How to Follow Up With Attendees (And No-Shows) After Your Seminar

How to Follow Up With Attendees (And No-Shows) After Your Seminar

Carl Taylor | May 2, 2017

Congrats, you pulled off a seminar event!

Seminars take a lot of strategic planning and execution, so you’ve already accomplished something big. But now that your event is over, it’s time to follow up. Regardless of who attended and who didn’t. Who bought something and who didn’t. You can use this time to deepen the relationship with everyone who signed up.

Below we’ll show you why the post-seminar follow-up is so important and highlight the three different scenarios where you should be following up.

Why the Seminar Follow-Up Is Important

Watching and attending a seminar is a big time investment. Both on your end, and on your prospect’s behalf. The nature of these events makes them a great way to build and deepen relationships.

So when the dust has settled, you don’t want to leave all those people hanging. They’re going to have certain expectations in terms of communication, based upon the action they took.

The first group attended the presentation, loved it, and purchased your product, which is the best case scenario! The second group watched the presentation, but decided not to buy. Finally, the third group, registered but didn’t actually attend.

In order to continue the relationship for a future purchase, you’ll to need to manage buyer expectations for each of those three groups.

1. Following Up With Attendees Who Bought

When people buy from you, your job isn’t over. This is the time for you to welcome them into your business. The better the experience you provide for them from day one, the longer they’ll stick with you in the long term.

That is why you should have a customer onboarding sequence that introduces them to your business and makes them feel comfortable. This welcome series should set the expectation for future communication and introduce your product or services to them.

Your job is to prevent buyer remorse from occurring. You can do that by being incredibly helpful and communicative after a purchase. Especially if they purchased a high-ticket item.

2. Following Up With Attendees Who Didn’t Buy

Just because they didn’t make an immediate purchase following the seminar, it doesn’t mean the relationship is over. In fact, you have all sorts of ways to continue the line of communication and even sell them on other products. There are a few courses of action you can take, depending upon your offer.

1. Remind Them of the Offer Deadline

If you have a time-sensitive offer that’s still for sale, then it’s your job to follow up with them until the deadline. You could set up an email sequence that continues to sell your product until the deadline and contains emails that provide social proof and customer testimonials to reduce any existing buyer friction.

2. Downsell a Cheaper Product

If the product you were selling at the seminar is no longer for sale, then you could follow up with a donwnsell of a cheaper product you’re offering. Sometimes people were ready to buy, but the price was too steep.

3. Put Them Through a New Funnel

Finally, if you don’t have anything else to sell or promote at the moment, you could add them to another funnel. This funnel could be used to condition them to open further emails from you, and continuously provide them with more value.

That way, when you’re ready to sell something again, you can bet they’ll be on board.

3. Following Up With People Who Didn’t Attend

People miss seminars for a wide range of reasons. Maybe they were busy, had an emergency, or they simply forgot. But they did take the first step in signing up, so you know they were at least interested in attending.

With this group, you have multiple means of continuing the relationship.

1. Invite Them to Next Series

If your seminar was part of a series, then simply send an email that reminds them of the next one and highlights the things they missed out on. Chances are they didn’t miss the first one on purpose, so don’t count them out of the rest of the series.

2. Sell the Seminar Recording

If your seminar was a one-off event and you recorded the presentation, then you can package it up and sell it. If they really wanted to attend but couldn’t make the chosen time, then this could be a really compelling offer.

3. Invite Them Into Another Funnel

Finally, you could invite them to join another funnel to receive more information from you. Just because they missed out once, it doesn’t mean the relationship is over for good.

Make sure you continue to speak to the initial reasons that made them sign up in the first place.

Pulling off a seminar is a big feat. But getting the most mileage out of everyone who signed up is another thing altogether. If you’re looking for help automating these seminar follow-up sequences, then reach out to our team today.

About the author 

Carl Taylor

Carl Taylor is the Founder & CEO of Automation Agency. For the past 10 years Carl has been building businesses and marketing them online through the use of Sales Funnels, Email Marketing Automation, Landing Pages, and Wordpress Websites. Carl is also a #1 author and highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted thousands of businesses across various industries worldwide.

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