Felicia J. Slattery: How to Get Your Audience Members to Sign Up for Your Free Offer

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In the years I’ve been teaching the Signature Speech™, one of the main issues I deal with is helping experts understand that the speech is only the beginning of the conversation with the people in the audience who want to know more.

In fact, one of my clients told me yesterday that from one speech she delivered, she booked $16,000 in consulting business within a week or so of the event.

Had she insisted on being paid a speaking fee, she would not have been welcome to that stage where her PERFECT clients were sitting in the audience.

Speaking for free, selectively and strategically gets results EVERY time. (Of course you can get the same results speaking for a fee, but sometimes the events that don’t pay can yield the greatest profits!)

So that leads to the question about how to ethically get people to join your email list community so you can keep in touch with them to make great things happen and serve them? Thanks to client and friend Shelley Hitz, book writing coach, who inspired this post by asking:

“Do you give [the audience] a link to sign up [for your list] or get them to sign up on a sign up sheet?”

Here’s how I answered:

I ALWAYS use a sign-up sheet passed around the room. I do it that way for several reasons.

• People physically commit to receiving your information in their own writing. That cements for them that they really do want  to know more.
• I save those pages and keep them as proof to show any autoresponder service (or even the person himself) later on that they did sign up, if ever there is a challenge of any kind. It’s a way to make sure I’m safe and protected because most people are awesome, but every once in a while you’ll get the occasional mean person who wants to create trouble for you rather than just hitting the unsubscribe button. And yes, some people will reply to your messages and say they never signed up. So it’s easy to show them their own handwriting if they get testy about things. And then hit unsubscribe for them!
• No other method works as well to get everyone in the room who is interested in what you have to offer on your list. I usually get 100%. The mobile app and text people will tell you their way is better, but I have tested every way known to business speakers, and there is something powerful about a plain old sheet of paper with a growing list of names on it being passed to you. You see, there is a psychological trigger of being excluded that comes along with seeing everyone else’s name on a list and the feeling (more than the thought even) that “everyone else is getting this, I don’t want to miss out” because they can see everyone else signing up on the spot. It’s also a concept known as social proof. You don’t get that with mobile because we all know people can be checking their email, Facebook, or texting their friend about dinner plans. No social proof there.