Patrick Gawrych

You want to have a seminar. Great who do you want to invite?

The list selection and criteria is crucial to the success of the seminar. People always ask me who they should invite to their seminar. Or put another way, what demographics they should use. There is no one answer to this question. The answer depends on your location and also your level of experience.

As a first year advisor or agent, you may initially think you only want to invite millionaires to your seminar. Then after giving it some thought, you may realize that you are not ready for that group.

The opposite is also true with an experienced advisor. Several of my clients do not have time to work with a new client if they only have $50,000 to invest. So how do you pick the right audience?

Several years ago the answer was easy. Pick some zip codes and an age group and maybe an income level. List selection is much more reliable and complicated now.

I like to use a list search criteria called Wealth Finder. Wealth Finder allows you to isolate a person by the assets they have available to invest. It will let you pick people with $100,000, $200,000, $500,000 or more of assets to invest.

My clients tell me that they have found this list search criteria to be very accurate.

So for your next seminar, isolate the zip codes you want to use, the age group, and ask yourself what kind of client you want. Is it someone with $300,000 or more in assets? Isolating your mail list will help insure that your invitation is being mailed to good viable prospects.

A word of caution here, the more you raise the wealth finder number the more likely it will be that your prospect already has a financial advisor or maybe a few advisors. It will take more to get these people to attend your seminar.

By the way, I think Advisors Marketing is one of the only mail companies that does not charge an extra .05 cents or more for the Wealth Finder Search.