Seminars are the most effective for financial advisors to generate interest and obtain new clients. The most crucial factor to holding a successful financial seminar is the invitation. A bad invitation will almost always get tossed in the recycling, and the few who do show up after receiving one will be unqualified or unlikely to set up an appointment. On the other hand, a solid invitation will pack your seminar with excited prospects, already halfway sold on your services. Let’s break down the main ingredients of the successful seminar invitation and discuss how each can be utilized to maximize your return on investment.
Attention Grabbing Headline
Don’t dive straight into the gritty details; give your prospects an eye-catching headline that sparks interest and forces them to read on. Keep your title short, but powerful. Remember, what people want is financial security, stress-free retirement, etc… not to attend a seminar. So basic invitation headlines like “Financial Planning Seminar” followed by a date/time and location will never be as effective as “Want to Retire Rich?” or “Blueprint for Financial Freedom”. Get creative, but keep in mind the needs and desires of your potential customers and how your service solves their problems.
Graphics That Make Sense
It’s easy to cast a wide net and put the same old generic graphics on every invitation you send out. The most common (and boring) graphics that advisors tend to put on their invitations include photos of happy older couples, a picture of the free meal being offered at the seminar, or even a headshot of the advisor. It is proven that people respond more to mail that feels like it was tailored for them personally, and luckily, personalization in direct mail marketing has never been easier than it is now. With VDP (variable data printing) technology, you can change a number of factors from invitation to invitation, including both text and graphics. As trivial as it may seem, something as simple as changing graphics of people to match the gender, general age-group, and ethnicity of the person receiving the piece leads to significant increases in response rates. If you are offering a free meal at your seminar (see our blog post Why You Should Be Serving Food) and want to include a graphic, make sure that your vegetarian prospects aren’t seeing the same juicy steak photo that the rest of your recipients are. There are tons of ways to use VDP to personalize a seminar invitation, and you can read our extensive guide on the subject “Why We Love Variable Data Printing” to learn more about its uses.
Compelling, Specific Bullet Points
The bullet points are the meat of the seminar invite. Now that you have captured the reader’s attention and personalized their mailer so that they feel your services are for them, it’s time to really sell the benefits of attending your seminar. Once again, the key to making your invitation as effective as possible is tailoring it for the specific audience you are targeting. Appeal to their emotions, whether it is the desire for financial freedom or the fear of financial hardship. Focus on the “why” more than the “what” and stay away from generic bullet points that people could Google search for themselves; the more specific and exclusive your bullet points sound, the more compelling they are to prospective clients. Find out what motivates your audience to take time out of their lives to come to your seminar, and if you find that you are targeting several groups in terms of reasons they would want to attend, make sure that you write at least one bullet point appealing to each.
If you follow this guide and put the proper thought and attention into crafting each of these components on your next invitation, you will pack your seminar with qualified, interested prospects. Keep an eye on our blog for more tips, tricks, and guides that share our expert marketing knowledge!
