Speaking gigs are an exciting way to build interest in your digital brand. Here is how to generate email leads and turn audience members into email subscribers.

The Power of Email Marketing

Presenting to a live audience on stage or camera is an opportunity to influence them. However, your job of piquing their interest in your digital brand doesn’t end when you walk off stage or the camera stops rolling. You might be wondering how you can continue to engage them after your talk or presentation ends. The answer is simple: Email marketing.

SEE ALSO:  How to Negotiate An Email Sponsorship

Email marketing can allow you to continue building the relationship you began with your speaking gig. This can allow you to deepen the connection you began to form with your audience. Most businesses send out marketing emails daily or weekly, meaning that they are an excellent way to truly make your business a part of the lives of your customers.

Here are 3 steps to help you generate email leads from your speaking engagements.

1. Make People Curious

When people want to achieve or learn something, they take action. You can spark this desire and use it to generate leads by intentionally building a curiosity gap at speaking gigs. A curiosity gap exists when there is a void between what people already know and what they want to know.

Intentionally leave your audience with questions. Leave them wondering about something which you can provide the answer to, making it worth their time to fill that curiosity gap by seeking your products, services, and digital brand out. Make them want to join your email list and open emails from you. This needs to be a key part of your email marketing strategy.

SEE ALSO: How to Make Your Email More Visible in Gmail

2. Offer an Answer

Once you have created a solid curiosity gap that has people asking questions and wanting more, it is time to fill that gap and satisfy their desire for discovery. This can be via some sort of tool or resource, however, it is recommended that you choose one that is easy to consume to generate email leads.

In-depth tools or resources like ebooks and reports tend to be less effective at generating email leads because they are very dense and take a lot of time and effort to read. Audiences tend to prefer easily digestible short-form content like:

• Tips
• Formulas
• Grids
• Calendars
• Templates

These tend to convert more audience members, however, this is not a universal rule when it comes to email marketing.

Know Your Audience

It might be beneficial to provide one short and sweet resource and one that is more in-depth to audiences, as different audiences will likely prefer different things. For example, an audience of scientists will appreciate in-depth published research or a white paper. However, an audience of social media marketers may appreciate something more concise.

Also, make sure your tool or research is specific to the main lesson of your presentation. Do not forget to mention it several times at relevant points throughout your speaking gig. Be sure to mention it at the very end. It is also important to make sure that once your audience joins your list, they are met with a relevant onboarding strategy that inspires them to stay subscribed.

SEE ALSO: Step Up Your Onboarding Email Strategy

3. Generating Email Leads In Person

After you have engineered a curiosity gap and offered a tool or resource to satisfy that gap, it is time to invite your audience to subscribe to your email list to access that tool or resource. However, keep in mind that generating leads in person is very different than doing the same thing online. Your audience will most likely not have their laptops with them and at the ready. Even if they did, going on their laptops could potentially distract them from your presentation.

On the other hand, every audience member will most likely have a mobile device on them.

There are certain services you can use to help them opt-in and generate leads. These include email marketing tools like:

• Call Loop
• EZ Texting
• Textiful
• Join By Text

How to Use Tools like Call Loop

Here is how to utilize these tools to generate email leads. First, invite your audience to text a phrase that has to do with your presentation to a specific phone number provided by the service you use. Your audience will then text that phrase to the phone number and receive a response on their mobile device. It will ask them to respond with their email address. After they text in their email address, they will be automatically added to your email list and be aware of all of your future email campaigns.

SEE ALSO: How to Use Google Analytics to Track Email Campaigns

Using Your Speaking Gigs to Generate Email Leads

Ultimately, speaking gigs are an exciting way to engage with people face to face about your digital brand, products, and services. They can help you build brand awareness and gain customers, fans, and followers. Use them to their full advantage, and take the opportunity to generate email leads at your presentations. In order to build your email list, follow these steps.

1. The Curiosity Gap: Make people curious. People take action when they want to know or learn something.
2. Fill the Gap: Once you have people asking a question or looking to fill a need, let them know of a tool or resource that can answer that question or take care of that need.
3. Provide Access: Now that your audience has a question or need, and an awareness of a way to satisfy that via a tool or resource, it is time to provide access to that tool or resource via email subscription.

SEE ALSO: 3 Lead Magnet Ideas to Build Your Email List

Be sure to keep your audience in mind and provide resources in a manner and level of depth that will be relevant and useful to them. With these steps in mind, you are ready to get started generating email leads at all of your speaking gigs!

Do you think speaking gigs are an effective way for a digital brand to make a real-world connection? Comment below…