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As an event promoter, one of your biggest challenges is finding ways to cost-effectively increase registrations at your seminars, teleseminar and webinars. Merely increasing response rates isn’t enough – you have to do so profitably.

One of the easiest ways to increase registrations and event profits is to market strongly to past event attendees. People who are already familiar with the quality of your content, the style of your teaching, and the experience you deliver at your events are more likely to attend future seminars than someone who has never heard of you or who has never purchased anything from you.

As you market future events, include a few special promotions that are targeted specifically to past attendees. Acknowledge their past attendance, and remind them of the high-quality content you delivered.

Next, show them how your new seminar dovetails nicely with the previous event’s material. This positions your new seminar as a way to build on the foundation they created by attending your previous training. In essence, it helps them generate an even better return on their investment. For example, imagine that your first seminar taught people where to find high-quality sales leads. Point out that participating in your second course to learn five proven closing techniques will help them get even bigger results from their lead-generation efforts.

Another approach is to set up your events as a series – step one, step two, step three, and so on. This gives you a solid base of prospects for each event. It’s entirely possible to fill the bulk of seats at the remaining events in the series simply by contacting registrants from the first class. My very best response rate to date – 84 percent – came primarily from using this technique.

To encourage attendees to finish the entire series of events:

• Offer a discounted rate for pre-purchasing a pass to the entire seminar series. Allow people to sign up for each event one by one – this will appeal to those who don’t want to make too big of a commitment. But reward those who make a strong commitment to their personal growth by registering for the entire series. If desired, you can offer a payment plan to spread their investment over the length of the series.

• Develop a series that ties closely to educational and training goals that are shared across an industry. The best example of this strategy is certification preparation courses. Employees in certain industries are required or strongly encouraged to get certain certifications to move up the corporate ladder. Offering a number of courses that help them prepare for the certification exams is an easy way to encourage prospects to attend multiple seminars. The more courses they take, the better prepared they will be for the exams … and the more likely they are to get the promotion and higher salary they want.

• Use courtesy calls to scoop up extra registrations. Rather than doing hard-sell telemarketing (which most prospects don’t enjoy and many promoters dislike just as much), make courtesy calls. This is simply a friendly call to see if they want you to reserve a seat in the next course. Because of their participation in the previous course, you want to make sure that they get a seat in the next level if they want it. Not only is this an easy way to remind your best prospects that it is time to sign up, most past attendees appreciate the thoughtfulness.

Conventional sales wisdom tells us that it takes more work to get new customers than to make a second sale to an existing customer. The same applies when selling seminar seats. To make your job easier and maximize your profits, give past attendees more opportunities and reasons to continue training with your company.

New seminar promoters often make the mistake of sending only two or three announcements of their upcoming events when marketing to their subscribers or a rented list. Unfortunately, they soon learn that most people don’t seem to even read their promotional materials, much less take the initiative of signing up.

Part of the problem is that prospects are deluged with marketing messages. Whether it’s traditional advertising, such as television and radio commercials, newspaper ads, or direct mail postcards, or newer forms of marketing, such as pay-per-click ads on Facebook, text messages sent to their cell phones, or pop-up ads on news sites or YouTube, they face advertising everywhere they look. It becomes easy for prospective seminar attendees to overlook your sole promotion in the sea of competing messages.

Conventional sales wisdom says that your prospects must hear or see your message nine times before they finally take action. Most seminar promoters – like most sales people in general – give up too early.

However, breaking through the marketing clutter is not the only reason you should promote to your subscriber list more often. Sometimes prospects see your messages, but are not compelled to buy for a variety of reasons.

In some cases, buyer reluctance can be overcome through better marketing. For others, the problem is simply that they are not ready for your event. Their life – in particular, the situation you will help them address in your seminar – has not grown so uncomfortable that they are ready to take action to change it. Still others are so busy that taking the final step of registering for your event never becomes urgent enough to do, even though they are interested in attending your seminar.

For these individuals, the solution is keeping your promotional message in front of them on a regular basis. Someday, they will be ready to make the change. They will be ready to find a solution, and when that day comes, you want to make sure that they think of you and your seminar.

To be in the right place at the right time – that is, in front of your prospects when they are ready to make change and sign up for your event – you must market to your list on a regular basis. This involves two major steps:

1. Increasing the frequency of your marketing when you are in the midst of promoting a specific event. For example, rather than sending three notices to your list about your upcoming event, test the effect of five, seven or nine messages. This will help you break through the marketing clutter.

In addition, it will serve as a reminder for prospects who are interested in your event, but set aside your materials to think about and take care of later. An additional message from you could be the nudge they need to finally take action.

2. Stay in touch with your list year-round. You never know when prospects’ lives will change and they will proactively begin searching for a solution. Keep your name in front of them with a mix of educational information and promotions. For instance, send out a monthly e-zine or newsletter, periodically post a short educational video to your web site, or offer regulary scheduled free teleseminars.

Without consistent follow-up, the time, money and effort you invest into generating leads will be wasted. By maintaining a consistent presence in your prospects' lives, you increase the chances of being there when they are finally ready to buy.

Hot off the wire ... congratulations are due to T. Harv Eker, author of the New York Times best-seller Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, on the sale of his personal development training company, Peak Potentials Training, to Singapore-based Success Resources, as well as to new Peak Potentials CEO Adam Markel.

Success Resources is Asia's largest event producer and has successfully produced Eker's events -- including the popular 3-day Millionaire Mind Intensive -- in Asia, Australia, and Europe. Get the full details here.

Multi-day, multi-speaker events are a popular seminar model that can attract hundreds of participants, add thousands of qualified leads to your opt-in list, and generate hundreds of thousands of dollars of back-of-the-room sales revenue to your bottom line.

The reasons these types of events have been successful and popular include:

• The more speakers you have, the more likely you are to appeal to a broader range of people. It’s like taking a group out to eat at a buffet – there’s a little something for everyone.

• Your celebrity lineup makes each seminar a “one time only” event. Although you may have a few speakers who share the stage each time you hold such an event, rarely do you have the same speakers at every seminar. Even if you’re touring the country with your event, you’ll probably have speakers who rotate in and out of the lineup based on their availability.

• The more speakers you have, the more people you’ll reach. The organizers of multi-speaker seminars typically require the speakers to promote the seminar to their lists. Depending on the caliber of speakers you are able to attract, this can expand your reach from tens to hundreds of thousands of extra prospects.

• You generate significant income from back-of-the-room sales. Organizers of multi-speaker events typically retain 40 to 50 percent of all sales made at the event.

The cons of hosting a multi-speaker seminar include:

• The “buffet” style of education can turn some prospects away. Hearing 12 speakers over the course of three days can cause serious information overload. People who have been to such events in the past are thinking more carefully about whether they want to attend additional events of this model, especially when they stop to consider how much they actually implemented from the last event they attended.

• The education is often knowledge, not training. The information shared by speakers is certainly informative and gets attendees pumped up with the possibility of what awaits them. But these presentations often deliver the “what” without the “how” --- to get the “how” so you can do all the things you’re excited about doing, you have to invest in continuing education with the speaker. This approach works well at driving platform sales, but again, seasoned seminar attendees are wise to the fact that they need to do a deep dive into content with a single expert so that they can gain skills, rather than just information.

• The more speakers you have, the more organization and planning you need to do. Filling speaking slots is one part of the challenge. You have to find speakers who have content that fits with your agenda, verify their availability, negotiate a speaking fee and/or back-of-the-room sales commission, and agree on promotional commitments. Then you need to get all of their information gathered in a timely fashion – bios, descriptions of their sessions, PowerPoint presentations – and find out what their stage requirements are. On-site, you need to ensure that their every need is taken care of … from making sure their hotel room is satisfactory and providing a place for them to set up their products to verifying that their presentation is set up correctly and that your team knows what handouts to pass out and when, as well as the details of the offers they are making from the stage.

If you are planning to host a multi-speaker event, keep in mind the amount of work required and start early. Securing speakers alone can take weeks; plus, the earlier you start, the more likely you are to find that speakers do not yet have commitments.  Padding your schedule with extra time ensures that you can effectively deal with the inevitable hiccups that occur when you host such a complex seminar

If you’re promoting a seminar that focuses on a soft-skills or “alternative” topic, you may find that it’s difficult to fill event seats. Not only do you face the usual challenges that go hand-in-hand with filling seminar seats, but you also often must overcome prospects’ skepticism about the value and even validity of your subject matter.

Soft skills are personal habits, qualities and attitudes that make people effective, easy to work with, and generally nice to be around. Examples include communication skills, maintaining a positive attitude, problem-solving, having self-confidence, and being flexible.

Topics that are considered “alternative” by some people include transformational work, alternative healing, and other personal growth events that focus on emotional healing. As with soft skills, many prospects have a hard time grasping the value of these events.

When training budgets are tight, soft-skills seminar often suffer. Many companies give preference to seminars that teach hard skills – the technical things individuals must do to perform their jobs. The reason is that it’s easier to observe and measure the impact of hard-skills training.

For example, if I take class on building presentations with PowerPoint™, it’s easy to observe what I learned at the course. It’s also easy to measure how the training investment will impact my business: I’ll now be able to create slides for webinars, sales presentations and live speaking engagements.

The benefits of attending a seminar that promises to help me become a more conscious communicator might be less clear. First, it’s more difficult to evaluate whether or not one is consciously communicating. Second, it can be more complicated to measure the return on investment. Because the payoff might be something amorphous like “less conflict” or “more confidence,” it’s easier for prospects to dismiss soft skills as a “feel good” luxury, not a necessity.

Tips for Selling “Soft”

Here are 5 tips for helping prospects understand the value of your soft-skills seminars:

1. Meet prospects where they are. Before you can convince prospects that your seminar can help them, they need reassurance that you understand where they are now. Try incorporating a list of challenges they may be facing or incorporate copy that demonstrates that you know what they’re trying to accomplish. A list of challenges also helps prospects recognize their need for your training.
2. Spell out the benefits. Present a detailed list of the many ways that prospects’ lives will change once they’ve attended your seminar. For example, rather than saying that “you’ll be a more effective communicator,” offer specific examples of that that might look like, such as “reach agreements more quickly,” “reduced conflict,” and “fewer misunderstandings.” Whenever possible, connect the benefits of your training to the bottom line. For example, how will more effective communication help you increase sales and revenue, reduce employee turnover, and/or boost productivity?
3. Use social proof. Use testimonials, case studies and videos to demonstrate that people just like them have attended your seminar and benefited. Incorporate comments from a variety of people – different ages, both genders, various industries, etc. – to cover a broad spectrum of prospects.
4. Provide background. As a practitioner, it’s easy to forget that not everyone knows what you know. For example, if you are offering a Reiki seminar, you would explain that Reiki is a form of channeled healing. This might be adequate for people who are somewhat familiar with energy healing. However, you might also want to back up even further, explaining that we are alive because life force is flowing through us and then continuing with a brief discussion of how Reiki works.
5. Offer a clear satisfaction guarantee. The purpose of a satisfaction guarantee is to remove risk. Prospects, particularly those working with a tight budget, are worried about making a mistake that will cost them and their company money. By offering a satisfaction guarantee, you remove the risk, making it easier to say yes.

The primary reason people don’t sign up for soft-skills seminars is that they don’t understand the true benefit of the training. The better you’re able to paint a picture of how prospects’ lives will change as a result of your training, the more clearly they’ll recognize their need for what you offer.

Want to learn more about promoting softer topics? Join me at the "Successful Workshop and Events" teleseminar series sponsored by Spirited Women's Network. You'll get access to interviews with 9 different event marketing experts. Best of all, you'll have a full week to listen to each interview. Sign up here.

Response rates are a widely accepted benchmark of success when promoting seminars, teleseminars and webinars. When gauging your success against that of another company, department or professional, however, keep in mind that these indicators – and improvements in them – don’t tell the full story.

For example, response rates don’t tell you how profitable your event promotion strategy is.  Generating a 3 percent response rate may seem good. However, if you knew that the campaign’s expenses exceeded income by 10 percent, would the response rate be as impressive?

One tactic that can easily improve response rates and profits is targeting your mailing list. Are you sure that everyone on your mailing list is a qualified candidate for the event or product you are promoting? If not, take time to segment your mailing list, weeding out those who are qualified to attend from those who will never attend.

For example, one large corporate client I work with was promoting its live seminars to its entire customer database. During our initial consultation, the client realized that only about one-sixth of the people on the list would ever attend the seminar we were discussing. Although the other customers would make great prospects for other events, they would never attend the seminar we were promoting. The content did not – and never would – apply to their businesses.

Reducing the size of the mailing list leads to an automatic jump in response rate. (This assumes, of course, that the number of responses remains steady – which they should, since the registrations have always come from the qualified prospects who will remain on the list.)

For example, imagine that the client generates an average of 20 registrations when promoting the seminar to its entire database of 10,000 prospects, resulting in a 0.2 percent response rate. Let’s say that trimming out the chunk of the database that was not qualified to attend the seminar reduced the list to 2,000 people. This boosts the response rate to 1 percent.

If you were looking only at response rates and didn’t know exactly what the company was testing in an effort to improve response rates, you would be impressed. The changes they made resulted in a 400 percent increase in response rate.

Digging further into the numbers reveals that the total number of registrations – and revenue – did not change. However, because the company did not mail its seminar promotion postcard to the 8,000 people it removed from the mailing list, there also was a tremendous reduction in marketing costs, which boosted profits. 

As you look for ways to improve your marketing results, remember that response rates – and revenue – on their own don’t tell the full story about your company, audience or event being sold. You might be thrilled with a 1 percent response rate, given the difficulty of selling your product in the current economy. An event promoter in a different industry might consider that response to be dismal. Take your colleagues’ results with a grain of salt. What matters are your results – and how much you can improve them.

In the quest to fill your seminars, teleseminars and webinars, it is tempting to start to view every person as a prospect. Suddenly, “anyone who wants to do (fill in the blank)” becomes your audience.

Although the ability to see nearly every person you meet as a potential customer may make you a great salesperson, it does not always help you become savvier event promoter. To effectively market seminars, teleseminars and webinars, it is essential to spend your time, money and energy where you will get the biggest return on your investment. This is especially true in a down economy, where the meager revenue from a single poorly attended event could devastate your business.

To identify who you should be promoting to, consider:

1. What problems do you help people solve via your teaching? For example, I teach people how to effectively promote their seminars, teleseminars and workshops.

2. Who has these problems? Be creative when answering this question – it is okay to cast your net wide at this stage in the process. People who may want to learn how to promote events include speakers, trainer, coaches, consultants, authors, information marketers/publishers and other experts. It also includes managers, directors and executives at associations, universities, colleges and training companies. Finally, it includes copywriters, marketing professionals, advertising executives, event planners and other individuals who may help their clients produce seminars.

3. Who is most likely to buy? This is where you start to prioritize your potential prospects. Although marketing professionals could benefit from what I teach, I find that the other audiences are more likely to buy, because they are more likely to be in charge of their own promotions.

4. With which audiences do you resonate most or have the most experience? I entered the seminar industry from the not-for-profit sector. So, when I first started my business, associations, colleges and universities were a primary target. I knew their frustrations, understood their goals, could empathize with the restraints under which they operated, and had experience in their market. As my business matured, I expanded to other audiences.

5. What trends are affecting my audience? Do I need to adjust my strategy to account for these trends? For example, with training budgets reduced, many employees of universities, associations and colleges are finding that they can’t afford to attend seminars. Knowing this, I might choose to invest more of my marketing budget reaching other audiences. 

Answering these five questions will help you develop a clearer picture of who you want to target when promoting your seminars, teleseminar and webinars. Once you have this picture firmly fixed in your mind, give yourself permission to stop worrying about all of the prospects who don’t fit your profile of the ideal attendee. If these individuals find your event and want to attend, welcome them with open arms. But don’t spend your precious resources trying to reach them. By focusing your marketing on the people who are most likely to respond, you will generate revenue and profits you can reinvest to expand your marketing program.

One of the most common mistakes seminars promoters make when creating marketing materials is ending their sales copy on a whimper. Like the salesperson who delivers a presentation and then doesn’t ask for the sale, these promotional materials present details about the course, add a note about the cost and a registration button at the end … and that’s it. If readers don’t like the price, they toss your promotions aside and you don’t hear from them again.

To increase the power of the sales presentation you delivering via your marketing copy, you must end on a strong note. Here are some tips:

1. Tell prospects to register. Many promoters simply present the tuition and a registration button. This approach is far too passive when relying on direct marketing. If you were sitting face to face with a prospect, you would have the opportunity to ask for the sale. Your copy – whether written words on a screen or page, an audio message, or a video presentation you’ve posted online – must do more. It must ask prospects for the sale. Tell them … “Register Now!”

2. Ask for the sale multiple times. When selling face to face, you might be able to get away with asking for the sale only one time. When marketing, you must do so multiple times. Most of your requests will appear near the end of your sales materials. However, you can sprinkle calls to action throughout your promotions, such as after every major section of copy. Other places to include calls to action are at the top of your sales page (include a navigation link that says “register now”), at the bottom of every page on your brochure, and on the front and back of postcards.

3. Include buttons and text links. Some prospects will be more attracted to large, visually appealing graphic buttons. Others will respond to calls to action that are incorporated into your text. For example, you might end a paragraph with, “…so reserve your place today.” In this instance, the phrase “reserve your place” would be turned into a link that takes visitors to your registration page. Include both formats of closes in your seminar marketing materials.

4. Recap your seminar’s benefits. If prospects are still with you at the close of your seminar promotions, they are in a state of evaluating whether they will be able to recoup the time and money they must invest to attend your seminar. This is a prime time to focus their attention on the benefits they’ll gain by participating, especially anything that relates to their bottom line.

5. Wave the stick. Some prospects are motivated by benefits (carrots); others are motivated to take action by a desire to avoid negative consequences (sticks). To win a sale, you may find it helpful to remind prospects of what they will lose if they don’t take action. Remind them of the consequences they’ll suffer from – or the frustrations they’ll continue to struggle with – if they don’t attend your seminar.

Some seminar promoters end their sales copy on a whimper because they don’t like to ask for the sale. Others do so because they get tired – by the time they get to the end, they are sick and tired of writing. To counteract these tendencies, motivate yourself by focusing on how much your prospects’ lives will change if they attend your event. Then write the close of your seminar promotions first, before you get tired. By improving your close, you’ll boost your revenue … and connect more people with the valuable training they need to improve their lives.

Seminar leaders and promoters who make most of their revenue via back-of-the-room sales often don’t care how much they make on ticket sales. Their primary goal is to get bodies in the room, no matter what it takes.

If that describes your marketing goals, one way to instantly boost attendance is to give away a free seat with every paid registration. Likewise, if you know that participants are more likely to implement the information and skills you teach them if they attend with a team of co-workers, their boss or even their spouse, giving away a free seat with each paid registration can make sense. It allows them to easily create a relationship with an accountability buddy who will help them follow through on implementing all they learn at your event.

This tactic works especially well if you’re marketing to entrepreneurs and small businesses or if you’re marketing a high-priced event – a $1,500 seminar suddenly looks like a much better deal if you know that you can bring your spouse, a co-worker or even a client with you to the event.

But note that how you phrase your offer can make a big difference in how it’s perceived by prospective attendees.

Let’s say you’re charging $500 per head for your seminar. You could say “When you sign up for this seminar, you get to bring a guest for free. That’s a $500 value … yours absolutely free as a thank you for registering.”

Or you could say “Two tickets to this event are available for the special price of just $500.”

With the first offer, the extra seat is positioned as a gift. Attendees can use this valuable bonus as justification for registering. Plus, you’re perceived as being generous.

The second offer is too vague. What if a prospective attendee doesn’t have anyone they’d like to bring? As stated, the offer tells these folks, “Sorry, you have to buy two seats – that’s the only ticket package we offer.” You might have a chance to save the sale, IF a prospect calls to inquire about single-ticket pricing and you give him/her a seat for $250. But recognize that most prospects won’t be motivated enough to pick up the phone to ask.

Offering free tickets to your seminar is an easy way to fill extra seats. Be careful in how you position the offer, so that it is perceived as a bonus gift, rather than misinterpreted as a way to squeeze more money from participants.

One of the easiest mistakes to make when marketing a seminar is not promoting often enough.

It's an understandable error. Promoting your own events involves tooting your own horn, and for many seminar leaders, that is uncomfortable. We fear annoying our students with too many email messages, for fear that they'll unsubscribe from our mailing lists.

Here's the thing though: If you don't stay in front of your prospects, it becomes very easy for them to forget about you. Not only do they not sign up for your events (which they've forgotten about), they may not even recognize your name when it does appear in their in-box. The irony is that because they don't recognize your name, they may end up unsubscribing from your list anyway. Worse yet, they may even report you as a spammer, because they don't remember giving you their contact information.

I recently attended the Ultimate Internet Boot Camp 2.0, where I heard T. Harv Eker, founder of Peak Potentials Training, speak. He shared a profound piece of advice for any marketer, particularly if you hesitate to promote for fear of annoying prospects.

Here's the gist of what he said: "It's not your responsibility to decide what's right for someone else. Your job is to promote the opportunities you offer and trust that your students can make up their own minds about whether your offers are right for them."

If you find yourself hesistating to promote your seminars, teleseminars and webinars, take a moment to find out what it fueling your hesistation. If it's a fear of bothering your subscribers, try these 3 ideas:

1. Focus on how your students' lives can change. In other words, shift the focus from you -- how you're feeling, how you think your students will feel about your promotions, what will happen to you if your subscribers get annoyed, etc. -- and instead concentrate on the people you are going to help. This shifts your mindset from being a pushy salesperson to being an advocate for your students.

2. Remember that you are the perfect teacher for particular individuals. It doesn't matter how many other seminar leaders are teaching the same content. The way you organize and teach your material, as well as who you are as an individual, make you the ideal instructor for certain people. Your students are waiting for you, and they will never find you if you don't keep promoting.

3. Let go of the outcome. The fear of annoying subscribers is, at its heart, a desire to control an outcome. As a seminar marketer, it's natural to want someone to delight in receiving your email promotions and to then sign up for the seminar. But as much as you want to "make" someone sign up or "guarantee" that they won't be annoyed, you are not in control.

You need to do your job of promoting your events at the maximum level allowed by your time, budget and abilities. How your prospects react is their business. You can drive yourself nuts trying to anticipate and respond to how you think other people will react to your marketing. Just do your thing and let go of the results.

The bottom line is that you are to teach. Your students are waiting. Keep your eye on the prize of how your students will benefit once they've participated in your seminar, and commit to promoting frequently and proudly right up until the day your seminar starts.