Participating in cannabis industry events can be an extremely effective way for your business to raise brand awareness among highly targeted audiences, build relationships, and increase sales. Today, digital marketing is more important than ever when you’re promoting your business to event attendees, and email marketing should be one of your top priorities. 

With that said, it’s important to understand that the email marketing strategies and tactics you’ll implement leading up to and after trade shows and conferences require some strategic planning. Let’s take a closer look at steps you can take to make your email marketing drive positive results for all of your event investments.

Email Marketing Before a Conference or Trade Show

Email marketing before an event needs to start early. This includes warming up your domain and creating an email marketing plan (what you’ll send and when) for both attendees and non-attendees.

1. Warm up Your Domain to Prepared for Increased Sending Volumes

When you use email marketing to promote your business leading up to an event, it’s highly likely that the number of messages you send and the frequency that you send them will increase. A sudden increase in message volume and frequency (anything that’s not consistent with your previous pattern of sends) can be suspicious to email service providers (ESPs). They’re the mailbox providers (like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.), and they’re also the gatekeepers that determine what messages make it to inboxes vs. spam or junk folders.

In simplest terms, ESPs like patterns and their algorithms look at your prior sending patterns in order to detect unusual sending activity. A sudden increase in sending volume or frequency is considered unusual activity, and when ESPs spot that unusual activity, they may start sending your messages to the spam folder rather than the inbox.

You don’t want this to happen, because not only will ESPs start sending your conference messages to spam but they’ll also start sending other messages you send in the future to spam as well. In other words, your sending domain (e.g., mycompany.com) reputation will be damaged, which affects the deliverability of all of your future messages.

To ensure this doesn’t happen and to protect your domain reputation so your messages get to the inbox rather than the spam folder, you should warm up your domain. Through the domain warmup process, you’ll slowly increase your sending volume and frequency, so ESPs understand your new sending pattern.

Doing a domain warmup is recommended before you change your sending patterns for events, holidays, and any other time your sending volume or frequency will change significantly.

‍Learn More: Why Domain Reputation is Critical to Email Marketing and Getting in the Inbox 

Connect with Attendees

If your business is an event sponsor, exhibitor, or an employee is a speaker, panelist, or moderator, you may be able to access a list of registered attendees before the event. This list of known attendees should be a key focus for your pre-show email marketing investments.

Send messages that don’t promote your business but rather promote the event and invite attendees to visit your trade show booth (if you’ll have one) or join specific sessions (if one or more of your employees are participating as a panelist, speaker, or moderator), or simply let them know what kind of content you’ll be offering during the conference.

Learn More: Email Marketing for the Cannabis Industry in 2022

2. Connect with Cannabis License Holders

If you can’t get a list of cannabis license holder attendees from the event(s) you participate in, don’t worry. The Cannabiz Media License Database has the leads for you and an email marketing tool that makes it easy to connect with your target audience before the conference or trade show. You just need to speak to these prospects a bit differently in your messages since you won’t know if they’re attending or not.

For example, if an event is targeted to a specific geographic region, you can quickly find all of the license holders in and near that region – by state, city, county, and zip code – in the License Database. If you only want to connect with people who hold a certain type of license, you can do that too. You can even target people by role, level, license status, and more using the Cannabiz Media License Database.

Learn More: Ultimate Guide to B2B Email Marketing in the Cannabis Industry

Email Marketing After a Conference or Trade Show

As with any event, your marketing efforts should continue when the event is over. Create a plan to keep the conversation going through email marketing after each conference or trade show that you participate in.

1. Connect with Attendees

Again, if your business is participating in the event in some way beyond simply attending, ask the event organizer for a list of attendees’ email addresses so you can follow up with them. The attendee list allows you to connect via email marketing on a more personal level because you know they attended the event.

Some event organizers will even provide exhibitors with more data, including which attendees visited their booths, what content they downloaded, what questions they asked, and whether they shared anything about the event via social media.  All of this data helps you write the most relevant messages possible after the conference, and relevance is critical to email marketing success.

Even if you can’t get the attendee list for a cannabis industry event, you can connect with attendees when it’s over. You just have to put some work in during the show or conference. You need to work the floor and chat with other attendees during events. Be sure to exchange contact information and follow-up after the conference.

Learn More: How to Create B2B Buyer Personas to Improve Email Marketing Results

2. Connect with Cannabis License Holders

The Cannabiz Media License Database can be used for post-event email marketing as well as sales outreach. You can easily look up each license holder attendee in the License Database to get more information about them and connect by phone, email, or through social media.

Upload the attendee list, and create email marketing campaigns that provide easy access to the content you provided during the event in case they missed it as well as more useful information to move the conversation and relationship with your business forward.

You can also use the License Database to share the content you offered during the conference with people who didn’t attend the event. Just exclude the list of attendees from the targeted lists you create, and write messages that are helpful and relevant rather than sales-oriented. 

You’ll have opportunities to sell later/ For post-event email marketing to non-attendees to work, you need to nurture people with useful content that builds brand trust first. Personalization is the key to success for email marketing!

Learn More: How to Personalize Email Marketing Messages to Get the Best Results

Key Takeaways about How to Promote Your Business with Email Marketing Before and After Events

Email marketing is very effective when it comes to promoting your business before and after cannabis industry conferences and trade shows. Just make sure you warm up your domain before you start sending campaigns, and ask for the attendee list and any other data the event organizer is willing to give you. 

Also, use the Cannabiz Media License Database for email marketing and sales outreach to attendees and non-attendees. Finally, make sure you personalize the content of your email marketing messages so recipients get the most relevant content possible.

To learn more about how the Cannabiz Media License Database can help you connect with cannabis and hemp license holders before and after industry events, schedule a demo to see it in action.