How your event communication flow can build relationships

By Alex Cutrone

Effective event communication is crucial for building strong relationships with your audience. This article explores how to optimize your pre-show email and SMS strategies to create a seamless event experience.

Ask any couple’s therapist and they’ll tell you the key to a successful relationship is communication. Of course, this extends beyond our personal lives and into the world of venue-guest relationships.

Arts and entertainment organizations can send out over a dozen communications each week to their audiences. While open rates for most promotional communications (those that encourage you to buy something) sit around 33%, transactional communications (those that provide information about something you’ve already purchased) can see open rates of 70-80%, based on Activity Stream’s analytics for Q4 2024.

If these transactional messages are being opened at over 2x the rate of promotional communications, we should probably make sure they’re providing information in the best way, no?

The Message Flow

Before we get into the content of these messages, let’s get some definitions straight and talk about what you’re trying to accomplish with each message.

Event communications (the aforementioned “transactional messages” can be easily broken down into two categories: pre-show (sent before the event starts and post-show (sent after the event ends). Each message category has two missions: to provide and/or acquire relevant information, and to make sure that your organization’s brand is clearly present (since, again, these messages get a TON of engagement).