Webinars have become ubiquitous within the modern business world, offering a medium of communication that helps transmit messages and open dialogues in a convenient way. This wasn’t always the case. I’ve been doing webinars for over 7 years now, but it’s only in the last two or three that they’ve been truly accepted. People still complain about technology, but this technology is here to stay because it’s an incredibly useful way of letting people see your service.
Webinars are cheap, easy, and get you in front of existing and potential customers.
We got in touch with four and a half thousand sustainability managers directly via LinkedIn. Of those 4,500, about 170 signed up to our email list (read more here).
From those 170, 13 registered for our idea generation webinar. What’s interesting about webinars is that people will commit to them, but it’s not the same as telling someone you’re coming to meet them face-to-face. That commitment just isn’t there, there’s no social contract, it’s anonymous, so even though 13 signed up, only 6 showed up. Across the webinar world, the average turn up rate is around 30%, but it depends what you’re selling. I hosted a webinar just the other day, 6 registered and zero turned up. That’s a worst-case scenario that doesn’t happen often.
Webinars are an amazing tool to help test your market and enterprise out. You can set one up very easily on a number of platforms. There’s Zoom, Google Hangouts and more, we use GoTo Webinar but Zoom is probably the most popular. You can set up your presentations and your webinar room generates a link to send out to your guests. You can set up a landing page for people to visit with that link on, or you can put it in an email or on social media. That link hooks up to their calendar and gives the prospective attendee notifications to remind them to attend the event.
You do your pitch, you guide the viewers through your slide deck or PowerPoint. You respond to the questions as you go, you see the engagement metrics, and then the webinar finishes and your attendees receive a follow-up email. Those who didn’t attend also get a follow-up email. From that, you can start discussing things with your prospects and hopefully begin to make some sales.
The whole webinar process inherently gathers data along the way. How many people did you approach, and how many of them clicked on the webinar link? How many were interested? How many actually signed up, and how many attended?
Don’t be disheartened if people don’t turn up, just put yourself in their shoes. You get busy at work, other things come up, you forget, or you get distracted. It happens to all of us. Those who are committed enough to prioritise your webinar will show their interest by turning up and listening to what you have to say. You can put your energy into making sales with those who turned up to watch your webinar. If you make a sale, you can look at how many people you targeted, how many you invited, how many signed up, and how many attended and use these figures as the scalable model of your business. You can use the same method to see if your business is viable or marketable.
How many people are in your target market? If there’s a million, awesome, if it’s 100,000 it’s going to be harder. What we are saying is that webinars are a cheap and easy way to drill down on how committed your prospects are, as well as finding out more data and getting more insight about your product or service.
If you get in touch with 100 people and only 10 or 20 click the link, but nobody signs up, you’ve either got to work on your copy, your presentation, or your idea. If your idea is not good enough, it’s time to move onto the next one.
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