How to get more “butts in seats” at your webinar or face-to-face event

This is a pretty common challenge: needing to get more people at your event - and there are three quick answers to the question:
You can…
Get more people to register
Get more people to attend
Or, if all else fails, invite more people

GET MORE PEOPLE TO REGISTER
I have had more than a few conversations regarding how to increase the registration rate for events. We have achieved response from the industry average 1% to a whopping 11% and more. Assuming you are offering compelling content, it’s usually the invitation that makes the difference. So, here are my eleven tips for the best performing invitations:

1. Sell the event, not the product or company
Often companies are quick to include product or service value propositions in an event invitation. The goal of an event invitation should be getting people to register. You can sell products later.

2. Personalize all invitations
The most successful invitations are those that look exclusive. If it appears you have invited thousands, or even tens of thousands, your response rate will be much lower. If you send a personal invitation (email or direct mail) that has more of a custom-feel, it has a better chance of getting through the gatekeeper, will grab attention and drive the response higher. (Also, it’s a pretty fair rule that the more senior the audience, the more custom and exclusive the invitation.)

3. Invitations should be copy-heavy
OK – here’s the one that can launch a debate. The prevailing wisdom is to keep invitations short with a focus on only a few main points to make it easy for someone to skim for the main ideas. Well – that isn’t how event invitations really perform and we’ve tested a ton of them. If you want to convince someone to invest an hour or more of their busy day, you have to prove it’s worth their time. If you don’t believe me, give it a test. Longer, detailed copy will always outperform the synopsis.

4. Make sure all of the event content is included in the invitation
Don’t leave it for the landing/registration page. Only a small percentage will actually make it to the landing page, so put your best and complete content in the invitation.

5. Invitation style and content should match event type
Make sure the content is relevant to the specific audience. For example, a highly technical/engineering presentation will not be of interest to senior executives who would be drawn to a round table discussion of business issues.

6. Email invitations work best for webinars, direct mail invitations work best for seminars and other face-to-face events.

7. Direct mail invitations that work
Business letters have good registration track record,
while postcards have poor registration track record (see
tip #3 about including more copy). Avoid marketing
“glossy” invitations (see tip #2 about making invitations
look exclusive)

8. Send at least 2 invitations
You can vary the type: 2 emails, 2 direct mails,
direct mail + email, tele-invitation + email, etc.

9. Tele-invitations provide the opportunity for dialogue which will generate non-registrant leads. There are many more people interested in the event invitation than will actually register. Let’s face it – some people never attend events. When you call to invite people to an event, you can qualify their interest and give a giant boost to the lead results. Also, tele-invitations have the highest registration rate of all other invitation options.

10. Include a 3rd party endorsement for the event (not the product, see tip #1). Include a quote from other people who have attended your events to promote the value of spending the time at the event. Or, include a list of event alumni on the invitations.

11. Make it easy to register by offering several response options. Believe it or not, not all registrations are done online. We still get a percentage of registrations from inbound phone calls.

GET MORE PEOPLE TO ATTEND
You can also increase the number of “butts in seats” by improving your attendance rate. The industry average for webinar attendance is 30-50% and for executive breakfast/seminar/other face-to-face event attendance is 50%.

To improve these results, we recommend five confirmation and reminder activities:
Send registration confirmations immediately on registration
1. Call to ask registrants for speaker questions
We call a week before an event to ask if the registrants have any specific
questions for the speaker, which increases their commitment to attending.
2. Email reminders to registrants weekly
3. Reminder phone calls 1-2 days before the event
4. Email reminder 2-3 days before the event and 1 hour before a webinar
One note: Make sure every communication resells the value of the event.

INVITE MORE PEOPLE
It’s your choice. You can certainly double your attendees by doubling the number of people you invite, but this can be a very expensive option…..

I hope that’s given you a really diverse and packed tool box to drive greater registration and attendance. If you would like to dig into some more details on how to make your webinar or face-to-face events even more successful, please sign up for our next educational webinar where I’ll be sharing my 9 keys to maximizing events for lead generation and sales opportunity creation.

Susan Linman