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If asked, most seminar promoters would agree that low attendance is their worst fear. But when you’re promoting a low-cost or free seminar, having a large number of unexpected participants showing up to register at the door can be equally problematic.

Potential complications include:

• Not having enough seats available, in which case you either need to turn away guests or scramble to set up additional chairs in the back of the room.
• Not having enough staff to handle the at-the-door registrations. This can lead to delays in getting people into the seminar room.
• Irritating participants who pre-registered. If pre-registered attendees are checking in at the same table where unregistered attendees are signing up, registrants will be stuck waiting in line. For maximum efficiency, have a separate table or line where pre-registrants can check in.
• Interrupting the start of the presentation. If at-the-door registrations are too numerous, you’ll discover that not everyone has made it through the registration line by the time you’re scheduled to begin. Then you face a tough decision: delay the start until everyone is registered, which annoys the students who showed up on time, or start on time and have stragglers entering the room for the first several minutes of your presentation.

So what’s a seminar promoter to do? Here are 5 tips for encouraging pre-registration:

• Require pre-registration. Seems obvious, right? The downside, of course, is that you may lose a few students who are truly last-minute type of people. If you go this route, consider including some copy in your marketing materials to present your reasoning. For example, you could include a sentence or two to explain that seating is very limited and that you need an accurate headcount so that you can start the event on time vs. scrambling around to find extra chairs at the last minute.

• Charge more at the door. This encourages people to pre-register and penalizes them for waiting until the last minute to sign up.

• Offer a bonus gift for pre-registration in addition to or instead of a discounted registration fee. (Tip: have the bonus gift be one of your information products.)

• Stress scarcity. Make sure that attendees know that seating is limited and they may be turned away at the door.

• Don’t reveal the exact location of your event until after registration. That way, it’s nearly impossible for someone to show up and register at the door. (The exception, of course, is if a registrant slips and tells someone where the event will be or brings an unregistered guest along.) Instead, list only the city in your marketing promotions.

NOTE: When you are promoting in large cities, be specific about the part of the city and/or surrounding suburbs in which you’ll be hosting your event. For example, common seminar locations in Chicago are downtown, near O’Hare Airport, the northeastern suburbs (e.g., Schaumburg), and the western suburbs (e.g., Oak Brook). For Chicagoland residents, there is a tremendous difference in these locations – depending on where you live, some are easy to reach, and others are very inconvenient.

Having too many people show up for an event is, in some ways, a good problem to have. It shows that your marketing materials are working, you’ve found a hungry audience, and your content is appealing. As your seminar business grows and your seminars begin to fill more quickly, consider using one or more of these tips to minimize the hassles of a last-minute surge in at-the-door seminar registrations.