As agritourism continues to grow in importance for the long term viability of many farms it’s also become increasingly important that they have ways to attract as many people as possible to their events. Different avenues like paid digital ads and posting on social sites can certainly help, but there’s one channel many may be overlooking: email.
Email has been, and continues to be, an important channel to promote events and engage past and potential participants. Unlike most promotional channels, it offers a direct line to people, making it more likely they’ll see your message.
However, before you can start a campaign, you need people to send your message to. And that means building an email list.
Why should farms invest in building an email list?
The idea of having to invest in a new marketing channel may sound like a lot of work, and it does require some thought and effort. However, the effort made to build a list is one that will pay dividends for years to come.
Really, there are five core reasons why we think farms need to invest in email marketing, and by extension building an email list:
- Email is a proven channel – We know email works. In fact, in 2023 about 17% of all event tickets sold on our platform came directly from email. There are even events that sell upwards of 20% of their tickets directly through email communication.
- Email gives you a direct line to people – When you spend on digital ads and the like you’re not sure exactly who’s seeing your messages. With email you do.
- Email is a low-cost, or no-cost channel – Sending emails to an existing list is generally very cost effective, and if you’re a TicketSignup user it’s 100% free. Also, email addresses collected through TicketSignup are automatically added to a list you can download and use for future events.
- Email is flexible – You can segment email lists and contacts to send messages to specific people to make your messaging even more targeted.
- Email is efficient – With tools like TicketSignup you can automate email sends, making it a very efficient channel to use.
How to build an email list
The best thing you can do to build an email list effectively is to use multiple tactics. Even if you’re doing well focusing on one channel, you could potentially miss interested people by not utilizing multiple channels.
Below are three ways to get started building an email list with TicketSignup.
Purchase path
If you do events you’re able to ask for an email address as part of the ticket purchase . You can even require email addresses for each individual ticket purchased even when tickets are purchased together. That said, we do suggest usually making email questions optional for additional attendees.
To add a question to the purchase path you select the “events” tab and then “questions.” From there you select the type of question you want to add and a few other options like who to ask the question to, and whether or not it’s required. You can learn even more about questions set up here.
Website pop-up
A lot of building an email list comes down to capturing people when they’re actively thinking about you. And if they’re on your website they’re probably thinking about you. With TicketSignup sites you can add a pop-up window that asks site visitors to sign up for your email list. And if you want to further incentivize them you could even offer a discount of some sort for doing so.
Setting up a website pop-up is really simple. In your main event dashboard you select the “email” tab and then “email capture.” Once there toggle email capture on and you can create a pop-up window for your site. For more in-depth set-up instructions, check out this article.
Waivers
Waivers are a common part of most events and can be a great way to collect more email addresses. They can be included in the ticket purchase path, but not everyone buys their own ticket.
To ensure that waivers are all signed and saved electronically, you can use the TicketSignup Tickets App in Waiver Mode and have people sign waivers on-site via tablets or other devices. Email is optional for visitors signing the waivers, but we’ve seen events collect up to 80% of all visitors’ emails through waiver kiosks.
Moving forward
Building an email list may sound intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. By building email collection into existing processes, as well as using a diverse set of channels, you should be able to build a successful list in no time.
If you haven’t already, you can create a free event on TicketSignup here.