Ryan has a wealth of experience working and strategising with government agencies and stakeholders at all levels for over 10+ years.  His experience and insights have helped shape the Swift Digital platform to meet the government and private sectors’ demands.

Register Now -> Free Webinar 5th September

Ryan Harris, Government Communications Strategist

Register Now -> Free Webinar 5th September

Attendees can expect to gain valuable insights into these areas, helping them to develop and implement effective marketing automation strategies that drive engagement and improve customer satisfaction.

We look forward to seeing you there! #SDwebinar #Swiftdigital4Gov

Polls can be used to gather quantitative data, while emojis can be used to gather qualitative data.

Polls can be created on various social media platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and now you can do so through your email newsletter.

What Do Your Readers Really Think about Your Initiatives?

You can ask a question and provide multiple-choice answers for people to choose from. This can be a great way to get feedback on specific topics or to gauge overall opinions.

What is Article Feedback?

What is General Feedback?

General feedback is a widget available in the Swift Digital suite whereby you can drag and drop it in and ask whatever question you want to help gain newsletter feedback.

You can give your users a choice of responding using emojis, ratings such as stars and like/dislike buttons. Some example questions that you may want to add to your email newsletters are below:

How Do You Know Your Audience like your Article?

Emojis can be used to gather quick reactions from your audience.

For example, you can ask people to react to a post with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down emoji or to use emojis to indicate how they feel about a particular topic.

When using polls and emojis, it’s important to remember that they are not always representative of your entire audience.

Decline feedback is another way that allows invitees to explain why they are unable to attend a specific event.

You can provide your audience with options to answer to let you know why they have declined the event. This is a super valuable and powerful insight. When the data is collected and assessed, this information can be very useful when it comes to running or planning future events.

You can add register and decline links to your emails and newsletters, and capture feedback via your newsletter.

Adding a survey link to your emails and newsletters is another way to get feedback.

If you want more in-depth newsletter feedback, you can use a survey that asks questions about the newsletter or specific topic. Post-event surveys are also a very good way to get feedback from your event, post-event.

1.  What do you think of our newsletter?
2. Do you find this newsletter interesting and valuable?
3. How often would you like to receive this newsletter?
4. Do you have any newsletter feedback?
5. Did you find this article interesting?
6. Rate this article from 1-5
7. How interesting do you find this newsletter?
8. What do you think of the new newsletter layout?
9. How likely is it that you would recommend this newsletter to your friends and colleagues?
10. What would you like to read more about?

If you would like to see how emoji feedback features really work in emails, check this out! 

Here at Swift Digital, we specialise in servicing the needs of Australian government departments and agencies at all levels, from the federal to local councils and everything in between.

Download Swift Digital’s data and security platform checklist to run security health checks on your organisation, third-party platforms, and vendors.

-> Download Now -> Free Email Newsletter Best Practices Guide

Swift Digital’s templates help you effortlessly create stunning newsletters using our drag-and-drop email builder. You can raise engagement with emojis, polls, article feedback tools, videos and more.

All of the unique marketing requirements of government departments are covered, and full compliance with all anti-spam and privacy laws is guaranteed. Swift Digital is also ISO 27001 certified.

Swift Digital is Australia’s leader in marketing automation software, working with organisations like the NSW Government, ATO, and companies like Westpac Bank and Qantas.

Find out why we’re the Australian government department’s number one choice for their professional communications, emails and events.

To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our team today.

Don’t forget to share this post!

If you’ve not considered investing in event management software, it’s time to find out why now is the right time.

Event management systems can provide a number of benefits to a range of organisations. We look at how event management software can automate those laborious and manual tasks in 5 key industries.

Australian universities, schools, and other educational establishments use event management platforms to automate their academic, social, and cultural events.

From creating an invitation to checking in attendees, it is important to your users that your event registration process is seamless. This can help to increase registration rates, and reduce the workload of busy in-house marketing teams.

An event automated system for bookings and cancellations results in fewer double bookings and data entry errors, resulting in more accurate data and more professional user experience,

Using an event planning system means the education sector can ensure their payments integrate with their banks and payments can be easily managed and tracked.

Privacy and security is among the most important factors for Australian Federal or State Government departments and government-funded organisations.

It is important when using event automation software for Government events, the event platform you are using is fully compliant with anti-spam and privacy laws and stores information on secure servers located in Australia.

The Swift Digital platform hosts all data locally within Australia and provides one central hub for all your events, including; workshops, conferences, seminars, and more.

Superannuation, investment, and retirement firms can use event management software to automate bookings and marketing communications for conferences, seminars, webinars, and other on and offline events to assist with the marketing of their services. 

Events are a highly effective way to engage with your audience, and you can increase your attendance rate and gather feedback for continual improvement by using an event automation platform to send out personalised email invites, track registrant status and check in attendees in real-time.

Banks and other financial institutions can use event management automation software to arrange events specific to their industry, such as conferences, seminars, public speaking events, and training for customers, partners, and staff. 

Holding these events is not only informative, but they are a very effective part of the overall marketing strategy. However, it can be a drain on the marketing and event teams.

Event management and automation software take the hard work out of managing your event attendees, dealing with sending out invitations, managing registrations and cancellations, taking payments, and sending out post-event surveys.

Download Now -> Free Event Planning Checklist

The Legal and Accounting Industry use event management software in a slightly different way from some of the above. This industry likes to have the opportunity to meet face-to-face with clients and partners, to create a deeper, longer-term partnership. Arranging face-to-face events can sometimes turn out to be a logistical nightmare. 

An event appointment calendar can help manage the organiser’s time and provide a more professional overall user journey.

The healthcare industry can operate online or offline with its audience. Using event management software helps industries like healthcare manage their appointments using an appointment booking calendar. They also use an event planning system to arrange for consultations for upcoming appointments.

No matter how important your event is to your marketing strategy, it is important that you keep within the budget that has been outlined for the event, but that is easier said than done!

Sticking to your event budget can be challenging. Even the most basic event planning tasks can take up a lot of time and resources.

Promotion and marketing of your event can be expensive. However, using tools such as email marketing and social media as part of your overall plan can make it easy for you to promote your event, even if you only have a small budget. 

Use social media and an event management system to engage your attendees in the run-up to your event as well as during the event.

Event management and automation software allow you to manage your event admin efficiently, saving you time and money, it can also automate your promotional activities, helping you to increase attendance rate and scale up interest and create that needed event buzz prior to your event.

The administrative tasks of event organisation can be highly time-consuming. Sending out invitations, manually taking bookings and payments, dealing with cancellations and refunds, and handling check-ins at the event are easily a full-time job.

This is where an event automation system is worth its weight in gold. 

The Swift Digital event automated management system allows you to send out emails, track open rates and registrations, process payments, send out reminders, process cancellations and refunds, send thank you emails and feedback forms, and more.

All of this is simply and easily managed from one central digital marketing platform, which takes only minutes each day to manage. As the majority of management tasks are completely automated, you don’t need to overburden your marketing team or take on additional staff to deal with the admin, and you’re free to concentrate on putting on a great event.

Download Now -> Free Event Planning Checklist

Personalise the registration process and maintain effective communication around event changes, updates, promotion etc.

Streamlined Registration Process: Event management software allows attendees to register online quickly and easily. They can access registration forms from any device and complete the process at their convenience, eliminating the need for manual paperwork or long queues.

Personalised Communication: Event management software enables organisers to send personalised emails and notifications to attendees based on their preferences, interests, or registration details. By tailoring communication, organisers can provide relevant information, updates, and reminders, enhancing attendee engagement and satisfaction.

Real-time Updates and Notifications: Event management software enables organisers to provide real-time updates, announcements, and notifications to attendees. Whether it’s changes in the schedule, venue updates, or important announcements, attendees can stay informed and adapt their plans accordingly. This helps to minimise confusion, improve attendee satisfaction, and ensure a seamless event experience.

Agenda and Session Management: With event management software, attendees can easily access the event agenda and customise their schedules based on their interests. They can view session details, and speaker profiles, and make informed choices about which sessions to attend. This empowers attendees to create a personalised agenda that aligns with their needs, maximising their overall event experience.

While event management platforms are great at preparing and managing an event, they are also invaluable AFTER an event, a well built event management platform will provide amazing insights after an event that can help you plan and improve future events.

Registration and Attendance Data: Event management software collects data during the registration process, including attendee contact information, demographic details, and registration preferences. This data provides valuable insights into the attendees’ profiles, allowing organisers to understand their target audience better. It helps in segmenting attendees and tailoring event experiences to specific groups.

Engagement and Interaction Metrics: Event management software tracks attendee engagement and interaction throughout the event. It can capture data such as session attendance, session ratings, survey responses, interactions with exhibitors or sponsors, and participation in interactive features.

These metrics help organisers gauge attendee satisfaction, identify popular sessions or activities, and assess the overall success of the event.

Feedback and Surveys: Event management software enables organisers to collect feedback and conduct surveys before, during, and after the event. This data helps in understanding attendee preferences, gathering opinions on specific sessions or speakers, and identifying areas for improvement.

Analysing feedback data can inform future event planning and enhance the overall attendee experience.

But whilst these might be the main email engagement metrics to track, there are other metrics for email marketing that you really need to keep a close eye on.

We take a closer look into the email campaign metrics and email marketing metrics you should be monitoring and look into what the most important metric in email marketing really is.

CTR stands for “Click-Through Rate.” It is an email marketing metric used to measure the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. Adding a CTA (call to action) to your email will encourage recipients to click through and help to increase your conversion rate. CTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks an ad receives by the number of impressions (or views) it receives and then multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage.

A higher CTR indicates that your readers are paying attention to your emails, helping you to meet your email KPI metrics.

CTOR stands for “Click-To-Open Rate.” It is another email campaign metric used in email marketing to measure the effectiveness of an email campaign in terms of generating engagement and interaction with the email content.

This email metric is often ignored and sometimes treated as the poorer cousin to CTR. But this is one email metric you want to track and should be paying attention to.

CTOR is calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens and then multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage.

How to calculate CTOR

CTOR = (Unique Clicks / Unique Opens) * 100

Unique clicks represent the number of recipients who clicked on any link within the email, while unique opens represent the number of recipients who opened the email. CTOR provides insights into the level of engagement and interest among those who actually opened the email.

It is a valuable metric for assessing the effectiveness of email campaigns, as it measures the engagement of the audience who interacted with the email content rather than the entire recipient list. By monitoring and optimising CTOR, email marketers can improve the relevance and impact of their email campaigns.

-> Download Now -> Free Email Newsletter Best Practices Guide

An email open rate refers to the percentage of email recipients who open an email out of the total number of recipients who received that email. It is a metric commonly used to measure email campaigns in capturing the attention and interest of recipients.

How to calculate the open rate

Email open rates are typically calculated using the following formula:

Open Rate = (Unique Opens / Emails Delivered) * 100

An email open rate can provide insights into how engaging and compelling the subject line, sender name, and preview text of an email are. A higher open rate generally indicates that the email content and the initial impression captured the attention of recipients, prompting them to open and read the email.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)

Most of you have probably heard about it, but what is it and what does it mean for your emails and email marketing campaigns.

How Does MPP Work? When a user opts into Apple’s MPP they are allowing Apple to fetch and download their email and email’s images (preloading). This will always happen whether or not you have opened or not opened the email.

What Does MPP Mean For Your Email Metrics? With the introduction of MPP it is inevitable that open rates will become less accurate since all email service providers measure email open rates by the number of times that an image pixel is loaded.

Segmentation. This update will also likely affect your email campaign segmentation strategies. For example, if you segment based on email opens, this will no longer be as accurate as before, which means you will have to rethink some of your segmentation strategies.

Geographic Targeting. Geographic targeting is also affected as the Apple update will start to mask each user’s IP address meaning your location tracking for these devices will become less accurate.

It’s probably fair to say email open rates aren’t as useful as they once were. Boo.

Email bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that were not successfully delivered to the recipient’s inboxes. It indicates the number of emails that “bounced back” or encountered an error during the delivery process.

How bounce rate is calculated

Bounce rate is calculated by dividing the total number of bounced emails by the total number of emails sent, and then multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage.

Bounce Rate = (Bounced Emails / Total Emails Sent) * 10

What are High Email Bounce Rates?

An email unsubscribe rate is an email metric that measures the percentage of recipients who choose to unsubscribe from an email list or campaign after receiving an email. It indicates the number of individuals who actively opt-out or request removal from future email communications.

How unsubscribe rate is calculated

Unsubscribe Rate = (Number of Unsubscribes / Number of Delivered Emails) * 100

Social sharing is when a recipient of one of your emails opens your emails and chooses to share the email or an element of the email with another person or platform. This can be either via social media channels or can also be classified as somebody forwarding your email.

This is really one of the hardest email metrics that you will satisfy as part of your overall email performance metrics. It is one of the key metrics you should keep an eye on because it is one of the most authentic and transparent of all email metrics.

Not only does it mean they want to be associated with your content, but it is also a chance for you to grow your list and reach a potentially wider audience.

You have a brand advocate in the making!

Example 1: Plenty of people opened the email, but no one was really interested in the content. Make sure your subject line accurately reflects your content, you don’t want to be misleading.

Example 2: An exciting subject line has tempted lots of recipients to open, but they’re still not clicking. Engaging, relevant content with strong calls to action will help you out here.

Example 3: You’re crushing it! Engaging subject line, and content tailored to your target audience. What a champ!

Example 4: Your content has garnered plenty of click action, and those who opened it loved it! You might want to consider segmenting and targeting your mail groups, however, as the low open/high click rates suggest you haven’t quite found your niche.

Example 5: Oh, boy! Back to the drawing board. Use these stats to inform future campaigns. Take a look at our subject line guide and tips for writing online content, and give it another shot! Keywords to keep in mind: timely, engaging, relevant.

-> Download Now -> Free Email Newsletter Best Practices Guide

The email and campaign metrics you choose to monitor come down to what conversion rates and email KPI metrics your organisation has set.  Some organisations may need to pay particular attention to their unsubscribe rate and soft bounces.

Your email service provider should be able to assist you with ideas to ensure you and your team are meeting your email API metrics and keeping your unsubscribe rate low and addressing any hard of soft bounce issues you may have,

Once things for sure, everybody should be paying attention to their spam complaints and ensuring they are providing valuable, worthwhile content and sending communications that are targeted and relevant.

-> Download Now -> Free Email Newsletter Best Practices Guide

Swift Digital’s templates help you effortlessly create stunning newsletters using our drag-and-drop email builder.

You can raise engagement with embedded images, videos, and maps, and schedule messages to send at the right time.

All of the unique marketing requirements of government departments are covered, and full compliance with all anti-spam and privacy laws is guaranteed. Swift Digital is also ISO 27001 certified.

Swift Digital is Australia’s leader in marketing automation software, working with organisations like the NSW Government, ATO, and companies like Westpac Bank and Qantas.

Find out why we’re the Australian government department’s number one choice for their professional communications and events.

To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our team today.

Don’t forget to share this post!

Ryan Harris

(VIC, ACT, WA, QLD, TAS & NT)

Paul Hodgson

(NSW)

ISO/IEC 27001 is the world’s best-known standard for information security management systems (ISMS). It defines the requirements an ISMS must meet. ISO 27001 is an international standard for information security management.

To be ISO 27001 certified means that the organisation’s people, policies and technology have been closely vetted, and an information security management system has been implemented according to this standard as a tool for risk management, cyber-resilience and operational excellence.

Achieving ISO 27001 certification shows that an organisation takes information security management seriously. An organisation with a certified ISO 27001 standard demonstrates that it is aligned with the best security practices, ensuring business partners and an existing customer base.

There are three key areas we need to focus on when trying to find the root cause of email deliverability failure:

If the above conditions have been checked and satisfied, you’ll need to troubleshoot the issue further and look to the journey of the email.

Each government department or agency in the public sector has its own mail servers, third-party security software and internal IT network configurations; meaning the journey of a public sector email can have a more complex path when it comes to communicating internally.

The diagram below simplifies an email’s journey from the sender to the recipient, showing four typical journeys of broadcasted internal emails:

Journey A is an email that passes the third-party internal and internal email servers’ configuration, allowing it into the organisation’s network. It is also accepted by the internal network protocol. The recipient receives the email.

Journey B is an email that passes the third-party internal and internal email servers’ configuration, allowing it into the organisation’s network. However, it is marked as suspicious by the internal network protocol. The recipient receives the email, but it comes with a warning or lands in your spam or junk folder. In this case, the internal network configuration is at odds with the third-party and internal email network settings. In this situation, you should notify your network IT manager.

Journey C is an email that did not pass the internal and third-party mail servers. The security configuration finds the incoming email suspicious. In such a case, it will be quarantined in the mail server until it is released. The recipient will receive their emails late as the emails need to be released to them after it passes the quarantine. At this point, the email can be rejected depending on the rules set here. If rejected, it will send a bounce message back to the broadcast email server.

Journey D is an email that was immediately rejected by the internal and third-party mail servers. A bounce message will be returned to the broadcast server. In this case, the recipient will not receive the email.

In most unsuccessful deliveries, your emails may receive erroneous hard bounce codes, impeding your future email deliverability.

Your email deliverability team should be able to troubleshoot, validate the issue and rectify it accordingly to ensure smooth deliverability for your next send.

If you encounter any scenarios from Journey B, C and D, you can contact the parties involved in this journey.

At Swift Digital, we pride ourselves on the responsiveness of such incidents.

With our deliverability reputation score being 99%, our email deliverability team can help you troubleshoot which part of the journey is causing the issue with speed and accuracy, ensuring your email reaches your intended recipients. Our managers are experienced, and their priority is ensuring your emails reach your subscribers.

Download Swift Digital’s email deliverability guide to help ensure your emails land in your subscriber’s inbox every time.

Don’t forget to share this post!

We are excited to announce that Swift Digital’s Government Communications Strategist, Ryan Harris, will present at the Public Sector Comms week in May. Ryan has a wealth of experience working and strategising with government agencies and stakeholders at all levels for over 10+ years.

His experience and insights have helped shape the Swift Digital platform to meet the government and private sectors’ demands.

Ryan Harris, Government Communications Strategist

We will also have a stand where we will be demonstrating new features just released on the Swift Digital platform, its capabilities as well as future plans. Come and say hi.

We look forward to seeing you there! #PSCommsWeek #SM4Gov

You can control all event promotion and marketing aspects for your planned event in one handy dashboard. And that’s not all. When the big day arrives, event solutions software also helps you run the event.

Tasks like checking in attendees, managing payments, tracking capacity limits, and more are more efficient using specialist event software. Then, once the event has concluded, you can poll and survey your attendees to get their opinions on how it went.     

Event solutions software is something your organisation should be using.  89% of event planners say that event management software helps them save time when planning an event, and 80% say it helps them prove event ROI.  

After you have built an audience for your event with your landing page and email marketing, you can use the event management features in your event solutions software to run the event on the day. 

There is no need for reams of A4 paper with the attendees’ details to check off who’s shown up. Nor do you need to worry about point-of-sale technology to take payment of entry fees. 

Swift Digital’s event management features are jam-packed with event management capabilities to help your event run smoothly. 

You can assign your attendees a QR code for you to scan on arrival for speedy attendance management and take payments beforehand or on the day, using the online payment gateway integration. 

Further tools in Swift Dgital’s event solutions software include:

• Manage a waitlist should your event become fully booked
• Handle cancellations and refunds with ease
• Manage the event location capacity limits
• Use multiple ticketing types for a single event
• Take payments for events
• Provide custom PDF certificates to recognise event attendance

Before your event, you’ll want to build up some anticipation and buzz around it.

While you can’t ignore social media when marketing your event, an Event Manager survey demonstrated that email marketing is the next most popular marketing and communications channel.   

Your event solutions software helps you collect registrants’ email addresses per the 2003 Spam Act via your event’s landing page.  Which then allows you to send them event marketing email messages. 

A significant benefit of using Swift Digital’s event solutions software is the ability to send automated email drip sequences.

These are a set of email messages sent on a fixed schedule that starts once an attendee provides their email address.    

You can send the set of emails on a schedule of your choosing and compose them to provide the information that has the maximum impact on the reader and contributes towards the success of your event. 

A further vital email marketing practice is message personalisation.

People warm more to the personal touch. So you can design your emails with a drag-and-drop editor, then let your event solutions software automatically add the recipient’s name and other information into each email. 

It transforms every bulk message you send out to your email contacts into an email that appears written especially for them.

So what is a landing page? 

Websites used to be more straightforward: a couple of pages of information about you and your business and how an interested party could contact you. 

Today, thanks to digital business transformation, websites,  microsites and landing pages play a critical role in how a business functions. 

Most events need a microsite or website, a place to share event information, the dates it will happen, and how attendees can reserve a spot.  But, if you mix all this in with your existing website, your event details can become lost in the noise. 

What you need is a simple one-page website―a landing page―that focuses on your event.

There are no nagging menus to draw visitors away, so they can concentrate on your messaging, which increases your chances of converting them to your offering.  

Our event solutions software lets you design simple, attractive one-page layouts using our inbuilt drag-and-drop editor.  It’s so easy; even the most technologically shy can use it to produce a dazzling page. 

The landing page provides the essential information a web visitor needs and, most importantly, provides an easy way for them to register their interest in your event. 

Capturing a visitor’s email address is an essential step in delivering a successful event, too, because it lets you send promotional messages to build up the buzz.  So always ensure that it’s easy for visitors to give you their email addresses.   

Now that nearly everyone has a smartphone, you can employ the power of mobile and SMS solutions to enhance your event. 

There are the standard reminder messages you’d expect to alert your attendees to the forthcoming event. But SMS can do more than this when combined with our event solutions software’s digital marketing features. 

Say you are about to host a seminar at your event.  You can send an SMS message to all the people attending the event announcing that the workshop will soon start. Those who reply to the SMS to say that they’re going can get a PDF emailed immediately containing further information.

While many of us ignore automated emails or only give them a passing glance, according to Techjury, SMS has an open rate of an impressive 98%. 

SMS marketing messages are cheap, quick, and practical.

With our event solutions software, you can manage all your SMS messages and track user interaction all from within the same platform.  

Running paid events shouldn’t be an arduous affair. Event managers need event solutions that have the option to take online payments and track payment statuses in the system.

Your event solution should offer to invoice for manual payments or Bpay/bank transfers, online payments through your bank, and automated receipts/payment confirmations.

Having the option to integrate your selected payment gateway with your event solution will make your event management a lot easier to manage and is beneficial.

Some of the benefits of having options for payment gateway integration include the following:

• You receive funds immediately in your designated bank account
• Self-managed funds, improving security as everything goes straight to your bank account
• You can initiate refunds directly within your payment gateway

Tip: Watch out for event solutions that skim money off the top of your event sales/transactions.

Whether it’s an online event or physical event it is likely to have a capacity so having the ability to control the capacity is a must

Does your event have different ticket types? For example, one ticket type includes the buffet and a welcome drink, whereas the other ticket type is a simple ticket with no extras.

Having different ticket types is becoming more popular, so make sure your event solution has the ability to let you select multiple ticket types as part of your event.

You should be able to have the choice of a multi-select, single select and the ability to add a guest and assign a booking agent.

PDF certificates are commonly used in events to acknowledge and recognise a certain activity or program’s participation, achievements, or completion.

These certificates are typically distributed to attendees, participants, speakers, or organisers as tangible proof or documentation of their involvement.

Issue event certificates at the end of your events to attendees, whether it be a corporate conference or an internal learning event.

Keep track of your attendee’s level of progress.

1. Conferences and Workshops: PDF certificates can be given to conference or workshop attendees to acknowledge their participation. These certificates often include details such as the event name, dates, attendee’s name, and sometimes the topics or sessions attended.
2. Training Programs: In training programs or courses, PDF certificates are awarded to individuals who successfully complete the training or achieve specific learning objectives. These certificates serve as evidence of their acquired skills or knowledge.
3. Competitions or Contests: Events that involve competitions or contests, such as hackathons, coding challenges, or academic competitions, may provide PDF certificates to winners or participants who achieve a certain level of performance or recognition.
4. Webinars or Online Events: With the rise of virtual events, PDF certificates are frequently used to acknowledge the participation of individuals in webinars, online workshops, or other virtual learning activities. These certificates can be sent digitally to the participants’ email addresses.
5. Volunteer or Organising Roles: Event organisers often distribute PDF certificates to acknowledge and appreciate the efforts of volunteers or individuals involved in organising the event. These certificates recognise their contributions and can serve as a testament to their dedication and commitment.

Gone are the days of shuffling through pages of registrants to mark attendance. Manual, paper-based check-ins can be time-consuming and flustered and leave attendees with technological ineptness.

Use a check-in app to make your attendees and add attendees on an ad hoc bass.

Now you can use our iOS event check-in app to scan attendance with bar codes, or quickly locate an attendee through incremental search (Eg. type “Fra” to immediately see all “Franks” or “Frans” registered for your event).

• Pre-event surveys: Prior to the event, you can use surveys to gather information from attendees. Ask about their preferences, expectations, and specific topics or activities they would like to see at the event.
• Post-event satisfaction surveys: Distribute satisfaction surveys to attendees after the event to assess their overall experience. Include questions about the event’s organization, venue, content, speakers, networking opportunities, and any other relevant aspects. This feedback will provide valuable insights into what worked well and what areas need improvement.
• Speaker evaluations: Use surveys to collect feedback on individual speakers or panel sessions. Ask attendees to rate the speaker’s knowledge, presentation style, relevance of content, and overall satisfaction. This information will help you identify the most effective speakers and refine your speaker selection process for future events.
• Post-event content evaluation: If your event included workshops, breakout sessions, or educational content, surveys can be used to evaluate these sessions. Gather feedback on the content’s relevance, clarity, and usefulness. This feedback will assist you in curating more effective and engaging content for future events. Demographic and registration surveys: When attendees register for the event, you can include survey questions to gather demographic information, such as age, industry, job title, and location. This data can help you understand your target audience better and tailor future events to their specific needs and preferences.
• Future event planning: Use surveys to solicit ideas and suggestions for future events. Ask attendees what topics they would like to see covered, what formats or activities they prefer, and any other suggestions they may have. This feedback will guide your event planning and ensure that future events align with attendee expectations.

You can send them out automatically after your event and choose whether you want them to be anonymous or not. Surveys are a quick and efficient way to see your event’s success. 

Over the years, email marketing has become more and more sophisticated and new demands from marketers have kept the product development teams on their toes.

As a result, email marketing platforms and software have been built with more powerful technology, giving marketers greater flexibility in what they can do with their email communications, seeing an overall increase in engagement levels and a quality ROI.

Some of the more popular email marketing tactics to have come out of the rebirth of email marketing are listed below- go ahead, give them a go.

-> Download Now -> Free Email Newsletter Best Practices Guide

Marketers demanded it, the product specialist gave it to them. Improved personalisation was something that had been discussed over and over, it is often at the top of every marketers wish list.

Personalised emails rely on everything from demographics and birthdays, to purchase/browsing history and a subscriber’s engagement with previous email campaigns. Collecting the right data, and using it correctly, is the key to creating an email campaign that converts them into customers. But knowing where to begin can be difficult, to figure out.

Below are 5 ways to personalise your emails and why it’s critical to your success.  

• Behaviour-triggered emails (CTR, CTOR, Opens, Clicks etc)

• Custom field data

• Location-based emails

• Identity based campaigns

• Automate ‘direct’ emails from familiar senders

However, personalisation for personalisation’s sake just won’t cut it. Using sophisticated tools such as dynamic content and applying dynamic rules will improve your overall engagement figures.

Another tip here is ensuring that your subject lines are diverse. In other words – shake it up. Or your audience will soon get bored and become blind to your communications that you worked so hard on.

Don’t let your efforts go to waste.

The rebirth of email marketing has resulted in more accurate testing methods for various parts of your email campaigns.

These include your content, design, fonts, layout, etc – the possibilities are endless.

There are a range of tools you can use for email testing, such as simple A/B testing and heat maps.

A/B testing is great way to test variations of your emails and a heat map is an excellent tool for gaining insight into what’s hot (literally) and what’s not in your email. Heat maps allow you to analyse where the user is more drawn to in your emails, which buttons they click and how long they spend on certain aspects of your email.

The flexibility users have with the design of their emails has made leaps and bounds since the early years of email marketing.

Not only are designers able to create beautiful templates with the introduction of new technologies, including HTML5, but marketers now have even more choice when it comes to building their email templates.

With the introduction of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, as well as drag-and-drop functionality for embedding videos, and images, and easy tools for tweaking font and other design elements – email marketing has never been so creative.

-> Download Now -> Free Email Newsletter Best Practices Guide

Polls can be used to gather quantitative data, while emojis can be used to gather qualitative data. You can ask a question and provide multiple-choice answers for people to choose from. This can be a great way to get feedback on specific topics or to gauge overall opinions.

Using feedback widgets such as article and general feedback takes you one step closer.

Emojis can be used to gather quick reactions from your audience. When using polls and emojis, it’s important to remember that they are not always representative of your entire audience.

Ensure your email deliverability components (DKIM, SPF, DMARC) are set up correctly on your sending domain. This is the domain you send your emails from.

Keep a consistent email frequency and email volume when sending emails, this will tell your email service sender that you are reputable and reliable, increasing your chance of landing in the inbox of your recipients.

Maintain good list hygiene. Good list hygiene is maintaining your mail groups and lists that you send your emails. This includes monitoring bounce rates, weeding out the un-engaged and removing invalid emails.

Follow these tips on email deliverability and you will see that email marketing works!

Tips are cool. 

So, does email marketing still work? Yes, it does. Email marketing is certainly not dead and has never been more alive and is here to stay.

Make sure email marketing is part of your wider marketing strategy. Use our Email Marketing Best Practices handbook to make sure you master the art of email marketing.

Swift Digital’s templates help you effortlessly create stunning newsletters using our drag-and-drop email builder.

You can raise engagement with embedded images, videos, and maps, and schedule messages to send at the right time.

All of the unique marketing requirements of government departments are covered, and full compliance with all anti-spam and privacy laws is guaranteed. Swift Digital is also ISO 27001 certified.

Swift Digital is Australia’s leader in marketing automation software, working with organisations like the NSW Government, ATO, and companies like Westpac Bank and Qantas.

Find out why we’re the Australian government department’s number one choice for their professional communications and events.

To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our team today.

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