In How To Secure Excellent Speakers For Your Vision Board Party: Part 1, we spoke about the importance of mapping out your ideal event before you even approach an event speaker.
Once you’ve gathered all your research, it’s time to make the leap and email one of the prospective speakers you listed.
Part two walks you through exactly how to write an email that will get noticed and responded to.
What Information To Include In Your Email
Who You are
Unless you’re a household brand like freakin’ Oprah, you’re going to have to let the potential speaker in on who you are. People want to work with people and brands that they like. Give them the opportunity to decide whether or not they like your brand.
Note: It’s not about convincing them that you’re awesome. It’s about being authentic about who you are and seeing if they genuinely like you and your brand. That way, the working relationship starts off in an authentic way.
What Do You Want
Don’t mince words here. You’re definitely making a request so do it, and do it well. Influencers are used to receiving requests to speak or participate in activities so being direct with your request makes it easier for them to make a decision.
The Event Details
You want to give them as much information as possible so they can check their schedule, the location and map out logistics in their head. This will give them a better idea of whether they can say “YES” or “NO” to the request.
Your Specific Ask
Do you want them to speak for 15 minutes or 1 hour? Will it be a deep dive or high level talk? Will it be workshop style or keynote talk? Do you want time for Q&A?
Giving your potential speaker one sentence about your expectations of them reduces the number of conversations you need to have in the future. They won’t have as many questions for you because you were very clear in your original email.
What’s In It For Them?
OK, I’m not saying you have to say exactly how much money you have to offer in the first email, but you do have to let them know that you want to talk about terms. If you can provide them with a table to sell items, a promotional email to your list of contacts, then say so.
Influencers get a lot of emails with people making requests with no intention on giving anything in return. Don’t be one of those people. Show them that you value their time and effort.
Common Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make
Sending A Mass Email To Several Speakers.
You took time to plan out your event and audience in advance. You can choose the right speakers with the perfect message that will help change your attendees lives. This speaker is in perfect alignment with your audience (because you were careful and strategic in choosing them).
A mass email negates all of that work. An email going to several influencers can never communicate what’s special about that specific person and why they want to speak to your audience like a personal email does.
Not Showing that You’ve Done Your Homework.
This email is the first impression a speaker will have with your brand. You want to show them from your very first sentence that you mean business.
Make sure each email is personalized with the person’s name and company. Let them know why the impact they’ve made through their work is exactly the message your audience needs to receive and why speaking to your audience will benefit them in the long run.
Get straight to the point.
Mention the Who, What, When, Where, and How - and do it fast.
Influencers don’t have a ton of time to figure out what you have going on. They want to get the information, make a decision and go on with their life. Your only job with this email is to make that decision an easy one to make. You do that by giving them all the information they need quickly and concisely.
Getting speakers for a vision board party can seem like a lot of work. If done right, you can create an experience that your audience will remember for the rest of their life. I think that’s well worth the effort.
xoxo
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cyrene is a fun and accomplished workshop facilitator, learning and development guru and Human Resources professional. Being at the helm of Thrive Lounge has been a long-time dream. Through vision board workshops she plans to accomplish two-way learning. Sharing her vast years of knowledge to motivate and encourage others; while simultaneously getting the reward of great energy, ideas and questions to ponder back from each group. A super win-win. Please join our Thrive Lounge community so you too can benefit!
