The easiest thing you can do right away is create a list of people you plan to invite. People you may want to invite include: potential customers; the press; neighboring businesses; your city’s chamber of commerce; government officials; vendors; employees and their guests; your friends and family; former colleagues; people who helped get your new business or location established (such as architects, loan officers, lawyers. . .).
The next step is creating, printing and mailing your invitations. Lower your costs by inviting your employees via company e-mail, bulletin board, group meeting, etc. You may want to invest in mailing lists that target potential customers. It is effective to send an invitation in the mail to complement an online invitation.
Check if the information you have on file for your guests is correct. Depending on the number of people you are inviting, it may be unrealistic to double-check all of the information. If this is the case, make sure to at least double-check the information of the people you need at your grand opening event the most.
As a general rule, expect 50% of your courtesy invites to show up. The actual number will probably be closer to 25 or 30%, but it is always better to plan for more. The percentage may be even lower if you are not targeting the right people in your invitations or are sending mass invites.
Send invitations, both print and electronic, to all local news directors and editors. That’s print, television and radio. You never know. Inviting the press can’t hurt.
Along with each invitation, you should include a personalized and hand signed letter. The letter should explain to the recipient who you are, what your business is and why your grand opening is a major event for the community. Remember that they are in the news business; if you present them with a good story, you increase your chances of getting news coverage. If you do not have an in-house PR department, consider hiring someone to take care of inviting the press.
Put someone in charge of calling to follow-up with the press and other personally invited guests. Have this person call them on the week of your grand opening event as a reminder.
When inviting the press or other high demand guests, personalize and sign each letter.
I cannot over-emphasize this. Sending a personalized letter lets the reader know your letter is not spam. Do research on each person you are inviting and have a few lines in the letter that show you know who they are. You may also be able to use information you gather to make the letter more appealing.
Be careful. Though you should be aggressively pursuing the press, remember that there is a fine line between aggressively pursuing and harassing.
Donating money to a local school or hospital, in addition to helping your community, will generate good publicity and help your efforts to garner media attention.
As you can see, a business grand opening is a lot of work. Make sure you give yourself enough preparation time so you can make changes if a problem should arise. Hopefully everything goes smoothly and your business grand opening is a big success.
Source – UPrinting
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