Are you thinking of running your own online summit? Are you wondering about how to promote a virtual event with email marketing?Today we're sharing the lessons we've learned from running our own two-day online event - Inbox. This is the third year we hosted our signature email marketing conference, which is a totally free online event with multiple speakers and a ton of value. Want to know all about it so you can find out exactly what email campaigns you can run to make your next online event a super profitable one? Then let's go! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (5:03) Why the online online virtual summit business model works.(6:49) Why we choose to run Inbox on Zoom.(8:00) Agree with the speakers when they're going to promote the event.(9:53) Find sponsors for your event. (10:56) Promote your event with email marketing. (12:39) The registration sequence and the engagement sequence. (16:06) The sequence you run during the event and the post-event sequence.(20:07) How to handle the price hikes.(25:51) Check out our Virtual Summit email campaign workshop.(29:06) Subject line of the week.Why the online virtual summit business model worksOur Inbox email marketing conference is now online, which means people can attend from all over the world. But when we first ran the event in 2020 it wasn't meant to be free or online. We'd planned an in-person conference in Newcastle for $500 per ticket. But then the pandemic hit, and we had to move the event online. We've basically changed the business model so that instead of having people pay for a ticket, they pay for the recordings of all the sessions (we call this All Access Pass). Plus, because all the speakers also promote the event to their audiences (and earn a percentage of the sales), an online event like this is a great list-building exercise. We absolutely fell in love with this business model, and to this date, our conference Inbox creates the biggest influx of brand new subscribers to our list each year. Why we choose to run Inbox on Zoom One of the things we learned is that although there are different platforms designed to host virtual events (and those are absolutely brilliant) sometimes tech barriers stop people from attending. So we decided to host our event on Zoom, and we have no intention of ever changing that. Because running a virtual summit is a list-building exercise, you want lots of attendees! So it's probably not the right time to try out fancy platforms that people aren't familiar with because there can be a lot of resistance to those. Whereas with Zoom, pretty much everyone knows how to use it, so if you remove the tech resistance you'll have more people registering and attending the event. Agree with the speakers when they're going to promote the event Another thing we learned is that not all businesses treat email marketing as a priority in their business. So while we know in advance what we're going to promote and when, a lot of businesses might not. During the first year of running Inbox, we asked all speakers to promote the event to their list, but we didn't specify any timelines for them. And that meant that we got very little (if any) promotion at all from some of the speakers. So what we do now is to ask the speakers to specify in advance what dates they're going to promote the event. We ask them to create a schedule, put it in their calendars, and commit to it. So if you're organising an online event, don’t be afraid of letting your speakers know that it works as a collective. If all the speakers promote the conference to their list,...