“How do I increase my webinar attendance rate?”
That’s a question that I’m asked on a daily basis!
My name is Jody, the founder of Social Charlie, where we help train and recruit in-house ad strategists
for high ticket coaches.
We work a lot with webinar funnels and it’s no secret that webinar attendance rates have
been dropping over the years. Webinars are still extremely valuable, but there are new strategies that
you can incorporate to make sure people attend your webinar.
Because let’s face it, you’ve put in a lot of time and effort creating this webinar, so that it breaks down
limiting beliefs, and shows your ideal client how you can help them overcome it. It helps serve your
audience to get over the situation that has been holding them back.
You have the answers and it’s out there but people aren’t seeing it, even if you are investing dollars with
Facebook ads (which by the way, I 100 percent recommend).
Now, let’s just have a look at ad costs for a moment. Let’s say you put $500 ad spend into your
live webinar and you’re getting webinar registrations at $5.
That means you’ve got 100 registrations at $5 .
Now, it’s not uncommon for a live webinar attendance rate to be like 10 percent. That means out of the 100 people you have registered, only 10 will show up live on your webinar.
Therefore, your $5 lead cost per webinar registrations is now $50 per attendee.
Ouch.
And if your lead cost is actually higher at around $10 per webinar registrations and you have 50 people register and 5 people turn up, that means it costs $100 per each attendee.
Those are scary numbers.
It’s in our best interest to maximize ROI and do everything we can to encourage attendance and have them excited to turn up to this webinar.
Live webinars can create such a buzz, so we want them to come in buzzing and anticipating some great content.
So, how can we get them there?
How can we have a higher percentage of the $5 registrations to turn up?
The secret is to get back in front of them with Facebook ads, specifically retargeting ads.
You may be saying, “But why do I have to spend more money on Facebook ads? I’ve now got them
in my email list. I can just send them email follow ups.”
Well, my friend, we all know, that email open rates are decreasing, so maybe 20 percent of those
webinar registrations are actually going to open your email.
You cannot rely on your pre-webinar email series to get people there, because they’re just not opening their emails. You need to go back to the platform where you initially engaged with them, which is Facebook and it doesn’t have to be expensive at all.
For these retargeting campaigns, you could just start at just a dollar a day.
Now this works best if you use an engagement or reach campaign, where you show up in front of all the people that have registered, and that have landed on your thank you page.
So, for a dollar a day, you can stay in their newsfeed and stay on top of mind.
There are a couple of ad styles you could use here to retarget them and push them back to attending the webinar.
1. Testimonials
Using quotes from what other people have said about the webinar, about how good it was and benefits they got from it.
2.Teasers
You say, “Hey, is it really possible to do x, y, z?
I’ll reveal all on Thursday’s webinar. Can’t wait to see you there!
3.Direct response
You can say “Hey, thanks for registering. Looking forward to seeing you on the webinar on Thursday,”
Those 3 ad styles work great with engagement, reach and even brand awareness objectives.
Another strategy that has done well is incorporating messenger bots. Your ad would have the ‘send
message’ button and that’s where you could say in the ad “Is it really possible to x, y, z?
Find out on Thursday’s live webinar. Tap ‘send message’ to get notified directly in Messenger.”
When they click on ‘send message’, they automatically receive the welcome message through messenger.
Messenger bots have a fantastic open rate, ranging from 80 to 100 percent, and at least a 30 percent click through rate.
Bots are very powerful and they are a great way to increase your attendance rate, because then they can
tap ‘send message,’ and you can continue to give them some value to lead up to the webinar and increase that buzz factor.
I would also include a bot on your thank you page of your webinar, to say “Tap below to get exclusive
pre-webinar bonuses, and to be notified when we go live.”
This will attract people to enter your bot sequence and nurture the lead before the webinar so that they turn up live.
Another key factor to a high attendance rate, is the amount of time between ads and actual webinar live date. We typically start showing ads 5 days before the actual date.
Years ago, back in 2012, I remember registering for webinars that were three weeks out. That’s crazy!
Who does that these days?
Five days on the other hand is a short timeframe, and those short timeframes actually work perfectly to incorporate a bot.
To recap, incorporating a bot into your live webinars, either by having it on the thank you page,
or having the send message feature in your ads, sandwiched between when they’ve registered, to the live webinar, so that they can get into your bot sequence, is very valuable.
Or if bots are just not on your priority list at the moment, start with retargeting ad campaigns for people who have registered.
Now, how do you increase attendance for your evergreen webinars?
That’s a bit trickier right?
Especially if you’ve got some scheduled times, where they might schedule two hours out, or 12 hours out.
There is a very complex and technical way to do it, where you could do zaps and tags, that can send tags over to active campaign, and create a Facebook custom audience that dynamically updates and goes over to Facebook.
But the non-technical way to do it is to use a tool like Connectio. Within that tool, we use ConnectRetarget which gives you a super pixel , and you can add that pixel on page that’s broadcasting the webinar.
Then you can create an audience of people that have watched a certain amount of time.
And then that pixel will fire off and send the information to Facebook automatically through your
Facebook Ad account. Then you create a Facebook Ad that will show to people who watched 10 minutes
or less of the webinar and it would say “Hey, life’s busy. Come back and watch the webinar because of x,y, z.”
Also include some benefits and testimonials, like the other ads we were talking about, with comments
that other people said about the webinar, to encourage them to come back and consume that content.
Bottom line, we want them to watch that webinar in its entirety.
So within Connectio, ConnectRetarget is the particular feature that we use to get people who have left early to come back and watch the webinar.
These ad campaigns are crucial because they are for people who are just entering our funnel and we
want to make sure that we’re getting the right message and the right ad to them. We don’t want to
target just anyone who’s landed on the thank you page, to come over and book a call, or to go to the
sales page. They don’t know what they’re booking a call for, and they don’t know what you’re selling.
We want them to come back and consume the content in the webinar.
Our main goal is to retarget that audience, that have left early, to come back and consume the content.
These ads work really well to get people back to watch the webinar. We have seen a high conversion rate
of people who do come back, watch the webinar, and then go on to book a call.
I hope you found that valuable and that you apply these strategies to increase your webinar attendance rates.
I’m Jody from Social Charlie. If you’ve got any questions about this, just drop them in the comments below.
If you would like to know more about how you can have your own in-house ad strategist, who can have 100 percent focus over your campaigns, to get you the best results, who will be one of the best trained ads and funnel specialists around, then head over to www.socialcharlie.com.
There’s a guide that you can download that tells you more about it, or you can book a call with our team, to discuss if it’s a good fit for you.
Until next time!
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