5. How to Invite People to Your Event

We believe your brand should always be the focus of your audience, not ours. This means the ultimate experience is for you to market and promote your own website where Sparxo is embedded. So then, the question is how do you get people to know about your event?

In this article, we will cover:

1. How to invite people to your event
2. Ways to market your event

How to Invite People to Your Event

Whether you have embedded Sparxo to your website or are using our free, custom splash page URLs, a good way to “invite” people or notify them of your event is by using a free email marketing system tool like MailChimp . We highly recommend MailChimp. It is free to use for up to 2,000 contacts aka email addresses. While we do offer a way for you to email event attendees from your Sparxo dashboard, it is not the same as using an email marketing system to invite people or notify them of your event. Platforms like MailChimp are designed solely for email marketing and have so many features that we simply couldn’t keep up with, including algorithms to help your emails avoid the spam or junk folders.

Once you signup with MailChimp, you will want to import the email address for your audience. You should consider gathering email addresses from the following places:

• Business email database
• Personal email database (Only for those friends who would be interested in your event)
• Exporting the registrant email database from previous events
• Exporting your LinkedIn contact email addresses

Once you import your audience to MailChimp, you will want to set up an email campaign. With MailChimp, you will be able to see some really cool data:

• Exactly who opens your email
• Exactly who does not open your email
• Regions of where your audience is located
• Percent of your audience who clicked your links
• And so much more…!

We came up with some tips and examples for you to reference when designing your email campaigns for your event. Check them out in our blog here: https://www.sparxo.com/event-promoters-ultimate-guide-to-email-promotions/

Keep in mind, we believe that short, sweet, and simple is the best for a first email. Your goal should be to get your audience and potential ticket buyer to open the email, read it, and convert to a registrant. The goal is not to shove a ton of information down their throat. Otherwise, they might open it, be overwhelmed with information and not do anything further.

Ways to Market Your Event

First, we want to reiterate that our goal is to enable you to promote and market yourself – your own website. Therefore, we hope you embed us into your website so that your audience never leaves your site, giving you full control over the experience and information your audience engages with.

Second, here’s a list of ways our team has come up with for you to market your event and website:

1. Create a Facebook event and invite your network
   • If you have a Facebook business page, we suggest considering paying for some ADs to boost your event presence. (Even as little as $1 a day)
2. Add the link to your Instagram profile biography
   • If you already have a link or multiple displayed in your IG biography, we suggest signing up and using this free platform called Linktr.ee. It allows you to display multiple links in your IG bio profile.
   • Post about the event in both your feed and story
3. Add a new page to your website just for the event
   • The goal here is to boost SEO for the event. Make sure to use as many descriptive words and phrases on the page as possible to help with SEO.
4. Google search for local companies who are discovery portals or platforms for events like yours and post your event on their platform
   • While we encourage posting in as many helpful places as possible, we do not suggest that you market them. We suggest you use your marketing to market yourself, your own website, to boost your own SEO.
   • You can import sales lists from other systems into Sparxo to aggregate data and use one check-in system.
5. Turn your event partners and sponsors into promoters by giving them a unique referral tracking link
   • It’s always a good idea to ask your partner and sponsors to also send an email blast or share their email database with you to send an email blast, post on their social media pages, tag them in your own social media posts, add them as a host to your Facebook event.
6. Turn your ticket buyers into promoters by incentivizing them to share the event with their network
   • You can turn on our Facebook reward feature.
   • You can also send an email to previous attendees offering a special discount in recognizing their support and loyalty.