I recieve emails from an networking event company informing me of their continual array of excellent events and high quality speakers. However, when I opened their email this morning I was disappointed to see the words ‘Were you there?’.  The email read as follows:

"Were you there?

The fabulous atmosphere at our September event was electric to say the least! Were you there?"

As it happens, I wasn’t there (mainly because I was in London, UK and the event is in Sydney, Australia) – but if I had attended, I would have been even more disapointed to know that whether I was there or not meant so little to them that they couldn’t be bothered to segment attendees from non-attendees and send them different versions.

What I would have prefered to see would be something along these lines:

Email to Attendees:

"The fabulous atmosphere at our September event was electric to say the least! It was great to have you there and this month we have ……"

Email to Non-Attendees:

"The fabulous atmosphere at our September event was electric to say the least! We missed you – but hopefully you’re able to come along to next month’s event with guest speaker….."

Simple…not a huge amount of extra work, but a little bit of personalisation and segmentation (and dare I say it…relevancy) lends so much to the relationship with your subscriber….and goes towards building loyalty.

If it is absolutely impossible for you to know who attended and who didn’t -then don’t advertise the fact that you don’t know and leave out obvious lines such as ‘Were you there?’

Kath Pay
Managing Director
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