I was just on a two-hour call discussing how to increase the show-up rate for a weekly webinar. (Side note: making people NOT wait a week is a better option, but sometimes you have to work with what you’ve got.) Anyway, I’d like to quickly share with you some of the things we covered. 1. Don’t underestimate the task at hand when it comes to getting people to show up.. Using the good old “Gun to the head” philosophy. Ask yourself: If you HAD to get people to show up, what steps would you take? Fact: In between registration and the time of the event. People cool off. We need to do more than remind people of the date and time. 2.Principle of arriving differently. Robert Cialdini calls this pre-suasion. Basically, I wanted to be very deliberate about framing the webinar to get more people excited to show up. (More about this below.) The market is getting more sophisticated, and people know that a webinar is a pitch. The plan: actually make it an event and advertise it as one. 3.Leverage modalities. People experience the world through their senses. (sight, sound, touch, etc.) You can market to that. In this instance, we worked on: Voicemail drops SMS (reach people across multiple devices) Sending out a podcast clip (audio) Brochure (give something out to people) Videos (want people consuming stuff ahead of time) 4. Make it an event. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. Although this webinar happens weekly. Each one is an event. All new people. And everyone is slightly different as a result. Key question: What data could we use that would be accurate week after week, and how could that help sell it as an event worth attending? And so, we looked at the average number of people registering per day & on average, how many register per week. This is now being introduced in the ads & emails as a reason for people to get excited and show up. “On average, we’ve had over x number of people register for this PER DAY since we announced it.” <- This is a true week on the week because we’re using an average.