This is a deep dive into The Void. One of the five phases of the Annual Event Email Marketing Lifecycle. The Void is the stretch of time between the end of your post-event follow-up and the moment you’re ready to sell again.
(Read about the full Annual Event Email Marketing Lifecycle here)
This is the longest phase of the entire annual lifecycle of your event. Likely to last 6-9 months.
Spam placement rates nearly doubled (4.5% → 8.6%) in 2024, driven by rising and uneven sending volumes — proving that when and how steadily you send matters as much as what you send. (Validity 2025 Email Deliverability Benchmark)
The goal of this phase: Don’t lose touch and stay in contact. Nurture the relationship so that when you’re ready to sell, your audience is ready to buy.
The goal is to make sure you DON’T end up in the void where your emails are not landing in the inbox, your brand is forgotten, gets flagged as spam, and you don’t know what’s wrong with your deliverability.
You can do that by being purposeful, intentional, and consistent with your email marketing throughout this phase of your annual event lifecycle.
This is a deep dive into The Void phase. I’ll show you how I’d segment your event audience, decide what to send to them, and choose frequency through the lens of an imaginary event.
📌 The Void is one of the 5 phases of the Annual Event Email Marketing Lifecycle. You can get the full breakdown of each phase, what to send, how to segment, what questions your emails should answer and more when you download your copy here.
My imaginary event is going to be a Children Book Author’s Conference that just took place for the first time.
Here are the key details of the event:
- Next event date: 19th May 2027
- Public tickets will go on sale: 19th Feb 2027
It will look something like this:
Exclusive ticket sales and early bird offers will take place before that, which will change the starting points of ticket sales and attendee comms as well.
Here are the key details of my email marketing audience:
- 3,450 subscribers
- 204 attendees last time
- 10 previous sponsors
Map out key dates
First step in planning your email marketing content strategy for the void is to map out key dates on the calendar that you need to keep in mind when planning your content.
This is useful to do for the full calendar year so that if anything important falls during your sales cycle, you’re prepared for it!
For my imaginary event the following calendar key relevant dates that I can find right now are:
- World Kid Lit Month, whole of September 2026
- International Literacy Day, 8th September 2026
- World Read Aloud Day, 3rd February 2027
- World Book Day UK, 4th March 2027
- International World Book Day, 2nd April 2027
- FCBG Conference 2027, 9-11th April 2027
As well as some other key events in the publishing industry:
- Independent Publishers Guild 2026 Autumn Conference, 10th September 2026
- Publishing Industry Day, 16th January 2027
- Independent Publishers Guild 2027 Spring Conference, 10th February 2027
- The London Book Fair, 16-18th March 2027
And let’s not forget relevant calendar dates like:
- Summer holidays
- Bank holidays
- Christmas and other public holidays
Decide on key dates and offers
Next up in the calendar planning, you’re going to sit down and decide what your offers are, when you’re going to start and end your early-bird, what special offers you have, and which audience groups they’re for, etc.
For my imaginary conference, these are going to be:
- Previous event attendees – super early bird – get before end of June 2026
- Pre-sale promo 1st – 19th Feb 2027
- Early bird regular, 19th – 28th Feb 2027
- Standard & VIP tickets 1st March – 19th May 2027
You could skip this step for now if you don’t have your tickets and offers finalised, but do not wait until the last minute before your sales window opens to do this. Plan for it!
Once you have an overview of all key dates to keep in mind when planning your email marketing communication for the year, especially the void phase, you can move to actually planning some content.
Plan your email marketing content
This is what you’re here for!
But I am not going to just tell you “send these 5 types of emails during the void phase” and be happy about it.
Now is the time to do three things:
- Sit down and properly look at your audience and define segments
- Decide your newsletter content and cadence
- Figure out what audience gets what content when, what gets personalised and what not
The hardest part of this step is that it cannot live in a silo, email marketing is not a lonely beast, it’s the connector of all your channels, so this content planning session (especially step 3) needs to consider things like:
- Your social media calendar
- Any partnerships and sponsorships you have
- If you’re attending any events yourself
- If you’re hosting any smaller events
- If you’re publishing a podcast or regular YouTube videos
- What activities you’re doing to reach more people to grow your audience
- etc.
📌 Get the summarised breakdown of what to send, how to segment, what questions your emails should answer and more, download your copy here.
Segment your audience
Implementing simple segmentation practices in your email marketing, however small, is going to benefit your event immensely.
From building a stronger 1 to 1 connection with your subscribers to learning more valuable information about them, to higher ROI. Segmentation is a must.
Companies with the highest email ROI (more than 45:1) are 20% more likely to use subscription lifecycle emails and 20% more likely to use behavioral segmentation triggers than their peers. (Litmus State of Email Report, 2026)
We’re starting with this information for my imaginary conference:
- 3,450 subscribers
- 204 attendees last time
- 10 previous sponsors
This is not a lot of information, and you probably have more tags and filters that you can use to segment your audience by. For the sake of this event example, we’ll focus on this information only.
Here are the segments I would identify and the questions I would ask:
- 204 attendees:
- attended
- no-show
- excl the sponsors
- 10 sponsors:
- did they have someone attending the event?
- are they subscribed to our marketing comms?
- 3,450 subscribers
- excl 204 attendees
- excl 10 sponsors
- who could be considered engaged vs unengaged?
- is there a super-engaged group?
- does anyone need to be re-engaged/unsubscribed?
- who indicated through behaviour interest in the past event but did not purchase a ticket?
- who is new to our marketing and who has been around for longer?
As we are at the start of The Void phase, I would do the following segments:
- Past attendees who showed up
- excl no shows, excl sponsors
- Identify segments that could be called engaged/unengaged (this will be very unique!) and then for each group add more filters:
- exclude all previous ticket holders and sponsors
- unengaged + interested in event before + subscriber for 90+ days
- unengaged + not interested before + subscriber for 90+ days
- engaged + interested in event before + subscriber for 90+ days
- engaged + interested in event before + new subscriber for <90 days
(I am using 90 days here as an example only! Yours will be different.)
These segments will be used for content personalisation, custom offers, and any dynamic content variations.
Decide on newsletter cadence & decide who gets what content when
Now let’s look at your content and frequency.
Between today and the start of the sales cycle in February next year are 266 days, which is 38 weeks.
So from today until the sales push, you have 38 weekly email opportunities to build a connection with new subscribers, nurture old ones to stay around and engage with you, and build anticipation to buy next year’s tickets.
So if you’re thinking you’re going to get away with a monthly newsletter now because it’s your downtime, you’re not.
A monthly newsletter is going to leave you with just 9 emails.
That’s just not enough.
For my imaginary Children Book Author’s Conference I am going to choose the following newsletter and email marketing frequency:
- Every other week on a regular cadence to the majority of the subscribers: a newsletter with relevant news, industry updates, etc.
- Twice a month, an ultra-personalised email is designed specifically for one or two segments. These segments could be those already identified based on engagement and history, or new ones, based on new learned information and behaviour from the subscribers, like interests.
This means on average, a subscriber will get 2-4 emails a month from me, depending on my chosen segment focus each month.
If you have more capacity in your team, you will be able to create more personalised content more regularly as well, so just find a system that works for you.
It’s time to plan some emails
Lots of hard work done!
You know what’s going on in the industry, what your audience is probably thinking about and engaging in, you know when important key dates and events are happening, and you have your key offers on the calendar.
Without doing all this prep work, you’d be planning every single email in a silo and running around trying to make it “perform” without knowing the broader picture and context for the business or the audience.
But because you’ve done the work, planning your upcoming emails is easy and you can more easily get stakeholders involved when needed.
Not to mention the bonus points for your domain health and deliverability, but I’ll talk about that in more detail another time!
What is your biggest challenge with email marketing between events?
I work with event marketers and organisers 1-1 to create email marketing strategies for annual and recurring events.
Whether you want to start small or are ready to overhaul your whole email marketing programme, I can help you.
“Maria has done an amazing job in setting up our welcome journey for both our company newsletter signup and also our conference. Our email marketing has never been in better shape.” – Jean-Paul Bayley, Actineo Consulting & Lean Agile London
Book a discovery call or DM me and tell me what your biggest challenge with content planning for The Void is, and I’ll help you find solutions.