time and thought on that subject line. Don’t use the headline from a press release. Say something in a way that entices the reader to open the email. Subscription tools such as Constant Contact allow you to run an A/B test on email headlines and will wait to send the majority of emails until it discovers the headline that produces the greatest open rate.

Once they’ve opened the email, make the content short and, if possible, visual. You have their attention, but only very, very briefly. Boil it way down. Use links to your website to provide additional information to those who want it. It’s okay to have a few elements in the newsletter, but keep them all short.

If you can’t afford a tool such as Constant Contact and your list is small, use a free Google Form to collect email addresses. These emails don’t have to be slick. They just have to deliver value in a tight package. Do these things and you might just discover why email, at age 50, is, like Eeyore, still pushing forward and, for those who know it best, still beloved in marketing’s Hundred Acre Wood.

Dave Bullard is the Public Relations and Marketing Manager for The Great New York State Fair in Syracuse, the nation’s first and oldest state fair, dating to 1841. He has spent his entire life in and around media, spending many years in print, radio, TV and online media in addition to running a solo PR, marketing and video production business and founding one of the nation’s first online-only local news publications in 1999.

Dave is also the moderator for the IFEA PR and Marketing Virtual Affinity Group every 2nd Tuesday of the month and welcomes you to attend their monthly chat! Dave can be reached anytime at dave.bullard@agriculture.ny.gov and is here to support the great people and events of our industry. Don’t hesitate to drop him a note with suggestions, thoughts or counterarguments anytime.

WWW.KALIFF.COM