As important as email marketing is, it is critical that you have a great product or service to sell to begin with. There is no point to knowing how to effectively use email marketing if you don’t have high quality products and services to sell once you get people an email.

Email marketing has been an essential component of my success as a seller of info products and a marketer of seminars of all sorts.

People who promote seminars tend to forget that their seminar is a product. A seminar is just one form or version of what you sell. You are selling your knowledge and information in various forms. One of them happens to be a seminar or workshop.

Like you, I very much enjoy doing seminars. They are much easier than other ways to sell and distribute your knowledge and information. It’s fun to speak. I like doing it and I’m sure you feel the same way.

If you do a lot of seminars, you will probably be approached by a lot of different people begging you to give them your money for advertising of various sorts. The problem is that most of the people who are soliciting you for business have NO idea how to best market a seminar.

This is true of virtually every advertising rep I’ve ever seen. They are interested in selling you advertising and making a commission. Please don’t fall for this. Instead, I suggest you build a big and loyal mix of followers. Better than a physical address is their emails. This email list will be essential for you to market to them both now and in the future.

What’s the bottom line? Please don’t get conned by people who are trying to make money for themselves by selling you advertising for a seminar that you are doing that would be much better promoted using email marketing. Attend an email marketing seminar if you so choose, but make sure that you spend your time building your own in-house list so that when you promote your seminar or other event, that you have to spend VERY little money to fill your room!

The majority of those in the financial field sell products and services that have very high lifetime value to the financial advisor. In coaching my Canadian client, he tells me that the average value of one of his clients was somewhere “North” of $5,000.

Here are the numbers that make this method of marketing make sense.

In this particular case (and like many in this field), the seminars that are done are free. The PROBLEM with doing a free seminar is that every attendee who is there KNOWS that the seminar promoter has got to try and sell them something at the end.

The first question you have to ask yourself is: What are you going to try and close the attendees on when they are there? In the case of most folks, you want to close them on setting an appointment to come in and discuss their particular situation.

When you do your financial seminars, what is YOUR goal? What are you trying to get people to do when you are done with the seminar?

Most of the seminars like this go on for anywhere between 60 and 90 minutes. You must know what your goal is in order to know how to structure your seminars. Although you certainly want to deliver good content in this short seminar, you are also doing a sales job. This must be paramount in your thinking. It is why you are doing your events.

I suggest that before you launch a heavy seminar schedule and spend a lot of money to promote your events that you THINK about what you want to happen at the event itself. Also, although it sounds self serving, I highly recommend that you talk to someone like me to make sure you consider ALL the important details you need to think about before launching your seminar.

This will help make sure that your seminar has the greatest chance for success.

Would I say something different if my name was number 1? I don’t THINK so. I’d like to think that I would still understand that one’s ability as a seminar marketing consultant is different from getting you to the top position in the search engines.

I’ve done a lot of consulting work for people who put on and promote seminars. I’ve also done a lot of seminars myself. This is what is a lot different between me and a lot of other seminar marketing consultants. I actually do them. I continue to do them. Make sure and ask anyone you’re considering working with if they actually do their own seminars and events. Do THEY put their own money on the line? If not, PLEASE be skeptical. There is nothing like putting your own money on the line.

That’s not to say that just because I do my own seminars that I’m the most qualified to help YOU with creating, marketing and promoting your seminars, but is certainly a major piece of the puzzle. I enjoy helping others to create and market their events almost as much as I do promoting my own.

If you choose to work with a consultant (which I HIGHLY recommend that you do), you need to make your assessment based on talent and experience. Ask the consultants you are considering working with how they measure success. This is the most important thing to find out from them. What is their criteria? How will they judge their success? Your success?

To me, it’s all about results. That means that you have to measure. What do you measure? You need to measure how many people show up to your event. You need to measure how many dollars you spent versus how many dollars you made. In short you need to measure everything that you can.

I have two signs up in my garage. One of them says: “Measurement Eliminates Argument”. This is true with every aspect of my business. Whether it’s selling info products or helping others market their seminars.

I hope you do the same!

One of the areas that will be revised is the way in which seminar marketers should use email to market their events. I now use very little direct mail in the marketing of any of my own, or my clients events. This is because of my obsession with making sure that I maintain my perfect record of having never lost money on a seminar or event. To do that, I have to keep my expenses to a bare minimum and rely only on those methods I am 1000% sure work.

Over the past 4 or 5 years, I’ve been marketing my seminars exclusively using online means. I’ve also recommended to others that they do the same.

At least twice a month I get an email from someone who wants my help in doing one of their seminars. They are anxious to get going and are willing to spend a lot of money to make the events happen. I’m almost always the voice of reason who asks them to step back and take a deep breath. Every single person who contacts me is under the delusion that they can profitably promote a seminar with a small or non existent inhouse email list. This is nuts!

IF you want to be doing seminars and workshops in a field, the single most important thing you can do is build a high quality list of email names. This will allow you to promote to these folks for free. This reduces your break even point to almost ZERO.

If you were to combine your in house email marketing with some quality joint ventures and some content packed teleseminars or webinars, you’ll be well on your way to creating a profitable event.

The areas of my seminar book that will be most updated are in this area. Reliance on direct mail is iffy. I’ve seen some people get decent results, but others have wasted a lot of money. My suggestion is to concentrate on your online methods of getting people to attend your events. This way your break even point is extremely low.

The new version of the seminar marketing book will cover these and other new topics that you, as a seminar marketer, should consider carefully when doing your events.