As anyone familiar with marketing knows, a majority of marketing initiatives are conceived to generate leads and ideally sell, or at a minimum, greatly assist in selling a company's goods and services. The legal technology industry is no different. In fact, according to the 2008 InsideLegal.com Legal Technology Vendor Marketing Survey, 79% of all marketing programs have lead generation as the primary goal. With this in mind, it is helpful to differentiate between lead generation that results in a face-to-face meeting, a product demonstration, or a seminar RSVP, compared to leads that are aimed at closing deals, bringing in new business, and directly impacting the bottomline. 

In this case, we'll focus on 'indirect' lead generation in the form of event attendance. How many times have you produced an event - a webinar, a 'lunch and learn', or perhaps a one day workshop- and waited with baited breath for the RSVPs to roll in. Then, once you straddled the RSVP hurdle you were even more anxious about ensuring adequate attendance (actual 'live bodies') to your event. Typically, the correlation between RSVPs and actual day-of event attendance is determined by event type, event venue (or access), event cost, and overall goodwill gained by attending or ill-will earned through absence. Here are some observations as it relates to legal event RSVPs vs. attendance: If producing a webinar, the further in advance you send the initial invite, the smaller the overall attendance (people usually don't plan webinars or web sessions more than a week or so in advance). If producing a complimentary webinar and relying on evites/HTML invites, a majority of RSVPS will occur on the first day the invitation was sent. Email reminders for webinars sent between 3 days prior and up to 3 hours before are most effective. For seminars and educational programs offered free of charge, the RSVP-to-attendance conversion rate is commonly less than 50% and influenced by many factors including event content, ease of getting to venue and length of event, allegiance to the event host/producer (aka 'the guilt factor'), and overall competition from other events or invites.

While there is no silver bullet or magic formula for increasing your RSVP-to-attendance conversion ratio, there are several tips that will guarantee you have adequately covered all your promo and marketing angles (and hopefully result in better attendance):

Set the tone with professional invites and follow-through: Your invitation is often times your first point of contact with your prospects so make sure you are sending out very professional, appealing content that clearly articulates your value proposition and answers the attendee's main question: "what's in it for me?" Once RSVPs are received, make sure you acknowledge receipt and confirm attendance (usually handled by auto-response emails).

Preach value as well as exclusivity: When you send a follow-up or reminder to the initial invite, add unique content tidbits to further entice attendance and to communicate exclusivity of this 'invite-only' event.

Rely on grassroots (word-of-mouth) promotion using social media: While it is not realistic or advisable to blast the invitees with pre-event reminders and 'save the date' messages, it is possible to use social media tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to not only extend your invitation scope but to intelligently 'tease' and preview content attendees will be privy too. For example, if you are inviting legal IT executives to attend a webinar focused on presenting results of a recent IT Budgeting and Purchasing survey, use LinkedIn to provide pre-webinar polls, leverage Facebook to sign up 'fans' and encourage conversation about some of the survey toplines, and tap into twitter to send out short (all you have is 140 character anyway), thought provoking statistics and survey factoids (and web invite links) to your followers and potential webinar attendees. Beyond social media, good old fashioned 'door-to-door' tactics might work well, venue permitting. For example, we recently hosted a tradeshow vendor education program and went booth-to-booth the morning of the event to remind RSVP(ers) and others who had not heard anything about the event.

Tap into your 'social' network: Most events often involve external speakers, panel participants, and lecturers- all of whom are very vested in your event and want nothing more than to draw a big crowd and fill those seats just like you. With a little planning and foresight, you can collaborate with your content providers and have them help promote your event, in some cases to the same crowd you are reaching, in other cases to a whole new group of prospects you might not have thought of or had access to.

Reward RSVPs that attend: Do not take attendance to your events for granted. Consider that your audience will always have a reason to not attend (they'll have more reasons during the economic downturn), but rather seek the event presentation notes and other leave-behind. Reward your attendees for coming with an exclusive gift, acknowledgement, hand-out or other give-away.

At the end of the day, and before you start serving your pre-event continental breakfast, you want to feel good about the outreach and promotion you have engaged in beforehand. If you follow-through on some of the common sense methods above, you'll be able to not only fill more seats at your events but build valuable, hopefully long-term relationships with your prospects.

Note: InsideLegal decided to 'eat our own dogfood' and follow the aforementioned RSVP-to-attendee conversion tips when producing our recent ILTA Legal Vendor Education Program. The result: We received 135 RSVPs to our 3 hour long educational track, and counted actual attendance in excess of 95 through various panel discussions offered as part of the program.