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How to drive attendance to your webinar?
Getting people to register is one thing. How do I get them to actually ATTEND the webinar !?
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4 Answers
There are a few different ways to encourage and remind registrants to attend the live showing of your webinar:
As James said, you can and SHOULD send out reminder emails at different intervals after the person originally registers. I recommend sending out a 24 hour reminder, a 1 to 2 hour reminder, and a 15 minute reminder.
Also, When the confirmation email is sent to the registrant ensuring they successfully registered and passing along log in or dial in information, see if the platform you are using has an option to include an Outlook Calendar Item. This makes it easy for the registrant to add to your calendar and then along with your reminders, it is also on their calendar promoting their attendance.
You can do a give-away, such as a free book or a desired item (iPad, Kindle, etc.) and make clear in your promotions only the ATTENDEES will be eligible.
Lastly, I would recommend Social Media to drive registrations and attendees. You can easily make announcements via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, prior to the event, letting people in your network know the webinar is taking place and when it is happening.
I just wrote a whole post about this topic a few days ago:
"Why your webinar attendance sucks:
http://www.socialmedia-academy.com/index.php/2010/12/why-your-webinar-attenda...
In essence: Leverage social media to make it a successful event.
Because social media is where people hang out - not in spam filters, do not call lists or wast baskets where advertising ends up to be.
1) Event preparation
- Make sure your contacts, friends, advocates, business partners know about it, find it valuable and are happy to talk about it.
- Ensure you have a platform for all of them to share their opinion and interest
- Be approachable for ideas, suggestions and able to tweak your initiatives as you go
2) During the event
- Don't be too busy "organizing" things. Keep talking about the event publicly and while it happens in real time
- Make sure everybody else can talk about it, tweet and re-tweet, have a hash tag…
- Help blogger and other influencer with key information in a well prepared way so they can use the content without retyping it
3) Post event management
- Now the real work begins. Have your SRM tools ready to individually engage with every single attendee
- Have your team review the event and share results publicly
- Motivate speaker and audience to review and share publicly what they saw, learned, liked and also didn't like
Cheers
Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS
(ways to connect)
One method is to develop an attractive handout of useful information made only available to webinar attendees.
A small business administration consultant told me he gets 50 per cent or less of invitees to attend live seminars. I use his advice as a measure for potential attendance based on the list I use for invites.
I often survey those on my list for best times for a webinar and use the data from the survey to guide the best times for the audience I'm pitching.
Reminders of the event, timed at intervals during weeks preceding the webinar, are good ways to stay top of mind when potential attendees are actually setting their schedules.
James and Sarah have included some very valid points. Indeed, don't assume that once someone signs up he/she will attend. It takes a logical approach to follow-up with reminders (restating the benefits of the webinar). Incentives that work in marketing research are alive and well to help make the webinar more "sticky". Social media provides additional opportunities to increase registration. If you have carefully cultivated a Twitter community of interest, this is an excellent way to inform them. Facebook works as well but may not be as focused on the target as Twitter (much depends of the size and depth of the community for either tool). LinkedIn provides its own unique benefits. Remember, you can use direct ads (LinkedIn) and Facebook ads to reach prospects. Twitter's "promoted Tweets" is rolling out as well. Display ads can be purchased on a PPC or impression basis very efficiently with excellent targeting selection tools.
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