SECRET NUMBER 10
A Powerful Technique for
Boosting Registrations to your Conference
So you've built your conference web site and started to promote it. You're getting some registrations, but you want to generate more.
There is one simple conversion technique that almost every Internet marketing expert agrees will DRAMATICALLY boost your registrations - follow up with your prospective delegates.
This system is geared towards any kind of "sale" so you can use it for any other promotions too, not just for your conference. And if sales is not your business, think about what it is you want to attract people to. For instance, you may be a hospital and you are part of a committee of volunteers that organise a conference. The system outlined below is ideal for you and it is also ideal for your hospital in ways such as:-
i) regular contact with interested community members that can and may already donate to your hospital
ii) to community and council regarding programs and services, such as giving blood, etc.
iii) regular contact with other facilities - to update and/or exchange information.
iv) many more ideas that we can workshop with you.
The bottom line is this - if you want to vastly increase the number of your visitors who turn into valued customers (in whatever format a customer/client/stakeholder/interested party might be to you), you need to contact them over and over. Through a series of messages, you need to convey the emotional and logical reasons why they MUST be a part of your meeting or offer support, funding and other assistance to you .
If you assume that your visitors are going to buy from you on their first and only visit to your site, you are mistaken. It just doesn't happen that quickly. Approximately 80% of sales are made AFTER the initial contact.
Do you even know how many registrations you could be losing if you don't initiate further contact?
Consider your site's visitors perspective. Do you grab your credit card every time you pass through a store and see something you like? It doesn't mean you're going to buy it right then and there. When you decide to buy it, do you go back to that same store? Maybe, maybe not! Would you be more inclined to return to a particular store if the sales associate gave you a courtesy call?
How do you follow up for maximum effect and what tools and techniques should you use?
o The Tools
Begin by realizing that you can't do all this by yourself! Suppose you get 50 visitors a day to your site and one in five of them requests information. That becomes a lot of e-mails you're going to have to send manually for the next few days or weeks. And tomorrow you get more, and the next day another more... can you imagine how complicated managing this process could be?
What is the best management tool available? Sequential or follow-up auto-responders.
Auto-responders are the e-mail equivalent of "fax-on-demand" systems. Someone sends your auto-responder an e-mail or subscribes to it on your web site and the auto-responder sends the messages and manages the follow-up process from that point. It does the managing for you!
A good auto-responder system will send out the right message on the right day, address your prospect by name, keep track of the follow-up sequence while automatically building you a database of interested contacts.
Most web site hosting packages come with auto-responders. Usually, however, these send out a single message and therefore can't be used for continually following up with prospects. Instead, you can pay monthly fees to an auto-responder service or install software on your site and run them directly from there.
o The Techniques
So what techniques can you employ in follow-up messages to turn your prospect into a registrant?
- Technique 1: Build Trust and Credibility
The more you contact your prospect with useful and relevant information, the
more they will assume you can be trusted. By offering valuable credible
information, you prove to your prospect that you know what you are talking about
and why what you have to offer is going to improve their knowledge and ability.
- Technique 2: Create the Reason to Buy
With each message you send, you can work on the need or desire that your product
will satisfy. More money to pay for that holiday? More free time to spend with
the family? Less stress? People buy because they WANT something, secondly
because they NEED it.
- Technique 3: Increase the Offer
Gradually increase the perceived value of your offer until your prospect has to
find reasons not to buy from you! You can do this by offering free bonuses,
discounts, or free shipping. But here's the golden rule - all of them must be
time-limited to push your prospect to make that final decision.
- Technique 4: Logical Justification
People buy for many reasons and they need that decision to be backed by solid
logical reasons. Your follow-up plan should include logical reasons why your
prospect should buy - reasons based on facts and figures, not on emotional
desire alone.
- Technique 5: Avoid the After-Sale Blues
How many times have you bought something and then immediately regretted it? You
can avoid this situation (and refunds) after the sale by reassuring your new
customer their decision to purchase was a good one. You simply need to remind
them that your product will save time, increase knowledge, boost prospects, help
them develop new opportunities or whatever. They have already bought it - they
just need reminding what it will do for them.
In summary, to dramatically increase your ratio of visitors to sales, you ABSOLUTELY MUST follow up with your prospects and site visitors.
It works, it's proven, and it's easy if you use the right tools.
====================================================
Auto
Response Plus is one of the Internet's leading auto-responder
systems.
Install it on your conference web site today!
Click
here for the full story and to order online
===================================================
System Requirements:
Only the most basic of web hosting packages will not have the resources to run Auto Response Plus.
Please check with your host before ordering Auto Response Plus.
A web server running UNIX or Linux (not Windows NT/2000)
MySQL (at least 3.23.39)
Perl 5.005 or greater with your own CGI-BIN
FTP (and preferably SSH or Telnet) access for installing and configuring Auto Response Plus
Sendmail, Qmail or Exim on your server (not compatible with Postfix)
Ability to run cron tasks (this is not optional)
A compatible web browser:
Auto Response Plus accepts subscriptions through web based forms. It also can accept subscriptions by e-mail if your server has a way of piping incoming e-mail through a Perl script.
This would normally be done using a .forward or .procmailrc file (Sendmail, Exim) or .qmail files (Qmail). Sometimes hosts have this functionality built into their domain control panel.
====================================================
Auto Response Plus is one of the Internet's leading auto-responder systems.Install it on your conference web site today!
Click here for the full story and to order online
===================================================
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