Marketing & Growth

How to launch an email marketing campaign as Event Agency Founders

Marketing & GrowthFor Event Agency Founders3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You're running a 10-event quarter and your 'email marketing' is a Gmail draft you copy-paste into Mailchimp whenever you remember. Your inquiry confirmation still says 'Thanks for reaching out!' from 2021. You write the same venue-announcement email four times a year with slightly different dates. Past clients who booked you for a corporate holiday party in 2023 have never heard from you since. You don't have a nurture sequence — you have a vague intention to send one. And when you finally do want to reach a segment (say, all wedding clients from the past two years), you're manually scrolling HoneyBook or a spreadsheet to build the list.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Event Agency Founders3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A Starch CRM that holds every lead, past client, and vendor contact in one place — tagged by event type, booking status, and last-contact date — so you can build a campaign audience in seconds instead of an afternoon

An Email Agent that drafts the campaign copy in your voice, personalizes first lines based on past event history, and queues follow-ups for anyone who doesn't respond within five days

A Growth Analyst digest that tells you each week which emails actually drove new inquiries, so you know whether your spring corporate push is working before the season is over

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Email Agent Growth Analyst

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so the Email Agent can read thread history and draft contextually relevant replies. Your CRM is built on top of that Gmail sync plus any contact data you import from HoneyBook or a CSV export. Growth Analyst connects to PostHog from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live — and reads your Gmail sync to correlate email activity with site inquiry form submissions. Calendly connects from Starch's integration catalog to track discovery calls booked as a downstream campaign metric.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for my event agency. I need contacts tagged by event type (wedding, corporate, nonprofit, social), booking status (lead, proposal sent, booked, past client), last event date, and total revenue. I want a view that shows every past client I haven't emailed in over 180 days.

I'm launching a spring corporate events campaign. Draft a three-email sequence for past corporate clients: email 1 is a soft re-engagement referencing their last event with us, email 2 is a mid-season availability check with a call-to-action to book a 20-minute call, email 3 is a last-call note two weeks before our summer booking cutoff. Write in a warm but professional tone, like I'm a founder who actually planned their event.

Set up a weekly Growth Analyst digest that reads our Gmail for any reply activity from the corporate campaign, cross-references with new inquiry submissions, and tells me on Monday morning how many replies we got, how many converted to discovery calls booked, and which email in the sequence had the highest response rate.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start with the CRM app from the Starch App Store and customize it for your agency: describe your pipeline stages (Inquiry → Proposal Sent → Contract Signed → Booked → Past Client) and the fields you actually track — event type, guest count, venue, total contract value, lead source.

2 Import your existing contacts. Export a CSV from HoneyBook, Dubsado, or your spreadsheet, and tell Starch to map the columns: 'Import this CSV; map the Event Date column to Last Event Date, the Total column to Contract Value, and tag anyone with a past event date as Past Client status.'

3 Build a campaign audience segment directly in the CRM by asking: 'Show me all past corporate clients whose last event was between January 2023 and December 2024 and who haven't received an email from me in the last 180 days.' Starch runs this against your synced Gmail data to filter out anyone you've already been in active conversation with.

4 Hand that segment to the Email Agent and describe the campaign: event type context, the offer or angle (spring availability, early-bird pricing, a new service you're adding), and the tone. The agent drafts all three emails in your voice and lets you edit before anything sends.

5 Review the drafted sequence. Pay particular attention to email 1 — it references the specific past event, so check that the personalization tokens are pulling the right fields (event name, date, venue) from your CRM.

6 Schedule the sequence: email 1 sends on your chosen launch date, email 2 auto-sends five days later to anyone who opened but didn't reply, email 3 sends five days after that to anyone still unresponsive. Set this up by telling the Email Agent: 'Send email 2 only to contacts who opened email 1 but didn't reply within 5 days; send email 3 to anyone who still hasn't replied after email 2.'

7 Set up automated follow-up reminders for any reply that comes in but doesn't get a response from you within 48 hours — the Email Agent flags these so a warm lead doesn't go cold while you're on-site at an event.

8 Wire Calendly from Starch's integration catalog so that any discovery call booking triggered by the campaign gets logged back to the contact record in your CRM automatically — you'll see the full journey from 'last event 18 months ago' to 'booked a call' in one view.

9 Activate the Growth Analyst weekly digest. Tell it: 'Every Monday at 8am, email me a summary of how last week's campaign performed: total replies, discovery calls booked via Calendly, any new inquiry form submissions that mention corporate events, and which email in the sequence had the highest reply rate.'

10 After the campaign ends, ask the CRM: 'How many contacts from this campaign converted to a signed contract, and what was the total contract value?' This becomes your baseline to measure future campaigns against — and your answer the next time a vendor or potential hire asks how you do business development.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Greenfield Events — Spring 2026 Corporate Re-Engagement Campaign

Sample numbers from a real run

Past corporate clients (2023–2024)	47
Emails sent (3-touch sequence)	141
Replies received	19
Discovery calls booked	11
Proposals sent from campaign leads	6
Contracts signed within 60 days	4
Total new contract value attributed	87,500

Greenfield Events, a 3-person corporate and social events agency in Chicago, had 47 past corporate clients sitting dormant in a spreadsheet. The owner spent 90 minutes importing the list into Starch's CRM, tagging each contact by event type and last event date. The CRM cross-referenced Gmail sync and surfaced 12 contacts who were already in active threads — those got pulled from the campaign list automatically. The remaining 35 received the three-email sequence the Email Agent drafted: email 1 opened with a specific reference ('Last time we worked together was your Q3 2024 sales kickoff at the Ace Hotel — hope that went well for the team'), email 2 was a soft availability check for summer and fall dates, email 3 was a low-pressure last note. Of 19 replies, 11 booked discovery calls through Calendly — all of which appeared in the CRM the same day. Six proposals went out; four closed, totaling $87,500 in new bookings. The Monday Growth Analyst digest flagged after week one that email 2 was outperforming email 1 on reply rate (22% vs. 14%), which led the owner to reorder the sequence for a second wave targeting nonprofit clients the following month.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Email reply rate by sequence step (which email in the 3-touch flow actually gets responses)

Inquiry-to-discovery-call conversion rate from campaign contacts vs. cold inbound

Days from first campaign email to signed contract — the sales cycle length for re-engaged past clients

Revenue attributed to campaign per quarter (tracked in the CRM against campaign-tagged contacts)

Past clients not contacted in 180+ days — a running number you want to keep near zero

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Mailchimp + HoneyBook

Mailchimp handles the send, but your audience list lives in HoneyBook and you're manually exporting CSVs every time; there's no feedback loop that tells you which email led to a booked event, and no AI drafting the copy.

Dubsado email workflows

Dubsado's automated emails are tied to project stages, which is useful for active clients but not designed for reactivating dormant past clients or running a standalone outbound campaign.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a capable email automation platform, but it doesn't know what's in your Gmail threads, doesn't connect to your CRM deal data, and requires you to build all the segmentation logic yourself — you're still doing the thinking, just with better infrastructure.

Hiring a VA to manage campaigns

A good VA can run campaigns reliably, but they need the same messy input data you have now — the CRM still has to be clean, the segments still have to be defined, and the copy still has to be written before anything gets sent.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent, growth analyst all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

I use HoneyBook for client management. Can Starch pull my contacts from there directly?

HoneyBook is reachable through Starch's integration catalog, so the agent can query it live. The most reliable path today is exporting a CSV from HoneyBook and importing into the Starch CRM — you describe how to map the columns and Starch handles the rest. Once the contacts are in Starch, the CRM stays current through your Gmail sync, which Starch connects to on a schedule.

Will the Email Agent actually sound like me, or will my clients be able to tell it's AI?

That depends on how much context you give it. The more you describe your voice — formal vs. casual, whether you use the client's first name, whether you reference specific details about their event — the better the drafts. Most people edit one or two lines before sending. The goal isn't to send without looking; it's to start with an 80% draft instead of a blank page.

Does Starch store my clients' email history? I want to be careful about what data I'm connecting.

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and stores it in Starch's database to power the CRM and Email Agent features. The sync is read-plus-send — Starch can read threads and send emails on your behalf when you authorize it. One honest note: Gmail's OAuth consent screen currently shows the name of Starch's underlying verified client rather than 'Starch' — that's on the roadmap to fix, but worth knowing before you connect.

I don't use PostHog. Can the Growth Analyst still tell me how my campaign is performing?

Growth Analyst's pre-built template is designed around PostHog for traffic and conversion data. If you don't use PostHog, you can still ask Starch to build a custom campaign-performance tracker that reads from your Gmail sync (reply activity) and Calendly (calls booked) — you'd describe what you want and Starch builds the surface. It won't include site analytics without a site analytics connection, but for an email-only campaign, reply rate and bookings are usually what matter most anyway.

What if I want to send to contacts I've never emailed through Gmail — say, a list I collected at a trade show?

Import the list into the CRM as a CSV, tag them as a campaign segment, and the Email Agent treats them the same way. The main difference is that Starch won't have Gmail thread history for them, so the personalization in email 1 will need to reference whatever you do have — event type interest, where you met them, or just their company — rather than a past booking.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I sometimes work with corporate clients who ask about data security.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified as of now. If your corporate client has a formal vendor security review process that requires SOC 2, that's a real blocker worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.