Why is it that webinars are so effective at acquiring customers?
Which is more social, educating people through an interactive webinar or sending a tweet and not getting any responses?!
With webinars, you get a chance to talk to your audience and they can interact with you in real time.
How social is that?!
There are even some brave people, like Nathan from Heyo, who hand over the mic to the audience and let them take the floor!
So, don’t think for a second that webinars are not social media tools because they certainly can be!
Here are 15 tips/tools for improving conversions on your webinars.
1. Pick the Right Webinar Software
To host a webinar, you’ll need to sign up with a webinar provider, unless you decide to do it yourself and use something like Google Hangouts.
The most popular webinar software amongst digital marketers is GoToWebinar.
It’s not cheap but it does work and it’s really reliable.
An up-and-coming provider to watch out for is WebinarJam.
WebinarJam hasn’t been around for too long but it’s growing like crazy, it has some great functionality, and it’s much cheaper than GoToWebinar.
2. Start Off With a Great Landing Page
You need to have a high-converting landing page to encourage people to sign up to your webinar.
You can take the risky approach and ask your web designer to create a new design…
or…
… use a proven template that achieves high conversions.
We use LeadPages, which provides templates that don’t look amazing but convert really well.
For our last webinar-registration page, 80% of people who arrived on the page signed up.
Not bad, eh??
An example LeadPages page
3. Split Test Your Landing Page
Even if you have a great landing page, you still want to change aspects of it to see if you can improve its conversions.
This is another reason to use a tool like LeadPages, where split testing is built in.
Present 2 different versions and see which performs best
You can make a change to your landing page and test two different versions to see which one performs the best.
This video shows you how to set up LeadPages and do split testing. Thanks to Matthew Woodward!
4. Create Promotional Images With Canva
When you start promoting your webinar, you’ll need to create a variety of images.
The best tool for doing this is Canva.
Even though you may have to create a lot of images, most of them will be in similar formats.
Here’s an example of the type of images you may want to create:
- Facebook cover photo
- Twitter cover photo
- End-of-blog-post promotional image
- Facebook ad image
- Image for sharing on Twitter/Facebook etc.
Before you start any promotion, make sure you have the images created.
5. Encourage People to Share After They Sign up
Once someone signs up, you’d ideally like them to tell all their friends that they have signed up to a cool new webinar.
With LeadPages, you can set up a custom thank-you page with sharing options on it. This kicks off the sharing.
If you want to incentivize people to share, maybe you could run a competition?
If they share a promotional message to their social networks, they are entered into a competition to get a free download of a a very useful and relevant guide.
Now, it’s not difficult to get them to share…
We set this up a couple of times using the tool Paywithatweet.
Despite the name, it does also work with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc.
A further 5% of registrations came from people signing up through this competition, and we only gave out a free guide as the prize.
6. Kick off an Email Sequence When People Sign up
If you get people to sign up and the webinar is still a few weeks away, they may easily forget about it!
So, ideally, you need to have an email sequence that promotes the value of the webinar and, closer to the time, warns them that the webinar is coming up.
Amy Porterfield shares emails to encourage people to go to the webinar
One way you could promote the value of the webinar is to share some really useful information, related to the webinar topic, that they can implement immediately.
If you can get people who are registered to implement a cool tip, that’s going to encourage them to come because they will see the value of the information you are teaching.
To set up these sequences, you can use email marketing tools like AWeber or MailChimp ormarketing automation tools like Ontraport or Infusionsoft.
7. Get People to Check In
Kick off the webinar about 15 minutes before the event with a screen that encourages people to go to a check-in page on your website.
This is a tip I got from Nathan from Heyo and it works really well.
Here’s an example screen we use, when waiting for the webinar to start.
The screen that appears before the webinar starts
This page should have a prepared tweet that they can share with their friends, telling them they are now going to be on the webinar.
Here’s what’s displayed when you go to the check-in page:
The tweet you’ll get people to send out
This can encourage more of their friends to join in.
To get this working, you need use a tool called ‘Clicktotweet’.
8. Track all Your Results
If you don’t know what is working, you can’t make improvements the next time you run the webinar.
Every time you share a promotional link, you need to know if it’s generated any webinar registrations.
For example, if you share a Facebook post and run a Facebook ad, which one generated the webinar registrations?
The best way to do this is to use the Google URL builder.
Using this, you can create a web address with additional information tagged on it and then, in Google Analytics, you can see where your traffic is coming from.
Useful?
You bet.
When you start using these, you can go to Google Analytics and see where your conversions are coming from.
Check out this post, which explains how to set up UTM tracking codes.
9. Retarget Your Website Visitors with Ads
Your website visitors are a great audience for your webinar.
You can place some images on your website to promote the webinar, but you could also retarget your site visitors.
For example, when someone visits your website, you can then display an ad to them that promotes the webinar when they next go on Facebook.
To set up retargeting, you need to put a piece of code from Facebook onto your site (a tracking pixel). Facebook will then follow these visitors to Facebook and start showing them ads.
10. Pin Your Tweet and Facebook Update
When you share a post on Twitter or Facebook about the webinar, you can ‘pin’ the updates to the top of your feeds.
Here’s an example of Donna promoting a webinar. This is pinned to the top of her Twitter feed.
A pinned tweet at the top of Donna’s feed linking to a webinar-promotion page
This means that people visiting your profile on Twitter or Facebook will see the webinar promotion at the top of your feed.
11. Run a Promotional Campaign on Social Media
When you create your imagery and promotional text, it’s time to start scheduling your updates on social media channels.
Try and adjust your messaging and your imagery but make sure you send out updates regularly.
Schedule your updates across Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and other channels.
Use your UTM tracking codes for anything you share, because you can track all of this in Google Analytics.
12. Run a DM Campaign on Twitter
Direct messages are a 1-to-1 message between two people on Twitter.
They have a bad name because there is a lot of spam sent this way.
But we have found that, if we send a highly targeted and personalized DM, we get great responses and sign ups!
Here’s an example of some of the responses.
Example responses from a DM campaign
We use SocialBro, which enables us to run this campaign. Consider DMs for your next webinar!
13. Encourage Sharing In Your Email List
When you email all your subscribers, provide an easy option for them to share out details of the webinar to their friends.
For example, if you use MailChimp, you can easily embed buttons that make it easy for people to share.
14. Retarget Previously Registered People
If you ran previous similar webinars, how many people registered but didn’t turn up?
They expressed an interest before, so there’s a good chance they will be interested this time.
Promote to them with targeted emails and/or retarget them with ads.
15. Provide a One-Click Registration
LeadPages recently announced the release of LeadLinks. With LeadLinks, you can send an email to your subscriber database with a link to the webinar registration.
When they click on the link, they are automatically registered without going to any landing page.
Sweet…
Summary
Webinars are a hugely powerful tool to grow your business, but there’s a lot of preparation involved with setting up and running the webinar.
In this article, we outlined some key ways of getting more registrations for your webinar.
I’d love to hear your feedback – please share any further tips you may have.
p.s. We’re running a social media workshop (webinar) coming up soon. It’s a paid event but there is a great early bird offer at the moment (30% off).
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