SeminarSavvy.com

Convincing busy, budget-conscious people to invest their time and money to attend your seminar can be a challenge. That is why you should sit up and pay attention when a prospective attendee indicates even the tiniest bit of interest in your event. Seminar leads are golden.

Yet many seminar promoters treat their leads casually. They will field phone calls and emails from prospects who have questions, yet they will not keep records about who has called in. They will deliver free preview seminars, but assume that prospects who leave without registering aren’t interested. They let the sale go, assuming that prospects will call back on their own if they are really interested in participating.

If this sounds like you, it is time to change. Anyone who has summoned enough energy to get in touch with you to ask questions about your event if far more qualified as a prospect than the average person on your list. These individuals have indicated some level of interest in your material. Therefore, they deserve more attention when it is time to market your seminar or workshop.

Here are 5 tips to increase seminar registrations by improving your follow-up:

1. Capture as much contact information about the prospect as possible. This includes first and last name, phone number, email address, company and mailing address. The more information you gather, the more flexibility you will have when choosing how to follow up. At a minimum, get a first name and phone number or first name and email. This will allow you at least make a follow-up courtesy call or send a reminder email.
2. Do something with the information! In other words, create a list of people who are interested in the event, so that you may easily identify and follow up with them.

   Note: I don’t recommend adding email addresses to your broadcast list without explicit permission. If you want to contact prospects via email, do privately from your desktop. Feel free to offer them the opportunity to opt-in to your list. For example, you could tell them about a free preview teleseminar you are hosting to promote your next seminar, and provide the link where they could get full details about your event.

3. Pick up the phone. Taking the time to call someone can quickly strengthen your relationship, simply because so few companies use the telephone to reach their clients. But let me be clear: you do not need to engage in “telemarketing.” You don’t need to have a script. You don’t need to be pushy. You don’t need to badger prospects. You don’t need to make impersonal, automated calls. Instead, make courtesy calls. Follow up to see if the prospects who contacted you with questions need any additional information or if they want to reserve a seat. It’s short, sweet and can make a powerful difference.
4. Hook them online. Incorporate a mechanism on your website to gather names and email addresses of people who are tentatively interested in your event and want to learn more. When promoting live events, the best tool to use for this purpose is a free teleseminar or webinar, which can be delivered live or prerecorded and made available on demand.
5. Automate your follow up. Once people have opted in to your list, follow up via email. Send a series of messages via autoresponder, so that they continue to receive marketing “touches” about your event, but you don’t have to do the work yourself. Set it up and let technology take care of the rest.

Warm leads offer a significant opportunity for improvement for most seminar promoters. If they are interested enough to reach out to learn more about your event, they are closer to buying from you than the average person on your list. Invest the extra time, money and resources to follow up regularly with this motivated group, and watch your registrations and revenue climb.

Experienced seminar promoters know that the number of registrations that come in each day generally increases as the seminar draws closer. While you might receive only one registration per day four weeks before your seminar, you could see 20 registrations per day the last week before your event.

The reason for this trend, by and large, is prospects’ procrastination. Like you, your prospective seminar attendees are busy. They might be interested in attending your event, but if there is no compelling reason to sign up in the moment, they will put your promotions aside (or print a copy of your web page) for later review. After all, they have fires to put out right now, and your seminar does not take place for weeks.

Here are three ways to overcome your prospects’ natural tendency to put off making a decision about whether to attend your seminar:

1. Use deadlines. The starting date of your seminar is a prime example of the motivational power provided by deadlines. As the seminar gets closer, registrations increase because prospects are finally getting around to reviewing your promotions and making a decision. And they finally sit down to review your materials because they know they have to. If they do not, they will miss your event, plain and simple.

   A common, proven way to use deadlines is to offer a tuition discount for early bird registrants. If you do not want to offer a discount, try offering one or more additional bonuses instead. For example, give early registrants a copy of your latest book or access to a monthly coaching group that you run.

2. Increase the frequency of your communication around deadlines. Don’t set a deadline and then forget to remind prospects about them. Remember, your prospects are busy. They probably are not writing notes in their calendars to jog their memory, so it is up to you to prod them into action.

   Increasing the frequency and quantity of your promotions right before a deadline raises awareness that something urgent is happening. As much as we like to think that our prospects eagerly read every word of every promotion, the reality is that most of our promotions end up unread in the trash. Sending a few more messages before a deadline increases the chances that prospects will read your messages (“Hmmm, why does Jenny keep emailing me. Maybe I should read this email….”). Each reminder also becomes an opportunity to give a prospect the final nudge he or she needs to take action.

3. Make courtesy calls. I learned early in my seminar marketing career that some prospects are so busy that they will never get around to reviewing promotional materials. Courtesy calls can be an effective way to support these clients, who otherwise might miss important deadlines or perhaps miss your event altogether. If you are lucky enough to get your prospects on the phone, be prepared to take the registration.

Improving your marketing copy and making irresistible offers will increase the number of prospects who will sign up for your seminar right away. But a certain portion of your audience will always procrastinate. Use these three ideas to gently move them toward making the decision to register for your seminar.

When promoting live seminars, as well as virtual events such as teleseminars and webinars, it’s critical to continue promoting your event right up until you start delivering content. Seminar producers who track their sales typically see a dramatic increase in their registrations in the days leading up to an event. For teleseminars and webinars, the big increase is seen in the final few days before the event. If offering a live event that lasts a full day or more, the increase usually happens in the last two weeks.

But to enjoy the big increase and maximize your registrations, you have to stay in front of your prospects. Many promoters give up too soon, pulling the plug on their events three, four and sometimes more weeks out. They do so out of the fear of being stuck with food and beverage costs, as well as paying for unused sleeping rooms, for an event that won’t happen. In fact, they may be canceling their event right around the time that many prospects are getting around to evaluating whether to attend.

Email is an excellent and affordable way to keep prospects updated about your event. But some promoters are wary about using this tool too often, for fear of irritating their prospects. If you’re concerned that you are emailing your list too often, consider these tips:

1. Segment your list so that you emailing only the people who are likely to attend your seminar. If your seminar is designed for residential contractors, for example, don’t mail your promotions to the commercial contractors on your list.
2. Customize your message so that it is clear why you are mailing to your targeted list — and why they should be interested in reading your promotion. Not only will recipients be more receptive to your message (there’s nothing like opening an email that has nothing to do with your interests to feel like you are being spammed), they’ll also be more likely to read and respond to your promotions.
3. Incorporate helpful information. Try incorporating a few tips into your promotional messages. Then segue to your sales pitch by explaining that the information you shared is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you’ll cover at your upcoming event. You’ll prove that you have valuable content. Plus you’ll feel better about contacting your prospects again.
4. Shift from sales to courtesy reminders near the end. Some people are uncomfortable doing heavy-handed sales pitches. Sending out a courtesy reminder (“Hi, it’s Jenny, writing with a courtesy reminder about my teleseminar tomorrow night …”) keeps your event in front of your prospects, but in a helpful, less pushy way.
5. Find your style. Although it IS critical to promote yourself and your seminars, there are different ways of doing so. Some promoters come across like carnival barkers trying to get crowds to see the world-famous three-headed dog. Others feel queasy at the thought of being so pushy.

The best approach is one that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable, as well as a little more confident, bolder and promotional than you normally feel. You need to have a bit of swagger and sass when marketing. But at the same time, you need to feel comfortable with how you are promoting. If you’re not, your discomfort will be communicated on some level. Unfortunately, your uncertainty will come across as not believing in your event vs. not believing in your marketing approach.

You’ve seen the ads — “9 million mailing addresses for just $24.99.” You’re tempted to buy … because surely somewhere among those millions of prospects, there must be a hundred people or so who would be interested in your seminar.

Alas, the results don’t prove your theory true.   

Quality, not quantity, is what counts when you’re building your seminar business. Yes, it is important to grow your list, because at some level, seminar promotion becomes a game of numbers. Once you’ve achieved a fairly predictable level of response with your promotions, growing your business becomes a matter of getting in front of more people.

Until you reach a certain level of success, though, it’s highly critical to be choosy about who you’re reaching. If you market to a poor quality list, you risk getting horrid results. Although an established business can absorb the financial loss of the occasional bad promotion, it’s much more difficult for a newer business to recover from the loss.

In addition to improving the chances of generating a profit, choosing a highly qualified mailing list also helps future promotions. A better list will provide more — and more accurate — data about what works when promoting your event.

For example, imagine that you want to test a direct mail invitation vs. a postcard when promoting your free lead-generation event. If you market to a huge list of people who have given zero indication that they might be qualified to attend your event, you can expect that virtually no one will respond. As a result, you won’t get any meaningful data that will help you determine which marketing tool is most effective.

On the other hand, if you promote your seminar to a list of highly qualified prospects — people whose demographic profile or affiliations match those of your ideal prospect — you should generate enough data to make a sound decision about how to promote your seminars moving forward.

When evaluating mailing lists to rent or buy, look at factors such as:
* Age
* Education
* Job title
* Industry or profession
* Income
* Geographic location
* Past purchases
* Memberships
* Subscriptions

Once you do find a list or two that looks interesting, you might be tempted to rent the whole thing. Instead, rent a small list. Test your mailing. If the list produces enough registrations to cover your cost and generate a profit, rent more names from the same list.

If you’ve never rented a list before, be aware that most list owners require that a minimum number of names be rented (e.g., 5,000 names). Some marketers consider 5,000 names to be a small list; for others, it’s mind-boggling big.

If you fall into the latter camp, ask the list manager or broker if you can rent half the list two times to make up the minimum order size (e.g., rent 2,500 names to make up a 5,000-name list minimum). That way, you’ll have the names needed to do a second mailing (Want to run a test? See for yourself how effective it is to send more than one promotion. Send half of your list one promotion only, and send the second half two promotions.)

You also can ask permission to rent two smaller test lists (e.g., 2,500 names from List A and 2,500 names from List B) to make up the minimum. Some owners will say yes. Others will say no. It doesn’t hurt to ask.

To fill your seminars, it’s essential to keep expanding your reach. Make sure you’re investing your marketing dollars into qualified lists to position yourself to receive a positive return on your investment.