How To Get More Clients By Following Up After Your Speaking Gig Or Webinar

When I was getting started as a new health coach, I knew that getting speaking gigs was the best thing I could do to get clients quickly.

So I pounded the pavement and lined up as many talks as I could. I got my first two clients from the first talk I ever gave!

While this strategy worked for me, I kept hearing from colleagues who weren’t seeing the same results I was. They wanted to know how I was able to get paying clients from every talk I gave.

My health coach friends would ask…

Is my presentation not compelling enough?

Do I need to attract more people to my talks?

What am I not doing? How can I turn one talk into $1000+ in client revenue?

Of course giving a compelling talk to a large audience increases the odds that people will sign up with you after your talk… But audience size isn’t necessarily a limiting factor. I once gave a talk to 1 person and she became a client.

So what was I doing differently to get these results?

I was getting more clients with my follow up strategy.

I had a great system for following up with my talk attendees that got more people on my email list and turned more people into clients. Other coaches would tell me that they were shy about following up – they either wouldn’t ask for their attendees’ emails, they would only send 1 email to follow up, or they would wait too long to get in touch.

The reason the follow up is so important is because most ‘consumers’ need 7 interactions with a company before making a purchase – and this is especially true when purchasing one-on-one services. Your clients have to know you, like you, and trust you before they signup.

While it’s certainly possible to build that trust factor during your talk, most people need a few ‘reminders’ to really be convinced that you can solve their problems. That’s why the follow up is so crucial to growing your business and converting more attendees into clients.

This is the strategy that I used to convert more talk attendees into clients, and I still use these methods now when I lead webinars.

How To Follow Up After Your Talks

Collect names and emails

If you’re going to follow up with your talk attendees, you need a way to reach them! The best way to collect names and emails is on a form that you pass out during the talk, where you offer a free gift for the live attendees. Include space for them to write down their name and email and check off if they would like the free gift.

If the attendees registered for the event online, ask the event host or coordinator if those emails can be shared with you. This will allow you to reach out to people who registered but did not attend live.

If you’re doing a webinar or online talk, the attendees will be providing their email when they sign up. Done!

Send a thank you email immediately

Prepare a thank you email ahead of time so that you can send this one out right after your talk. This is important, so you can keep the momentum going.

Your thank you email should be short and sweet – thank them for coming, remind them of the key takeaways that they just learned, link to your free gift, and give them one call to action.

The call to action you include in this email should align with the offer you made during your talk.

If you invited people to sign up for a free consultation, your call to action should include a link to schedule the consult.

If you invited people into a group program, send out an email that shares information about the program and links to your sales page where they can learn more and sign-up.

One note here – don’t send the same follow up to someone who already signed up or purchased during the talk. You don’t want to confuse them by sending them an additional sign up link.

Create a follow up email series

At this point you’ve had 2-3 interactions with your new audience and they’re definitely starting to warm up to you. This is a great time to keep up the momentum and continue building that know, like, and trust factor.

An email series is the perfect way to build that relationship quickly. You can provide a lot of value over a short time with a strategic email series. You don’t want to hope that your new audience will visit your website, look you up on social media, and find the blogs or resources you’ve created. You’ve got to tell them to do that and point them in the right direction.

Your email series can be anywhere from 3-10 emails – but I think 5 or 6 is the sweet spot. What you write about is going to depend on the offer you made during your talk.

If you offered a specific program, be sure that your email series goes into more detail about the program. You want to use these emails to build trust, educate, and provide value so that your audience feels confident in their decision to work with you. Tell them what kind of results they can get, what they can expect during the program, and share success stories from past clients.

Encourage fast signups by creating urgency. You can do this by putting a time-limited bonus on the offer you made at your talk – whether that’s an expiring discount, an extra resource they’ll get, or bonus one-on-one time with you.

If you offered a free consultation at the end of your talk, use the emails to promote the consult, while sharing more information about you and how you help clients. Create urgency in these emails by making the offer time-limited and share the dollar value of the consultation. For example, you could say..

“These sessions are normally $97, but because you attended my talk I wanted to do something special for you. For the next 7 days, you can schedule a free nutrition strategy session with me. I’m offering a limited number of these sessions, so if this is something you’re interested in, be sure to sign up now.”

I am positive that if you use a follow up email strategy you’ll see the results from your talks and webinars!