Top 5 Trade Show Email Templates You Should Be Sending

Exhibiting at a trade show ain’t cheap. Trade shows have always been one of the most expensive marketing channels. Not only is it expensive, but it also takes up a lot of time commitment because of all the planning required that leads up to the show.

With that said, you want to maximise your ROI and one way of doing that is to send out pre-show emails to generate buzz and build awareness for your booth.

Here are five trade show email templates you can use on your next trade show campaign.

1. Let current clients and suppliers know you’ll be going.
2. Reach out to contacts from last year’s show.
3. Booth announcement + incentive.
4. Introduce the trade show team.
5. Follow up email to trade show leads.

Pre-Show Email Templates

1. Let current clients and suppliers know you’ll be going

This is a simple casual email that goes out to your clients and suppliers with who you have a relatively good working relationship with.

Ideally, you don’t want to send this email out to all your contacts such as leads and prospects because you might not have a relationship with them yet. For leads and prospects, you want to be offering an incentive for them to visit you which we will cover in Email Template #3.

2. Reach out to contacts from last year’s show

It is almost similar to email template #1 except this email emphasizes two things:

• You exhibited at last year’s show and you will be exhibiting again this year.
• You’d love to catch up to learn about what their company has been up to since your previous meeting.

3. Booth announcement + incentive

Donna from Cvent.com wrote in her blog post about her inbox getting flooded with generic “Can’t wait to see you!” emails before the show. The most common email she received is “Visit Us At Booth #123” emails.

Those exhibitors were hoping to get her to visit their booth but when you get 100 of those same emails, you’d mark them as spam instead of seeing them as invitations. It goes back to the saying in marketing “If you are not standing out, you are invisible.”

The two biggest mistakes those email campaigns made are:

• They didn’t have a working relationship with the recipient. If she’d receive a “Can’t wait to see you!” email from a person she knows really well, she’d be seeing the email differently compared to an email from a person she barely knows.
• They didn’t add any value to the recipient. What is in it for her to take 30 minutes of her time to visit their booth?

4. Introduce the trade show team

The advantage of this email template is it starts building rapport with your potential attendees before the show. This type of email can be sent out to all your contact database and it will work much better than a generic “Come visit us at Booth #123” email.

You can also include more details about each team member. For example, their expertise and years of experience in the industry.

Depending on your organisation’s technical capabilities, you can also add a link to allow your contacts to schedule meetings with your team.

Post-Show Email Templates

5. Follow up email to trade show leads

This is the most important email template out of all the five discussed here. Not following up is one of the common mistakes that exhibitors make in their trade show campaign. If your sales reps are hoping that your trade show leads will remember them and proactively give them a call, good luck with that.

Salesforce Training did a survey on how many exhibitors followed up on leads acquired during the trade show. They found out that only 15% of exhibitors followed up on their leads. Out of that 15%, some exhibitors took over 50 days to do so.

The difference between following up and not following up might be the tipping point between planning for your next trade show and canceling trade shows from the budget altogether.

Summary

The five email templates we covered in this post are:

1. Let current clients and suppliers know you’ll be going.
2. Reach out to contacts from last year’s show.
3. Booth announcement + incentive.
4. Introduce the trade show team.
5. Follow up email to trade show leads.