Webinars have quickly emerged as one of the best ways to connect with clients and customers across the globe. With these unique tools, it’s easy for business leaders and marketing teams to educate, inform, and entertain their audiences.
At the same time, webinars allow you to showcase your industry authority and thought leadership.
Webinars do more than just give you another type of content to add to your roster. These tools provide a popular way to highlight the details of your business, while also adding a face to your brand.
However, just like any other marketing strategy, making sure that your webinars deliver real results starts with figuring out how you’re going to get people to attend your sessions.
Fortunately, your good old email sequence might be the answer.
Table of Contents
Adding Webinars to Your Marketing Strategy
Webinars, otherwise known as digital seminars, are live events where you can present something to your audience. You might teach them how to use your product or service better, or you could discuss a strong trend or concern in your industry.
Highly engaging when used correctly, webinars allow you to explore everything from product demonstrations, to Q&As where you answer your customers’ most pressing questions. Thanks to webinar tools that feature things like one-on-one questions, and hand-raising, it’s up to you how advanced you want your webinar to be.
The benefits of webinars are varied, but they can include:
- Improved engagement: Webinars can keep customers connected with your brand for between 60 to 90 minutes. That’s a lot of relationship-building time.
- Better ROI: The software and tools for creating webinars are pretty affordable these days. That means that you can get a high return on investment, without spending much initially.
- Better leads: Around three-quarters of all B2B marketers find that webinars lead to more qualified leads. Up to 40% of attendees may convert.
To unlock all the benefits of webinars, you need to do more than just record your session. You need to generate hype around your online events. That’s where your email campaigns come in.
Creating Your Webinar Email Sequence
There’s more than one way to market your webinar, from adding landing pages to your website to spreading the word via social media. However, over half of all webinar registrations come from people who heard about you via email.
Additionally, the attendance rate for email sign-ups is between 40 and 50%, which means that there’s a good chance people will actually attend your session. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the emails you can include in your sequence to achieve maximum impact.
1. The Invitation Email
First things first, you need to find people who will sign up for your webinar.
There are a lot of ways to do this. You can create a landing page, share information on social media, or even publish a press release on a popular site.
One of the easiest options, however, is to take advantage of your email list. Your list of email addresses is packed full of people who have already proven that they’re interested in your brand and what you have to say. Make the most of this fact by sending an intriguing invitation email to the segments you think will be most interested.
Remember:
- Keep it simple. Don’t overwhelm your audience with too much information
- Highlight the benefits – let your audience know why they should attend
- Make it easy to subscribe – you should only need one button for your audience to confirm that they’ll be attending.
Check out this simple and eye-catching webinar email from Asana, for instance:
2. Post-registration follow-up email
The first email in your webinar sequence is there to follow up with attendees after they’ve clicked on your landing page or invitation and agreed to come to your webinar.
It’s in this email that you ensure your customers have everything they need to attend your session. You can provide details on things like where the event will take place (a website link), the time, and the date. Think of it like sending a confirmation email for an event.
The email provides your registrants with confirmation that the signup was successful. Additionally, the attendee should also get some details on what to expect from the webinar. If you can add a link for a calendar reminder, that will be useful too.
3. The Reminder Emails
People are busy. As excited as they might have been after they got your stunning confirmation email detailing your upcoming webinar, there’s always a chance that they’ll forget all about it.
A reminder email is there to refresh your attendee’s memory and ensure that they’re prepared for your upcoming event. The amount of emails that you should send will depend on how frequently you usually interact with your customer. However, it’s typically a good idea to send at least 3 emails, including:
- An email a week before your webinar
- A message one day before the webcast
- A reminder an hour before the start time.
With the first reminder email, include a link to the webcast, and information about when it’s starting. It might also be helpful to include some basic information on the kind of content your attendee can expect. This will maintain the “buzz” that people feel when thinking about your webinar.
In your second reminder, a day before the webinar event, focus even more heavily on the upcoming experience. You might highlight a crucial speaker that’s going to be part of the webinar experience. You could also encourage people to share the event with their friend so they don’t miss out.
In the third email, sent on the day of the webinar, make sure you advertise how amazing your webinar is going to be. Don’t overwhelm your audience with too much content in each reminder email but keep them aware of why they signed up for the event in the first place.
4. The Thank You Email
Once your customers have actually attended your webinar, you need to continue with your engagement strategy. Following up with your audience and providing a “thank you” has a number of benefits. First, it shows your audience that you care. That’s essential for building customer relationships.
Secondly, the thank you email can also be an opportunity for you to share any resources you promised when encouraging people to sign up for the event. This may include a copy of your slides, or a replay-able video that your audience can use to go over important lessons. For instance, take a look at this email including all the materials in the webinar from Daniel Waas:
A thank-you and free gift let your audience see the value that they got from your webinar immediately. It also ensures that they’ll be more likely to feel comfortable signing up to events in the future. You might even find that your customers want to share lessons they’ve learned from your webinar with friends on social media, which means more brand reach for you.
Including quick “share this quote” or “share this slide” buttons into your email if you want to encourage sharing.
5. The Additional Resources Email
Along with your email thanking customers for attending and delivering any resources you promised, you can also deliver additional value that could encourage more future engagement from your audience. For instance, you might provide an email that lists some blogs that were mentioned in the webinar to increase their understanding of a topic.
Other resources to highlight include:
- Podcasts that cover a similar theme or topic
- Case studies or white papers
- Access to free tools that users can check out for themselves
- A demo of your product
- Original research
This is an excellent chance to boost engagement across multiple platforms as part of your omnichannel marketing strategy.
If you’ve published webinars in the past and shared recordings online, then you could also include a “webinars you might like” section. This will be a great way to get an insight into the kind of content that your audience is interested in.
You can even use the same strategy to encourage people to sign up for future events or take part in different digital courses. For instance, AWeber sends emails out to webinar attendees that include free access to upcoming courses and learning opportunities:
Optimizing Your Webinar Sequence
Creating a practical webinar email series is an excellent way to encourage engagement with your brand and improve your chances of connecting to your audience. Just remember to keep the golden rules of successful email marketing in mind.
This means:
- Personalizing your emails: Remember to check your audience segments and adjust your messaging to suit the people you’re connecting with. A personalized email can encourage a 20% increase in sales, plus it’s great for your brand reputation.
- Listening to your audience: After you’ve sent the majority of your email sequence and encouraged people to visit your webinars, your work isn’t over. You still need to check out your marketing statistics to see what’s working for your business. It may even be helpful to send out a survey or poll that asks people to rate your webinar and their learning experience.
- A/B testing: As you continue to learn about your audience and what they want from your brand, you’ll be able to enhance your webinars and your emails. Try out different messaging, subject lines, and engagement strategies to boost your chances of success in the future.
As effective as webinars might be for building better relationships with your target audience, you’ll only get the results you deserve if you commit to making an effective email sequence too.
Are you ready to bring your webinars to life?
- 6 Reasons to Use Ontraport for Email Marketing - January 16, 2022
- 6 Reasons to Use AWeber for Email Marketing - January 10, 2022
- 5 Ways to grow your list with ActiveCampaign - January 5, 2022