6 Powerful Techniques to Create a Referral System that Drives Event Attendance
By Jenny Hamby, the Seminar Marketing Pro™
Certified Guerrilla Marketer and Direct-Response Copywriter
Want to drive event attendance and fill event seats? One of the best (and easiest) ways to achieve your goals is implementing a referral program that uses the strength of your network to generate awareness about your seminar or workshop.
A referral program is basically a way to get people to do your promotional work for you. Contacts you’ve made through your events, seminars, and workshops have likely already referred to you in the past. Implementing an official referral program is a way to motivate them to refer more often and deliberately. This maximizes the benefits of referral marketing to generate more sales of your live events, virtual events, and even products.
Let’s take a look at the steps you can take to develop and implement a referral program that will create serious boosts in attendance at your events.
1. Identify Who is Willing to Refer to You
To begin, ask yourself: Who is already referring to me? Past attendees of your events, trainers, colleagues, former employees, subscribers, or affiliates may all fall into this category.
There may be a “profile” or type of person who is most likely to refer to you. This is the type of person who you will want to focus on when developing your referral program. Those most interested in the material you’re providing and the events you’re planning will be the most likely to share and refer to your event.
2. Encourage Your Network to Refer to You
Once you’ve taken stock of who is referring to you or willing to do so, ask yourself what you can do to encourage them. Your goal should be to deepen your relationship with these individuals. Then look for opportunities to modify your marketing system to include the process of requesting referrals.
One approach is to incorporate referral requests into the free resources you provide to your mailing list subscribers. The people on your list are already interested in the content you teach. Encourage them to share the love by helping to spread the word about your event.
After asking people to opt in to receive a free report, send new subscribers to a “thank you” page. Suggest that they spread the word about the resource they just requested.
In your follow-up emails thanking them for signing up to receive your content, you can simply say, “Do you know of anybody else who might benefit from this information? Please feel free to forward this email to them, or send them to this specific webpage.”
A more tech-savvy way to do this is to integrate a form on your page that allows the reader to forward your content to another email address, quickening the process.
3. Encourage Referrals to Targeted Groups
A powerful way to drive referrals is to ask those reading your content to refer others to you based on the specific type of content you are providing.
If you are teaching speakers how to promote their own teleseminars, ask your readership to forward your content to those who are also working on that topic. This can jog people’s memories in a way that just doesn’t happen with generalized “forward this to your network” messaging.
Asking your readers to forward your content to a specific type of person will not only make them realize that your content may, in fact, be quite valuable to someone in their network (and thus more likely to share it), but will also make your referrals more targeted.
4. Use Period Promotional Pushes
You can also directly ask your list for more referrals.
Begin by offering them a free resource. Ask them if they know of any business owners, parents, athletes, etc. (obviously, customize this to include your unique target audience) who would benefit from this great new resource you’ve developed?
A key part to this strategy, of course, is to create gifts your subscribers can tell their friends about. Providing excellent free content upfront is a great way to give your list the desire to share your content with their networks.
You can formalize this technique by creating an affiliate program. An affiliate program allows people to sign up to become your promotional partner. You give them the tools to promote your content and encourage them to push your content when you promote a new free resource or a new event, for example. This will encourage individuals promoting your content in an individualized and convincing way.
5. Use Financial Incentives
When using an affiliate program to drive event attendance, you must implement some form of compensation to reward those who work with you. Paying them for referral-based registrations is a great way to do this. You can also reward them for simply generating sign-ups.
You can propose to pay them a quarter or a dollar for each sign-up for a report, for instance.
While this could encourage non-targeted promotion to simply increase sign-up numbers to receive a financial award, this will usually not be the case and shouldn’t be a major cause for concern.
If you are concerned about the quality of sign-ups or the effectiveness of this strategy, try it for a week and analyze your results. See if the quality of your leads is worth the money. If not, you can simply discontinue the financial incentive and consider it a learning experience.
If the quality of the leads you generate through an affiliate program is moderate to high, however, continue with this method.
6. Implement Contests to Drive Referrals
Using contests is a great way to get the individuals who are most likely to refer to you to compete with themselves and each other in your favor.
To implement contests, you must first have an established affiliate program so you can offer financial rewards to contest winners.
For 5 referrals, you can offer one prize; for 10, another prize; then for 15 or 20, and so on (while maintaining the normal financial reward for referrals). The person with the most referrals can win an additional prize at the end of the contest period.
Anyone who has seen the energy of kids during school funding drives as they try to sell the most wrapping paper and popcorn knows how exciting sales contests can be. You can generate this same energy in your affiliates through a well-implemented referral contest, and in the process drive event attendance and fill seats at your seminar, event or workshop.
Referrals: Delegating Event Promotion to Your Professional Network
Referral systems are a powerful mechanism to get those most excited about your content to do part of your work for you. Offering financial rewards can be a great idea to generate incentive and excitement among those who are most likely to refer to you, but the other techniques listed above should also be considered as part of your overall referral strategy.
Rather than doing all the legwork yourself, tap into the power of your network to maximize awareness of your content and fill those seats at your workshop, event or seminar.
