How to Run a Webinar that Engages & Converts Your Audience
Reading Time: 7 minutes These can be hard times for people who rely on events-based marketing to sell. COVID-19, after all, has prompted the cancellation of physical events as more people are urged to stay at home to prevent the virus from spreading. Simply put, without events, these people can’t sell. Or can they?
Fortunately, they actually can. Thanks to the Internet, salespeople can still reach potential leads even if they are in the confines of their homes. The key is to know how to leverage technology to engage and sell to your audience amid the COVID-19 crisis.
In this article, we’ll see how to use a webinar to engage and convert your audience. But first, let’s take a look at how to create your webinar sales funnel.
Creating Your Webinar Funnel
To run a successful webinar, you need to create several pages to move people down your webinar funnel. You have the registration page, the thank you page, the holding page, the webinar, the sales page, and the social proof page.
Of these six pages, though, the essential parts of the funnel are the registration page, thank you page, and sales page. Most of the best webinar software platforms let you create these pages. Let’s take a look at each of them one by one.
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Registration page
The registration page is the entry point to your marketing funnel. Your goal is to get people who have expressed an interest in your webinar to sign up. As such, you need a headline that grabs people’s attention.
Your page has to have a clear value proposition. This information is normally provided below the headline in bullet points. In this content that supplements the headline, you should also specify the benefits people can get if they attend your webinar.
If you have a different set of speakers, you can include them on your registration page. Your registration button should also stand out on the page.
Finally, you can include the name and a bit of information about the speakers. This adds an element of social proof to the registration page, which can help improve the conversion rate.
As a final tip, don’t choose a complicated design. You want the design to be simple so people can easily navigate around the page.
Thank You Page
The Thank You page is where people are redirected once they sign up for your webinar. Apart from the usual “thank you for signing up” message, your Thank You page should include the benefits they get from attending the webinar.
The basic details of the webinar should also be included in your Thank You page. Share when the event will be held, and reiterate the benefits.
Final Sales Page
A webinar is a great way to warm up a lead and generate sales. If you want to make a sale, you’ll naturally want to push people to a sales page, which you can create using a landing page builder. Your sales page should cover what you have to offer.
On the sales page, include a countdown timer and a fast action bonus. When you say something like the product or service is only available on the day of the webinar, it helps increase urgency. Fast action bonus offers, help incentivize a purchase.
And then there’s that final nudge.
It’s important to have lots of testimonials about your product or service. The pricier your product or service, the more testimonials you should include to help convince people to make that investment.
Email Registration Sequence
At this point, we’ve covered all the main parts of your webinar funnel. The final thing to discuss is the email registration sequence.
The email sequence should be composed of three to four emails: a welcome email, the email sent one week before the event, the email sent the day before the webinar, and the email sent an hour before the scheduled time. Each email is a reminder to the person who signed up about the upcoming event.
Creating Webinar Slides that Engage & Convert
Your primary goal when running a webinar is to engage your audience and generate some sales. In short, there’s always going to be a sales pitch here and there. The thing is, though, you can’t make your entire presentation one big sales pitch. If you do this, you’re bound to lose attendees halfway into your webinar, or even earlier.
So what do you do first?
Establish your credibility. This makes sense. People want to listen to those who have experience and knowledge to share. Talk about your journey about how you reached your goal. You can also mention the positive experiences of previous attendees.
Once you’ve established your credibility, discuss the benefits your attendees will get from staying until the end of the webinar. Then, explain the added benefits of your services or your product.
Your sales pitch should be two-thirds of your presentation. However, it’s important that you also have something useful to share with your audience. This is the hook that keeps people engaged. Finally, wrap up the webinar with a question and answer section followed up by a clear call to action.
For example, if you were promoting a time clock app, your webinar might cover “how to manage a remote team.” Your call to action at the end of the webinar could be a lifetime or special annual deal exclusively for attendees.
How to Promote Your Webinar
We’ve covered how to structure your webinar. Now, let’s look at how to get attendees. You’ll be glad to know, you don’t need a large email list or a busy blog to run a successful webinar.
I suggest then that you do a combination of LinkedIn and targeted email outreach too. Create a list of people who fit your ideal customer persona, and search for them by company, and then position on LinkedIn. You can use this strategy to generate a list of leads.
You can also ask the people you know to forward your message to anyone who might be interested in the webinar. If you have a co-speaker or a different set of speakers, you can ask them to promote the webinar on their social media accounts as well.
Make sure to make the most of your existing marketing channels as well. You can write a blog post on the upcoming event and post it on your website. Or you can include exit-intent popups on your site so your site visitors can be made aware of the upcoming event.
I recommend you use a combination of the strategies listed above to promote your webinar.
Running Your Webinar: Presenting Tips
Let’s assume you did all those things, and it’s D-Day. If this isn’t the first time you speak in front of a crowd (assuming you’re the speaker), then well and good. However, many of us get nervous, presenting in front of large crowds.
One of the most important things about presenting is to make sure you have fun. You want your presentation to be engaging. Make the experience enjoyable, but also share useful information. Try to crack a few jokes, and throw in some unusual slides that make people pay attention.
Secondly, give them the content you promised, but don’t give a big monologue. For some more tips, check out this post that contains guidelines for effective sales presentation delivery. If they enjoy the presentation, find it useful, and stay till the end, you can expect to generate some serious conversions at the end of your presentation.
Summing Up
The COVID-19 crisis has changed the way many of us work and conduct business. However, it’s not like we are stepping into the unknown. Digital marketers have been using online strategies to make money for close to three decades.
Webinars are one of the most effective methods for generating online sales. By following the formula outlined in this article, you can run a webinar that engages and converts your audience into customers. Now it’s over to you to take this theory and turn it into practice.
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Co-Authored With
Owen Jones is the Senior Content Marketer at Zoomshift, an online schedule maker app. He is an experienced SaaS marketer, specializing in content marketing, CRO, and FB advertising.
