The signs are all around us…the days are getting shorter, the nights are a little cooler, and everyone is talking about having to drag their kids out of bed in the morning. Clearly, summer is over - not only for the kids and teachers but for all of us in the office. There is a definite ‘back to business’ feeling around here. I’m sure you know the vibe I’m talking about, i.e. Q3 is over today, what are we doing for Q4, what’s our plan for 2011?
Now don’t get me wrong, as much as I hate the school traffic on my way to work every morning, as a project manager - I love this time of year! It’s a great time to analyze the success of current projects and programs, what worked best, and what didn’t. More importantly though, it also indicates new goals, in-depth planning and the start of new projects and programs to help our clients achieve their objectives. Have you started your program planning? What factors are influencing your planning decisions? Need help planning – give us a shout or join us for our upcoming webinar and learn how to plan, create and develop a strategy for a target account program.
All this of course means more work, but fortunately that isn’t the only by-product of this time of the year…there are also many other great things to look forward to. For example, getting out your favorite sweater, those tasty fall beers (yum!), freshly ripened apples, the leaves changing colors, your Halloween costume ideas…what else?
Kate Writt
Senior Project Manager
Dunthorpe Marketing Group
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
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
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
Friday, September 10, 2010
Go Blazers – putting the ‘personal’ back in marketing
After a couple of years of email blasting hell, I think consumers (and we’re all consumers in one form or the other) are going back to the old fashioned notion of relationships: where a company that wants to sell you its products takes some time and effort to find out something about you and makes its message and communications relevant to you, your likes and dislikes and the issues that keep you awake at night. Behind it is the simple notion that we all would prefer to deal with people ‘just like us’ who share our particular likes and passions, or at least understand why it’s important to you whether the Blazers will make the playoffs this upcoming season.
In that line I’m a great fan of using this kind of information to enhance one-to-one marketing communications: and lots of CRM systems today have the ability to record a client or prospect’s hobbies or interests. Certainly there’s lot of data out there about how a more personalized approach in marketing enhances results, and I think we could still do a lot more to make our communications feel really personal and relevant to every individual. It’s what good sales people have been doing for years - typically carrying it around in their heads: a prospect’s favorite hobby, or the college they attended and whose team they never miss. This information can be very useful in marketing/sales campaigns once you get past the initial challenge of capturing it and getting it in your CRM system.
Great, so now that you know that your contact likes golf, what can you do with this information other than make small talk? One idea is to try and incorporate your prospect’s interests in the subject lines of marketing communications. For example, instead of sending out a webinar invitation with a standard/generic subject line like- “10 Ways to Increase Your Bottom Line”, you might use a header/subject line like “10 Great Approach Shots to increase the Bottom Line” to the 20% of your database that you know have an interest in golf. Or let’s say that you have identified that 15 % of your contacts like baseball. They would be more likely to respond to the header, “10 Ways to Knock Your Bottom Line into the Upper Deck.” Granted, these personal touches will need a little extra care, but you are going to see an uptick in performance. Your prospects and clients know that you’re trying… and they might even remember that you’re also a fan of their favorite team. And who could resist that?
Vincent Hurst
Business Development
Dunthorpe Marketing Group
In that line I’m a great fan of using this kind of information to enhance one-to-one marketing communications: and lots of CRM systems today have the ability to record a client or prospect’s hobbies or interests. Certainly there’s lot of data out there about how a more personalized approach in marketing enhances results, and I think we could still do a lot more to make our communications feel really personal and relevant to every individual. It’s what good sales people have been doing for years - typically carrying it around in their heads: a prospect’s favorite hobby, or the college they attended and whose team they never miss. This information can be very useful in marketing/sales campaigns once you get past the initial challenge of capturing it and getting it in your CRM system.
Great, so now that you know that your contact likes golf, what can you do with this information other than make small talk? One idea is to try and incorporate your prospect’s interests in the subject lines of marketing communications. For example, instead of sending out a webinar invitation with a standard/generic subject line like- “10 Ways to Increase Your Bottom Line”, you might use a header/subject line like “10 Great Approach Shots to increase the Bottom Line” to the 20% of your database that you know have an interest in golf. Or let’s say that you have identified that 15 % of your contacts like baseball. They would be more likely to respond to the header, “10 Ways to Knock Your Bottom Line into the Upper Deck.” Granted, these personal touches will need a little extra care, but you are going to see an uptick in performance. Your prospects and clients know that you’re trying… and they might even remember that you’re also a fan of their favorite team. And who could resist that?
Vincent Hurst
Business Development
Dunthorpe Marketing Group
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