Webinars are BOOMING right now. And it’s not hard to see why. In-person events are cancelled for the foreseeable future and most of us are stuck at home. Just take a look at the Google Trends data for the search term ‘webinars’ ?
Marketers are turning to webinars and virtual events to close lead gen and pipeline gaps, start sales conversations, and give their communities an opportunity to interact face to face (albeit online).
While searches for webinars have spiked in the last month, there’s no guarantee your own webinar registrations have seen a comparable uptick. And even if you have seen your own webinar registrations soar, are you making the most out of every registrant? Are you turning those webinar views into sales conversations?
At the end of the day, are you doing enough to close the pipeline gap caused by in-person event cancellations?
Well, I’m here to tell you that Drift is ready to help. We’ve shifted our entire events strategy to work in this digital-first world. So, if you’re looking to boost your webinar registrations AND turn those registrations into meetings and pipeline, you’re in the right place. Keep reading ?
Rethink Your Webinar Strategy
For starters, no one will attend a webinar that’s not exciting or relevant to them. So make sure you’re not just hosting webinars for the sake of it, but are actually coming up with topics and content people are looking to consume. These pointers can help:
- Start With Who: Determine who you’re trying to reach to understand which topics will resonate best with them. Make sure anything you do come up with is relevant NOW. Times are changing and fast. So something that worked last week or last month won’t work now.
- Find a Partner: Can you partner with someone else – either an influencer, expert in your space, or another company? Finding a partner will help you amplify promotion, boost your registrations (aka lead gen), and lend more authority to your content.
Ramp Up Webinar Promotion
Now that you have a killer topic you know your audience will love, it’s time to get people registered. And you can’t just stick to the same old promotion playbook because everyone is using social and email.
The right message is more important than ever right now, and so is empathy. So, write like a person, not a “marketer.” And be creative in order to stand out from every other virtual event and webinar promo email out there. Here’s some copy we used to promote our own virtual RevGrowth Summit earlier this year:
That email ? got a 46,9% open rate and a 15.9% click-through rate!
And as always, optimize as you go. Both email and social happen to be great channels for collecting data on what your audience engages with. So, be sure to monitor engagement and registration rates from those channels, and create more promotions with the messaging and graphics that work, and turn off the ones that don’t. You might even decide to put some email syndication or paid ad budget behind what’s proven to work.
Lastly, use conversational email to register people directly from your emails. There’s a ton of friction in the classic webinar registration process, which leads to even more missed opportunities. Think about it: if you email 100,000 people about your webinar, the average click-through rate is 2%, and the average landing page conversion rate is also about 2%. So at the end of the day, you only end up converting around 40 people from that massive email send.
I’m no math PhD, but I know that’s bad.
If you’re emailing these people, then you’ve already got their contact information. So, you don’t need a form to collect it again. Remove friction by enabling people to reply to your email to register. This makes life easy for your recipient, improves conversion rates, and creates even more leads for sales.
Convert Webinar Leads
You did it! You created awesome content, got people to register and actually attend. So what’s next? Converting those attendees into buyers. Drift’s Webinar Bot can help. Here’s how:
- Save time: Drift’s Webinar Bot can send webinar recordings, copies of your post-webinar offer, and answer common attendee questions for you – so you can focus on replies that are more likely to lead to a sale.
- Focus on only the best leads: Webinar Bot sifts through the noise and automatically routes the warmest leads to the sales right rep, so sales can focus on the right accounts. That means you’ll book more meetings and generate more pipeline from your webinars. Win-win.
