Every year, thousands of life sciences meetings compete for attendants across the world. The success of these events, both scientifically and economically, is directly related to participation; the higher the number of participants the lower the cost per capita.

Lowering the cost per participant can translate into a lower registration fee, a surplus going to the association organizing the event or the ability to invite distinguished speakers, which improves the quality of the meeting and draws in even more participants. Thus, promoting the event is critical and the best way to do that is by email.

Most congresses are already promoted one way or another by email. Using our services has the advantage that we are not limited to your email addresses, we add thousands of them from scientists working on the congress topics. And we do it for a very low price!

Making external scientists aware of the meeting has two positive effects: One is to increase attendance. The second effect is that some of those members will want to become members of the society organizing the meeting.

Most scientists decide to attend a congress far in advance and therefore the email campaign must start early (10-12 months before the event) and it must consist of at least 3-4 mail-outs spread over the months before the congress. The last one should be done in the preceding weeks before the meeting since many scientists have already decided to attend but leave registration to the last minute; our email works as a reminder. Also, most congresses have an early-bird discount registration deadline. One of the mail-outs should go out a week before, reminding the recipients of the registration fee before and after the deadline.

There are some particular points that are unique to a campaign designed to promote a scientific event: Besides the number of mail-outs and their frequency, the actual email should be designed to 'transport' the recipient to the future congress.

As usual, to prompt the recipient to open the email, the Subject should include either his or her name, or the title of one of his or her papers published in the topics covered in the congress.

The body of the email should be representative of the venue: For example, if the meeting is held in a touristic location, a full blown picture of the resort should be included in the background. If the meeting is on a particularly 'hot' topic, it should be mentioned prominently. The same applies to notable speakers. Other things to mention are a particular occasion (e.g. 50th annual meeting of a Society), or a particularly low registration fee for students, etc. In essence, the most important points to convince a scientist to attend your event should be present in the email, while keeping it from being overwhelming.

A particularly important thing to include is the scientific programme, which should be included in the mail-outs as early as possible.

It is truly impossible to estimate the impact of a campaign. However, there are a few things that we are comfortable in stating:

1. Attendance is proportional to the number of emails and their frequency. As a corollary, recruitment of members into your society amongst congress participants is also proportional to those parameters.
2. The email content is crucial: For example, the results are very different if the scientific programme is already in the congress web site. This is not too critical for the first mail-out, which may only announce the event and its topics, but it is a must in the following emails.
3. Along the same lines, the quality of the web site and in particular how easy it is to register is also critical.
4. Depending on the registration fee, our campaign may pay for itself. In many cases, the first 10-12 additional attendants pay for the whole campaign. For a congress with 200 participants, our campaign should increase attendance by just 5%, which is very attainable considering that the campaign could be directed to thousands or tens of thousands of scientists!