This is how GOOGLE markets a seminar, baby.

Many law firms send large numbers of seminar invitations, hoping to fill the seats.  Of course, the goal should be quality rather than quantity – i.e. it’s better to have the right people rather than simply a lot of people.  But quantity is much easier to execute – just send invitations to everyone.

You want to see how to increase the attendance at a conference? How to get the rapt attention of the right people?  Go the extra mile and grab their attention. Intrigue them.  If the targets are important, it’s worth spending more on the materials and taking the time to tailor them to the individual recipients.

Here’s a package that showed up in my mailbox. It caught my attention; it was the first thing I opened.  I dedicated much more attention to it than anything else that arrived that day, and took the time to appreciate the creativity, hard work, and expense that went into it. It implicitly promised a program of real value.

First lesson – all the Hallmark research shows that “dimensional” mailers get opened first, before the letters.  Of course I opened this box before the holiday cards and other flat envelopes.  And the return address from Google made it even more interesting:

Opening the top, you see a black box and an envelope:

Let’s start with the box.  It’s thick and very high quality:

The subtly embossed Google logo shows the elegant design:

The enclosure letter sitting on top of the box is a folding card, beautifully printed, personalized with my first name on it.  “Ross, join us.”

It doesn’t say “Mr. Ross H. Fishman, join us.” or “Fishman, Ross, join us.” or the other misspellings or database errors which would convey that it’s junk mail or a faulty database.  I’m feeling pretty special at this point. 

Opening it, you find an invitation for a seminar hosted by Guy Kawasaki himself:

There’s also a personalized, hand-signed cover letter that is offering to sell me Google Engage for Agencies (” a program that helps you master the art of online marketing”):