The numbers on this circuit are worse than most artists realise. Aufgetischt St.Gallen receives around 700 applications for 40 places. Linz's Pflasterspektakel receives up to 1,200 for roughly 100, and says openly that about half of those chosen are performing there for the first time. Brunnen stopped accepting applications altogether after passing 400 a year, because reading them was breaking a volunteer team.
That is the filter your email goes into. It rewards a few specific things.
The video, and which video
Everything else is secondary to this. But not any video — programmers are looking for a specific thing, and a cut promo reel does not show it.
What they need to see is the full show, uncut, with a real street audience. Fixed camera. The build, the crowd gathering, the moment people commit and sit down, the ending. A promo reel proves you can edit. An uncut circle show proves you can stop strangers and hold them, which is the entire job.
Keep the promo too — it earns the first thirty seconds of attention. But have the long one ready, and say in the email that it exists.
The technical facts, early
Duration, space needed, sound, setup time, whether you are self-contained. A programmer is building a grid of pitches and time slots. If your email does not say whether you fit a five-metre circle or need a stage, they cannot place you, and placing you is the decision they are trying to make.
One word does unusual work here: adaptable. Most street festivals have one awkward pitch nobody wants. An act that says plainly it can work in different spaces solves a problem the programmer already has.
The language of the country
A German festival reads a German email differently from an English one. Not because English is a problem — everyone on this circuit speaks it — but because it takes ten minutes to write in their language and those ten minutes read as respect for a small team doing this on evenings and weekends.
What gets skipped
Anything that looks like it went to a hundred people. A subject line that says nothing. A message that describes the show as amazing, unforgettable or revamped without saying what actually happens in it. Attachments over a few megabytes. And any email that does not name the festival in the first sentence.
The test is simple: could this email have been sent to any festival in Europe without changing a word? If yes, it will be treated as though it was.