If you’ve ever put together a live event, seminar, webinar, conference, tradeshow or event dinner presentation, you probably already know how much work is involved in promoting it and getting people to register. And, if you do this for multiple events a year it can be incredibly taxing on your human resources not to mention your own sanity.
As someone who’s be producing live events for decades; first for the music industry and then business to business seminars and conferences, I know first hand how time-consuming and incredibly stressful it is to fill a room. It’s not easy. But there are new and seamless ways to automate certain things that you normally do manually such as; phone registrations, collecting payments, email campaigns for sales and fulfillment etc…
In this article I’m going to share the top 3 requirements you’ll need to save a ton of time, get higher registrations, increase your show rates and more.
The first thing you’ll need is a dedicated registration page on your website. On this page you’ll need a powerful “hypnotic headline”, bullet point information about what your registrant will get (the benefits of attending), testimonials from past participants, a bio and story about the presenter(s) and a clear and prominent call to action.
If possible, you should also make a VSL (video sales letter) or live video to explain the 5W 1H. Who, what, where, when, why and how. The registration button should appear at least 3 times throughout the page. It’s important that when that button is clicked that the click does not move away from the page but rather creates a popup to collect customer data. At this point is does not require payment. That’s right. You should collect the data before payment because if they don’t pay you can always follow up with them in time and collect payment later. But, without an email address, if they don’t pay, you get nothing.
Part 2 of the process requires a marketing automation software like Groundhogg. That software will collect the customer data and then automatically re-direct the optin to the payment checkout page. Always make sure that you use one-page-checkout and don’t require anyone to “join” in order to pay. You already have their contact data… remember?
Okay, now comes the tricky part… because you have multiple events, the initial opt-in form has either a drop down list or radio button choices for the different events. The purpose of this article as you recall is for automating multiple event. When the registrant chooses the event of their choice that’ when the automation kicks in.
In your Infusionsoft campaign, based on the choose of event, you place a decision diamond after the optin for that says something like this: if they choose this date – run sequence 1, if they chose another date – run sequence 2 and so on. In those sequences you set “field values” based on each specific event. Create “custom field values” for date, time and place and in the sequence set those “field values” to the proper values.
And finally, part 3 is to go after the money. Once they register and reserve a seat, anyone who doesn’t pay right away gets but into a “collect payment” sequence.” That sequence sends 3 reminder emails spaced out by a couple of days. They say something like this, “you’ve registered but we can’t reserve your seat forever, please click here to pay the registration fee.”
Using this system you’ll end up with way more registrations and payments than you ever thought possible. Also, at the end of the 3 emails if they’ve not yet paid, create a “task” for someone in your office to call the registrant. That call will usually mop up any sales that haven’t been made because it’s personal and people can rarely resist the personal connection and will almost feel obligated to pay.
There are of course plenty of other intricate scenarios within this “automation plan,” however these 3 things form the basis of “high-converting” registrations. To learn more about “how to fill a room” and how you can get more familiar with the automation system of filling multiple rooms a year, please visit this web page.
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The author Paul Tobey is known by many as Canada’s King of Conversion and has been giving multiple seminars and training events across North America for the past 10 years. His digital marketing and sales certification courses are attended by thousands of business leaders and entrepreneurs from multiple business verticals.