SeminarSavvy.com

In my last post, I shared my thoughts about why it makes more sense to make just one offer with every promotional piece you send out vs. giving prospects several offers to choose from.

But if you still want to promote multiple offers in a single marketing piece, here are some tips to help you get the most  bang for your buck:

1. Are you promoting a free seminar, where you sell your products, services or next (paid) event? Try offering a recording to people who can’t make it to the preview … or who don’t want to attend a live seminar, but are otherwise interested in receiving your information.

Don’t be surprised if you get fewer people signed up for your live event — ordering a recording is easier to say yes to than attending a seminar. (Tip: send the recording to no-shows. That way, you can salvaging the “lost” registrations by still getting your valuable information in their hands.)

2. Are you promoting a live paid seminar? You can safely promote your live preview event or teleseminar in your marketing brochure. Position it as a free trial for people who want to try before they buy.

3. If you insist on making multiple free offers in one promotional piece — for example, offering a report, a free teleseminar, and a free consultation — help prospects quickly grasp what you are trying to promote by using big, bold subheads and formatting. Remember, prospects are spending just a few seconds scanning your marketing pieces. If you bury your offers in dense paragraphs of text, they’ll ignore what you’re saying. But if you can telegraph what you’re trying to communicate (“I have 3 gifts for you — take your pick”), you’ll do a better job of grabbing attention and getting them to act.

My final tip? Test, test, test. By coding your promotions and tracking your results, you’ll know for sure which approach — one offer vs. multiple offers — produces the best bottom-line results.

When I opened my long-distance phone bill last month, my mouth literally dropped open. In the past six months or so, my bill had doubled. But I could shrug my shoulders and rationalize the expense, because I knew I had been participating in an extraordinary number of teleseminars lately. Seeing a number over $500 (might not be a lot for your business, but it’s about 4 times my average use), though, caught my attention.

Yet here we are a month later … and my bill is approaching the $300 mark. The pain of paying more money hasn’t yet become less significant than the “pain” I anticipate in having to sit in queue waiting to talk to a potentially unfriendly, unhelpful, unenthusiastic customer service representative.

There are two marketing lessons right there in that last sentence:

(1) As marketers, we have to battle our customers’ sometimes ill-founded prejudices and unsavory past experiences to win their business. Figure out what types of beliefs your customers hold about you/your company/your profession/your industry … and use your marketing materials to prove that you are NOT what they think you are.

(2) As with any type of change, customers will not register for your seminar (which really is a form of committing themselves to making a change by learning whatever it is that you’re going to teach them) until the pain of NOT making the change becomes greater than the pain of making the change. Use this to your advantage by driving home how much they are hurting themselves by choosing to NOT learn the wonderful information you’ll share.

As for my phone bill, a big thanks to my friend Jill Hendrickson of www.WeightLossItalianStyle.com, for the heads up about AT&T’s long-distance plans (oops, make that the “new” AT&T). I’ll now be paying a whopping $36.95 for what cost me $500.83 last month. Since I’ve been an AT&T customer for the past 8 years, I’m a little confused about why I had to sign up with the “new” company … but that’s a topic for some other day.

As marketers, it’s really easy to fall in love with our events, services and products. But just as when we fall in love with our human sweethearts, we tend to focus only on the positive aspects of our objects of affection … sometimes to a fault. WE can see the value in attending our seminars, buying our products or hiring our companies … and it’s easy to forget that our prospects are not necessarily wearing the same rose-colored glasses.

That’s why it pays to get periodic reality checks. Especially before launching (or even starting the development of) a new seminar or product.

Surveys are a great tool for soliciting customer feedback. You can be blatant about the purpose of your survey — “I’m planning to hold a seminar about XYZ. Is this something you’d be interested in attending and if so, when?” Or you can conduct a more traditional type of survey to get insight into how your audience thinks and feels about the topic.

I’m in the midst of conducting the latter type of survey on a topic that I’ve become more and more interested in over the past few months. I sent the survey to my opt-in list, and although it’s too early to draw any conclusions, the information I’ve collected so far has been really fascinating. Some assumptions I had made have been validated; others have been shot down. And I’ve received loads of detailed comments in the “Other” field. I’ll share more when I have more data.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: I used SurveyMonkey.com for the current survey. Awesome tool! Very intuitive to use (a huge plus for people like me who don’t want to fiddle around with learning new technology) … and one usage plan is free.  

Another tool that’s popular among the Internet marketing crowd is the ASKDatabase.com. This tool is a smart choice if you like to ask open-ended questions and/or if you get a lot of comments in the “other” field on your standard survey questions. Rather than reading and trying to make sense of a huge list of comments, you can use the ASK(TM) Database to analyze the feedback and draw conclusions.