When you collect email addresses from your audience and wider contact network, you gain permission to market to them on an ongoing basis. What people are implicitly saying when they give you their email address is, “Give me a reason to refer you to my friends. If you make me a believer in your cause, I’ll inform my own network of what you offer.”
If you make everyone a believer in your message and your unique value proposition, you’ll be setting yourself up for a legion of referral-generating machines who will become your personal sales force. And the very best way to make this happen with everyone and anyone who meets you and hears you speak is by using email marketing!
Keep in mind that this is essentially the exact same thing that the Motivational Speaker Academy training eCourse (if you were a past member) taught you to do with meeting planners, but this time it’s on a bigger and more far-reaching scale.
By building an email list that you’ve gathered from audience members, you can stay fresh in everyone’s minds, and become their go-to expert (and eventually trusted friend) for everything pertaining to your area of expertise. Best of all, you can become their trusted expert source indefinitely, and for free. When someone from your contact list – or anyone in their own network – needs a speaker for an event, you will be the person who pops into their mind as the one to hire.
But that won’t happen automatically; you need to stay in constant communication with your prospects and slowly build their trust and win their loyalty. The first step is to ensure that you gather email addresses in all you do, whether in person at an event or on your website. Once you do manage to add a prospect’s information to your email database, you have to follow up with relevant, meaningful contact on an ongoing basis.
With practise, you’ll learn how to collect thousands of email addresses from your event attendees and your website visitors, and once you do, you’ll be able to foster a personal relationship with each one of them. And everyone knows what happens when you build personal relationships!
Always remember that in the speaking business, as in every other industry, it’s not who you know, but who knows (and trusts) you. Email marketing is the best marketing tool, bar none, for getting more people than ever to know and trust you.
