Twenty to fifty percent of your seminar attendees should be repeats or referrals – if you deliver quality programs. Once you recognize this astonishing fact, you will start to include improving program quality as part of your overall marketing effort rather than taking it for granted. You should think of ways to continue to communicate with your graduates to increase referrals, repeats and word of mouth. Here are seven techniques that you can use to improve and communicate quality:

1. Develop a training “manual” for your seminar leaders. This will serve the obvious purpose of improving program quality by properly preparing instructors with answers to their typical questions. It will just as importantly serve as a “psychological tool” to show how much you care about quality.

2. Monitor your seminars and evaluations, and feed this information back to your seminar leaders with helpful hints to help solve particular problems.

3. Communicate with your leaders “at large” via a regular (monthly or quarterly) communiqué with tidbits of information, new instructor announcements, problem sharing, etc. Again, this is both a “real” informational tool and a “psychological” motivational tool.

4. Communicate with your graduates via a newsletter. Include additional information that will help “extend” the seminar. This will keep the seminar alive in their minds, and they will be more likely to send another, recommend another, or attend again.

5. Evaluate seminar attendees annually. You'll be surprised at the insights you get with a “3000–mile check-up.” And you'll once again create a real feeling of caring and continuity.

6. Run an annual “Alumni Program” just for graduates. They will have already shared a common experience, and you can present advanced materials as well as an update in the particular field. What a builder of esprit de corps!

7. And speaking of esprit, what better way to encourage that spirit than by helping seminar attendees establish their own network. Develop a forum either internally or on a public site like Yahoo that can allow you to monitor communications to keep them from being misused, but also allow people to freely share ideas, problems, challenges, and successes with one another. Once established, encourage them to continue their relationships via the network you've helped them establish.

These are just a handful of ways that would work with any seminar. Use these and add your own techniques that are particular to your specific program.

Excerpted from Developing, Marketing and Promoting Successful Seminars and Workshops manual available from our e-Store.