This is a guest post from Dan McCarthy, Event Manager at Ultimate Experience in the UK. Thanks for your contribution, Dan!

Social media promotion is almost always part of event advertising. However, email marketing is another component that should be a part of the equation.

Understandably, many event planners are skeptical of email marketing due to the low open and click-through rate. Even so, email marketing is still quite useful and can boost ticket purchases if you follow the tips outlined below.

When we started making initial plans for our inaugural OFFLINE Summit, our CMO, Alexandra, and I knew that one of the first decisions we would have to make was picking the perfect event venue for our conference. After we decided upon the Gelsey Kirkland Academy in Brooklyn, we looked for someone to help us with custom lighting and AV to make the venue represent our brand’s look and feel, and so that our attendees would have a great experience absorbing all of our top-notch content throughout the day.

Once we began our search, we were surprised to learn about all of the intricacies, and unexpected costs, that both of these crucial conference aspects would entail, but knew that this wasn’t an area in which we could scale back without sacrificing major aesthetic and logistical elements for our event.

We are very excited to announce our acquisition of Attend, a Boston-based event software company. Both the Attend and Event Farm teams share an aligned vision that business events must receive credit for being a major marketing channel to drive revenue. That joined vision will continue to guide us in the future.

Event marketing technologies are making it easier and easier to calculate your event’s ROI, but events can also help your company build a more elusive asset whose exact value is difficult to determine: a brand. Despite the difficulty marketers face in assigning a precise value to their brand, building a strong brand that resonates with consumers can be incredibly powerful in generating overall value for a company. 

Event planners have complicated workflows—from finding the perfect venue to ensuring that the right people get the right invitations, there are a lot of moving pieces that need to come together to create one coordinated, successful event.

Luckily, there are powerful tools that can help organize and synchronize your event-planning efforts. Whether you need inspiration for your event’s décor or are looking for ways to communicate more efficiently with your team, check out our list of nine essential apps that should be part of your event-planning toolkit.

Hosting an event isn’t about getting just anyone to show up to your venue—it’s about getting the best attendees possible to walk through those doors. No matter how much time or how many resources you put into planning an event, it will be difficult to find success if the right crowd is not in attendance.

Who makes up the right crowd? The people who will be most receptive to your event’s purpose and message. It’s important to not only gauge attendance by the number of people in the room, but to also consider the likelihood that the people in that room will help your event reach its ultimate goal, whatever that may be. In order to ensure that your guest list will help secure your event’s success, follow our six tips for marketing your event to get the best attendees.

Even with the rise of event marketing softwares that allow marketers to better track their event’s ROI, events can eat up a significant portion of a company’s marketing budget. Not wanting to blow a substantial amount of money on one event, some marketers hesitate at the idea of including events in their marketing strategy.

But in today’s digital-centric world, hosting events is a more powerful marketing tool than ever before. Consumers are inundated with online marketing tactics. An in-person event allows a brand to make a greater impression on its target audience, giving those who host events an advantage over their competition. Keep reading to discover our top four reasons events are more essential to your marketing strategy now than ever before, and how they can make the rest of your marketing strategy smarter.

Since Apple introduced iBeacons in 2013, the portable transmitters have found a place in the line-up of event and experiential technologies. Equipped with bluetooth capabilities, iBeacons determine the physical location of other portable electronic devices, such as tablets and cell phones, and are capable of sending messages or push notifications to those devices.

iBeacons offer exciting possibilities for marketers: they can produce targeted and promotional messages and send them to consumers or event attendees who are close by, potentially increasing the likelihood that nearby consumers would be aware of (and potentially engage with) a brand. But do unexpected and location-based promotional messages resonate well with consumers?

Event marketers understand the importance of branding their events in order to help facilitate an emotional connection between consumers and their brand. But creating an on-brand experience for consumers starts long before they walk into a venue—it starts with the first encounter they have with an event, its invitation or website. 

Being able to create a custom, on-brand website for your event offers exciting design possibilities and helps reinforce the connection between your event and brand in the minds of your attendees. But turning a blank screen into a aesthetically-pleasing and user-friendly website can be a daunting task. Refer to our five simple web design tips to help get you started, and check out our Pinterest board for more inspiration.

Earlier this summer, Event Farm hosted OFFLINE Summit, the first-ever conference solely focused on how offline experiences drive business results. With 20 sessions led by industry innovators, the conference covered everything from why creating experiences matters for business results to how virtual reality is going to impact events.

A theme that ran throughout the conference was the importance of creating authentic experiences and human interaction. Event Farm CEO Ryan Costello introduced the theme in his Keynote, and many of the conference's other speakers offered insights into how technology can enhance the authenticity of attendee experience and simultaneously provide marketers with the metrics they need to justify the cost of their events.