Should you be in the conference or seminar business?

Are you missing the boat on ancillary revenues by not sponsoring conferences or seminars? There are a number of factors to consider.

* Would the time and effort spent on conferences be more profitably devoted to launching another newsletter? In the industry, overall successful new launches are tougher than they used to be. Finding new ways to get money from existing subs is increasingly popular.

* Is your universe large enough to support them? This is a tough question. In the early days United Communications found that Postal World could successfully sponsor conferences when it had only a few hundred subscribers. It's a fact of life that on your prospect list are people who will come to an expensive conference but not subscribe to the newsletter.

[??] How much competition is out there in your area? Associations and for-profit conference givers? Associations do often have a "status" in the field, but your newsletter should have as much opportunity as another for-profit firm.

But the only way to find out is to test the waters. It's a risk. If the mailing bombs, you can cut your losses by canceling the meeting; but the mail costs are gone.

Big industry event or one-day seminar?

* What type of meeting should you hold? The best is a large-scale conference which you can repeat annually and which becomes a recognized "industry event." Benj Steinman at Beer Marketer's Insights and the late Denny Griswold's annual PR News extravaganzas are two examples of this type.

But a one-day seminar might be the best way to test waters. Meetings like that are usually the best vehicle to hop on a hot topic. It is not a good idea to publish a newsletter aimed at people or businesses "in transition," but a seminar on the the right topic at the right time can be very successful.

The newsletter association did very well in the 1980s with a couple of workshops on how to pick computers and software for newsletter operations, but after a year or two, the topic was dead. A truth of planning this type of meeting is the success of one is no guarantee that the next won't be a dog.

Site selection

The "executive retreat" sort of limited attendence meeting in very attractive locales can be valuable for all, but it's difficult to make much money running those despite high-ticket cost, and they are just about as much trouble to manage and administer as meetings with much larger attendence.

A caution on site selection. Before you pick an international location, are all your prospects going to have passports? And there are a few Caribbean countries where, in theory, conference expenses are not tax deductible because of squabbles over bank secrecy laws.

* Who will be coming to your meeting? If the prospects are senior executives, you have a lot more freedom in location and price than if you were aiming a meeting for people who are "sent" to the conference.*

Rives Cheney was very successful publishing The Pryor Report under contract with the Fred Pryor Conference/Workshop empire, but she learned that attendee lists were not good for the newsletter. The people on those lists didn't decide to attend the workshop; they were "sent."

* For beginners, holding the meeting at your home location is probably better than going on the road. There are some audiences that are never going to go to a meeting in Las Vegas. You'll know who they are.

* Tie-ins can be nice. If "everyone" in your audience is in New York for the Big Annual Whatever, that could be a good time and place to slip in your seminar. At Baseball Forecaster, Ron Shandler runs his annual conference in conjunction with the Arizona Fall League. Sessions in the morning, games in the afternoon.

Marketing

Here are some suggestions for marketing meetings:

* Don't worry too much over the price of the conference. People who are going to travel to a seminar are going to spend a bundle overall on airline tickets and hotel rooms, so another $50 (or $100 at higher levels) probably won't affect the buying decision.

* Offering early-bird registration discounts is a way of both getting money in early and gauging the level of interest.

* Consider accepting bill-me registrations, at least from your current subscribers. You know they've sent you checks before.

* For non-subscribers, don't try to create a combination conference-subscription deal. They don't seem to work--harking back to the old DM adage to sell only one thing at a time.

Get them to the seminar, and worry about selling them a subscription later.

*Location, location, location: When he was running his "How to Start a Newsletter" seminars around the country, Howard Penn Hudson would regularly get participants from, say, Chicago to his meetings in Southern California or even Hawaii--even though he also offered them in Chicago.