Everyone is planning on doing webinars these days. In fact, in just the last two weeks, the agency has been getting plenty of enquiries from prospective and existing clients about hosting webinars.
Here’s everything you need to know about how that webinar was put together.
It isn’t rocket science to host a webinar; one can easily do it with any of the webinar platforms out there. But after hosting webinars for years now (and making mistakes along the way), we’ve learned a couple of lessons on how to host a webinar that would successfully:
- Ensure a high turn-up rate (Most webinars have a turn-up rate of 40 to 50%)
- Convert your webinar attendees to actual clients
In fact, the largest webinar that we’ve ever hosted had over 35,000 registrants (that’s almost tripling the size of a concert at Singapore’s indoor stadium), and we generated over SGD7,200,000 (about USD5.4 million) in gross revenue from just one webinar.
Yes, you read that right. SGD7.2 mil in one night.
Here’s the proof from our daily revenue report from Tableau:
So what did we do? What made that webinar work so well? While I’m not in a position to divulge all our secrets away, let me at least tell you what our ingredients to success were.
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There are essentially, four core segments of what would make a high converting webinar.
- Getting webinar registrations
- Ensuring people turn up
- Having a high converting webinar script
- Establishing a strong post-webinar follow up series
Landing Page
Most webinar registration landing pages are terrible. It’s not uncommon to see landing pages like these:
Here’s a rule of thumb I’d suggest – Never use your webinar tool’s default landing pages because they’re not built for conversions.
Instead, when building your landing page, always make sure you cover:
- Headline: What’s the major promise for people attending your webinar?
- Brief Description/Agenda: Provide a little more details for those who want to find out more about what your webinar will cover
- Featured Experts/Speakers: Show their credibility, photos, and most importantly, address the question of why are they presenting at this webinar?
- Bonus points: Are there any extra incentives you can give away for people to attend the webinar? Check out the example below where they’re giving away $1 million in bitcoin
I happen to know the people who hosted this webinar, and I can genuinely attest that they’ve really given away that much value of Bitcoin
Webinar Confirmation Page
Most webinar organizers pay very little or no attention at all to their confirmation page. But webinar veterans would know that your webinar confirmation page is just as important, if not, more important than your registration page itself.
Getting people to register for the webinar is only 1/4 of the battle. The second part is making sure they show up, and your confirmation page is your best chance of ensuring that they show up.
There are a couple of things that you can do:
- Mobile number – This is one of the most valuable data points to capture from your target audience. Why not use the confirmation page as an opportunity to capture their mobile number as well so you can remind them of the webinar?
- The “Add to Calendar” Feature – Most working professionals rely heavily on their calendars. Make sure you have an “Add to Calendar” button put up on your Confirmation page
- Instructions on how to join the webinar – You may have emailed them the instructions on how to join the webinar upon successful registration. But everyone operates differently. Some prefer to keep the webinar registration details on the calendar invite, and others prefer to save the webinar details on a text file hosted on the desktop. Whatever it is, always be sure that you use every channel to remind them of how to join the webinar.
- Get them to share it on social media – Because, why not?
Promote your webinar
This part is pretty clear to most marketers. I’d generally advise an ideal time to start promoting your webinar would be three weeks before the actual webinar live date (and you’d want to get more aggressive in your promotion when the date draws closer). When promoting your webinar, there are generally a handful of channels you can use:
- Your existing list – You would want to promote your webinar to your existing audience at least 3-4 times over an extended period.
- Digital Advertising – We’ve produced comprehensive guides before on how you can run your ads on various digital platforms.. The same can be done when advertising for your webinar.
- Partners – This is probably something that most marketers haven’t thought of because it’s the hardest to pull off. But a great way to bring in new webinar registrants is through any existing partnership/relationships that you have. For example, here at Brew Interactive, we’re partners with a couple of software companies with huge email lists. And we sometimes partner with them by co-hosting webinars, which they would feel compelled to promote to their audiences as well.
Staying Top of Mind
We’ve discussed earlier that getting people to register for your webinar is only 1/4 of the battle. The second part involves making sure they turn up.
Your audiences are distracted all the time. More so, especially given that we’re in the middle of a pandemic now. The most effective way to ensure you score a higher turn-up rate is by continuously engaging your webinar registrants through email.
Here’s how your overall webinar and engagement journey should look. The Email Engagement Series is part of the red box in the diagram below.
Conducting your webinar
The third part of your webinar is how you script it. Over the years, we’ve refined the core segments that a webinar would typically require.
For the sake of conciseness of this article, here are the first 2 out of the 12 segments (you can download all 12 by clicking on the button below)
- Webinar Segment #1 – The Welcome – 10 to 15 minutes before start time The webinar experience (and yes, it MUST be an experience) starts the moment someone logs on. Have an opening slide ready and welcoming them. They need to know they’re in the right place. This is an excellent time for someone to jump in and “talk” with the audience. Get some interaction going by asking where they’re from, etc…
- Webinar Segment #2 – The Introduction – 1 to 2 minutes Set the tone for the webinar, set up authority. Ask for all distractions to be off, and provide them with all the general housekeeping rules/instructions.
To see all 12 parts, we’ve compiled them into a checklist, which you can download by filling up the form above.
Post webinar
In most scenarios, there are a few types of audiences you want to follow up after your live webinar is over.
- Existing customers who attended the webinar + Contacts who attended the webinar and took up your webinar pitch
You may want to explore cross-sell or referral opportunities with these audiences.
- Leads and existing sale opportunities who attended the webinar but did not take up your webinar pitch
- All contacts who registered but didn’t attend the webinar
For the last two groups of audiences, you can consider sending them the webinar replay.
But one thing we’ve learned is to make sure you set a date of when you’re intending to take down the webinar replay. There’s something peculiar about human psychology that if you want to keep the webinar up there forever, people tend not to watch it.
More importantly, you would want to send them a series of post-webinar promotion emails after the webinar is over.
Summary
While it may take some time to organize and plan, webinars are an excellent way for any marketers to acquire new leads and to re-engage existing leads. Just remember these four core segments of what would make of a great webinar:
- Getting webinar registrations
- Ensuring people turn up
- Having a high converting webinar script
- Establishing a strong post-webinar follow up series
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