If you’re here, you are already doing webinars and want to find the secret to increase your conversion rate. You are so in the right place!
Why do marketers (including me) prefer webinar as the number one strategy to get clients?
Webinar marketing is one of the best ways to build trust with your audience. This is powerful because as we engage with our connections and move them from suspect to prospect, trust is one of the biggest factors that will determine whether they will buy your products or services or your competition’s.
I know this because I’ve used webinars to effectively attract new leads and nurture existing leads through the buyer’s journey to make a purchase.
I’ve done webinars to promote both, services and products, for a long time now.
It wasn’t easy in the beginning and I did struggle with webinars at the start.
What To Conversion Rates Should You Expect From Webinars?
Talking about webinars is talking about an ever-growing process. But generally, when discussing a webinar campaign, we think in terms of averages. Here’s what we estimate for webinar metrics:
Registration page conversion: ~30% Cold traffic average
This is described as the number of new visitors to your website who then decide to sign up for your event and reserve a seat. Cold traffic is generally visitors who do not know you directly or have a previous relationship with you (think advertising visitors who are seeing you for the first time!). We see the lowest conversion on sign ups with cold traffic, as you have to prove your value and trust more quickly than any type of “warm” traffic.
Registrant to attendee show-up rate: ~40% show-up average
This is the number of signups (registrants) who actually show up to attend the live event. Depending on the emails you send out, the angle of your webinar, and any giveaways listed for the event, you may see these numbers rise or fall. This average is based on typical “cold traffic” registration numbers as well, so you can see even higher show-up numbers with quality, warm registrants who are excited to engage with you.
Attendee stick rate: ~50 minutes average
This is the average length of time those attendees join you live. Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule here, but most webinars are best kept to around 45 minutes to 1hr 15 minutes. You can definitely run longer events, but for a sales presentation, your best attention span will be right around here.
Attendee to conversion average: 15% average
This is the number of live attendees who joined the webinar that will convert into a sale of your product or service. This number depends directly on the quality of the content, the engagement of your attendees, the desirability of the product, and an irresistible offer, but typically, these numbers are seen by presentations that have a dialed in their market-messaging match.
If you are hosting webinars with no conversion rates, let’s fix this problem.
3 Factors To Host Webinars With Ease and Grace
You know that webinars are part of your lead generation process, so not doing them is not an option. You also know that you should expect 30% conversion at the invitation page level, 40% conversions from registrant to attendee, and 15% conversion from attendee to sale.
After doing hundreds of webinars for our company and for our clients, and attending to many, I have found 3 common denominators between the top performing webinars.
Warm Up Your Audience
Perhaps you have been told that you can build your email list by offering a webinar presentation. While that statement is not wrong, a webinar presentation is a sequel to a great content marketing strategy.
If you want to improve your webinar strategy, the first area to explore is your audience. Are you offering relevant content to them? Do you know them? Do they know you?
If you haven’t taken the time to build your audience and add value so you can get to know them, start here. Your chances to convert followers to webinar attendees, and clients, will be higher.
“People do business with people they know, like and trust.”
Engage With Your Webinar Attendees
If you want to improve your webinar conversions, live webinars will be my second recommendation (after warming up your audience). There are marketers that recommend a webinar funnel and paid traffic, but in my experience, especially for sales of high ticket items, a live webinar will outperform an automated webinar.
Try to be more personal with your attendees. Engage with them. I know it feels terrible to ask questions and getting no answers, but this is something you can explain on your landing page and during the very first minute when they join the webinar.
Manage expectations and tell your audience that you want to see them engaged. Create a poll. Be dynamic.
Webinar Follow Up Email
You are targeting educated consumers. Therefore, they will do more research before buying from you. For this particular reason, you need to craft a high quality webinar follow up email with a simple call to action.
Our top performing webinars did not have any links to purchase. I made sure that I kept my promise of adding a Q&A session to add more value. I didn’t want to rush the sales pitch.
You might need to decide where will your webinar fit on your sales cycle. If it’s to get your audience from cold to warm (convert them from suspects to prospects), perhaps your call to action is to follow up with an email to book a call with you.
