If you often get speaking gigs, then you should be utilizing them to add on to your mailing list. Read about these 3 simple tips that will help you do just that.

Good orators have been known to move armies to victory and civilizations towards revolutions. Because you have access to both eyes and ears of your audience when you have a speaking gig, you can reach their brain much more easily.

You can encourage questions as you speak, which would help you dispel apprehensions that some people in the audience might have. But many people are not good listeners, and prefer to digest and assimilate new information when they get a chance to process the new information in solitude and at their own pace.

Also, a public speech is a great way to get email ids for the next step of your engagement. For both these reasons, it is important that you utilize your speaking gig as an efficient tool to add to your mailing list. After you have taken an hour’s time of your audience (or maybe more), many of them might be in a hurry to leave. So you will need to smartly weave in your email id collecting efforts within your talk, so that by the time the audience has left, you have got what you wanted. Let us look at 3 easy ways to get there.

1. The first thing to do is not to lay all your cards on the table, and keep something for later. It might become too much for the listener to grasp in a single session. But more importantly it gives you an opening where you can slip in the suggestion of a follow up email. So once you have told your audience the what and why of your subject, you can leave the why out. That will arouse curiosity in the minds of your audience. This will be the perfect time for you to pitch in the possibility of you telling them the rest of it in a more detailed email, if they would be kind enough to share their email ids. Not only would it give you a number of additions to your mailing list, but because they would have been voluntarily provided, you could be sure that they would become active subscribers.
2. After you have got the consent of the members of the audience (or at least some of them) to become your subscribers, you need to give them a taste of what they can expect. A simple tool that you have developed, or a few simple tips to get around a problem that was discussed, or just a simple excel sheet which you have developed, which can be used by the audience – all of these can be used. What you share with the audience at the end should also be mentioned during your talk a few times, like ‘later, I will share with you a simple tool to help you
3. The point we mentioned in the first point – about getting listeners to share their email id – can be easily achieved even before you leave the stage. There are several tools available which can help you align email ids (and phone numbers) to your mailing list. The tool would provide a phone number to which the prospective subscriber needs to send a text with a particular alphanumeric string, after which they will get a validated text back asking them to submit their email ids. Later the tool will update all these email ids into your mailing list.

The 3 simple tips above will allow you to extract the best mileage out of your speaking gig, and quickly and easily add on a large number of validated email ids of interested listeners to your mailing list.