Eventbrite

What Eventbrite's email marketing is

Eventbrite is a global self-service ticketing platform for live experiences, and its email marketing tool is part of the organizer account rather than a separate product. The company's feature page presents it as event email marketing to promote your events: campaigns, newsletters and announcements sent to the people who have bought tickets from you, managed in the same place where you create events, sell tickets and track revenue.

That framing matters for anyone comparing it with a general newsletter service. The tool exists to sell tickets. Lists fill themselves from ticket sales, templates pull in event details, and reports measure results in ticket sales and revenue. For a venue, promoter, festival, class organizer or conference team already selling through Eventbrite, it removes the job of exporting buyer lists into a second system. The page puts it plainly: run your event email marketing alongside your ticketing and other promotional activities, with no need to juggle platforms or import and export lists constantly.

The About page describes Eventbrite's mission as bringing the world together through live experiences, from music festivals, marathons, conferences, community rallies and fundraisers to gaming competitions and air guitar contests. Its "2024 at a Glance" figures are 4.7M total events in nearly 180 countries, 89M monthly average users and 83M paid tickets.

Lists that build themselves

The central feature is the subscriber list. When someone buys a ticket to your event, the feature page says, they are automatically added to your subscriber list, which the company presents as an effortless way to build a mailing list and re-engage past attendees. The headline promises "automatically refreshed subscriber lists".

You are not limited to Eventbrite buyers. The contact management section says you can upload and manage contacts from other platforms you already use, or import attendees from past Eventbrite events. The page also says you can save an unlimited number of contacts and only pay for the number of emails you send, so the list itself carries no cost; sending volume is what the plans are built on.

Targeting and segments

Segmentation is based on what Eventbrite knows from ticketing. The US feature page describes segmented lists "based on past attendance and purchase behavior", aimed at improving open rates and sending people the event emails they actually want. Campaigns can go to your full mailing list or to a select segment of it.

Eventbrite's blog guide to email marketing for music events shows how organizers put this to work: send smaller, more targeted emails to fans in a specific city or state, to people who attended particular past shows and might like similar ones, or to fans of specific genres. It pairs that with a regular newsletter to the full list, recaps sent within a day or two after each show, and a few upcoming shows in the same genre listed at the bottom as a remarketing step.

Templates and scheduling

The editor is template based. Eventbrite's customizable event email templates are meant for marketing emails, newsletters and announcements, and the feature page says you can add your event details, photos and a link to your online registration with one click. Elsewhere the same page says templates automatically pull in your event details, images and branding, so a professional campaign takes minutes. The UK version adds that event reminders can auto-fill with your information.

For timing, Eventbrite offers automated email sends you can schedule in advance. The music guide recommends a steady cadence: the same time every week if you have enough good content, every two weeks or monthly if you do not, and more often as the event date approaches. The product updates page lists a recent change to email campaigns that makes it clearer what state a campaign is in and what comes next, with more control while one is under review.

Reporting

The campaign manager includes reporting that the company says shows exactly how your email campaigns affect ticket sales and revenue, so you can measure return on investment. The page encourages organizers to use performance data from past event emails to refine subject lines, content and send times. On the numbers side, the feature page says Eventbrite email open rates are +59% higher than the industry average, based on its average open rates compared with published industry data, and that Eventbrite helped transact 270M total tickets in a global community of 89M monthly users.

Beyond email, the organizer overview lists real-time analytics on buyers and where sales come from, and the corporate events page mentions detailed reports delivered to your inbox covering ticket buyers, sales trends and attendance.

Plans and pricing

The feature page gives the plan structure directly. You can send up to 250 marketing emails daily for free. For more, you upgrade to Eventbrite Pro, which sends "from 2,000 to 10,000 per day". The US page says Pro can save up to $2,880 a year on costs, and the UK page puts the saving at up to £2316 a year on marketing costs. A footnote explains the basis: data as of 9/1/2023, comparing the cost of Eventbrite's free plan with the average combined monthly costs of similar third-party marketing tools. The page's summary line is "Send up to 10,000 emails a day and save an unlimited number of contacts."

Eventbrite's music blog also points to Eventbrite Boost, with the line "send up to 6,000 emails every day with Eventbrite Boost", and says Boost can launch contests to capture new email subscribers and schedule content in advance on one platform.

Creating and publishing events is free ("Publish your events for free"), and the organizer overview describes low-cost, transparent fees and scheduled payouts before your event takes place. For large or complex events, Eventbrite offers tailored plans with personalized support and customized pricing through its sales team, and the email marketing page carries a Contact Sales button beside "Get started for free".

Integrations and other channels

For organizers who want a dedicated email service as well, the feature page says Eventbrite email marketing integrates with Mailchimp: you can import your buyer lists to Mailchimp for more design and reporting options, starting from the Mailchimp app page. The music guide also mentions syncing attendee lists with services such as MailChimp and Emma.

Email sits next to social promotion. The UK page promotes social media promotion in the same place, the corporate events page describes promoting events on LinkedIn directly from an Eventbrite account and sending automated event reminders and updates to people who follow or like your events, and it names an Eventbrite for Salesforce app that syncs attendee and ticket data and a Zoom integration for virtual events. The product updates page adds that in the US, ticket buyers now automatically follow you.

Who it suits

Eventbrite's email marketing fits organizers whose audience is their ticket buyers: music venues and promoters, festivals, food and drink events, performing arts, classes and corporate events. One customer quoted on the page, the founder of ORLOVE, says he used other email distribution platforms and would pay up to $1,500 a month, with a small fraction of the deliverability and open rates he gets with Eventbrite.

The limits follow from the design. It is built around events, so a business that mails a list for reasons that have nothing to do with tickets is better served by a general email platform, and the free allowance of 250 emails a day means a large list has to be sent in stages or on a Pro plan. For its intended users, having lists, templates, sends and ticket revenue in one account is the main attraction.