How to generate registrations and the pre-webinar phase

In today’s episode I will address two very important issues: how to generate registrations for your webinar and how to start bulding a relationship with them to build your brand, authority and have as many of them participating to your live webinar.

Let me tell you from the start about a certain distinction to have: the registrations are your leads and most webinar platforms have ways to either export the e-mail addresses of your registrations or to add them automatically to an autoresponder platform so they become part of your email list. The actual tools to use is a separate chapter but don’t worry about that for the moment. So, I repeat, the registrations are your leads, you should add them to your list and they become part of your marketing tribe. So, how to generate the registrations?

1. Ads – you can use Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Linkedin Ads, Bing Ads and basically any ad platform to generate registrations for your webinar. Many of the registrants may not know you at all but they will register because your webinar will address one of their pains or will show them the to something they want to accomplish. I assume that you are already present as an online marketer in a niche. If not you should find one and there are hundreds of resources online which can help you choose a great niche for yourself. If you are familiar with Facebook Ads and list building and if you already have a list you can even create ads speciffically for the members of your lists who registered on Facebook with the same address they are on your list. But let’s keep things simple here – you will have to pay a certain amount of advertising for any registration to your webinar. The traffic coming from people who don’t know you is called cold traffic and usually will convert less than traffic coming from a JV partner who e-mails his database (warm traffic).

2. E-mail marketing – if you already have a list from previous promotions you can use it successfully to invite people to your webinar presentations. Also you can buy solo ads, which is a form of advertising where you send an e-mail with the webinar invitation to somebody else’s list and you pay a fee per click, per sending or per registration (CPA/ cost per action). Also, if you are ready to split usually 50/50 the price of the product or service advertised at the end of the webinars you can have affiliates and JV’s which will promote your webinar to their lists and will be paid only if the leads generated from their lists will purchase something from you at the end of the webinar. We will discuss the JV webinars later but when you are just starting out it will not be easy to get JV deals because most of the times the JV partner will ask to reciprocate, meaning to promote their webinar if they have one to your list so you will need to find ways maybe through advertising to fulfill that.

3. Content marketing – you can use very successfully blog posts, social media posts, articles, press releases, videos uploaded online and have affiliates and JV partners do the same. There is one thing I would like to point here. If you create a lot of content before webinar and that content will remain posted use a redirect script and transform the link to the registration page into a link to the replay page for the webinar allowing other folks to still access you webinar after the live date and purchase the product or service pitched.

So based on the industry statistics, if you have 300 registrations to your webinar you can expect around 100 to show-up for the live event. As you can see, around 70% never come to the webinar but they are members of your list, of your tribe and you cancommunicate and market to them.

So let’s say that we have already 300 registrations, people who saw something related to our event and want to join. But … think about yourself, to how many webinars do you register and to how many actually join? Look at your inbox and see how many companies and individuals are begging for your attention. So to ensure the highest conversion you can get you need the pre-webinar phase. This is usually a sequence of emails prewritten and uploaded to an autoresponder platform where you start to communicate with your prospect around the theme of the webinar, build authority and trust, deliver value and prepare it for the actually live event. During this phase you can ask your audience to fill a survey, to contact you directly, to share their stories, their major pains and this will help you even to customise certain aspects of your presentation to the audience for the live webinar.

Now many webinars are promoted with three days before the live event with a sequence of three invitation e-mails so there is not much room to send a lot of content to the registrants before the webinar so ideally would have to keep at least a 7 days window to collect the registrations and deliver the pre-webinar phase.

You know, today the marketing works like an event. So you need to make from every webinar an event. You need to build anticipation, show your leads that you care about their needs, opinions and pains and to win their trust. And today the sales are done more and more this way. You collect the lead and have a process through a series of e-mails which will make the sale as the logical next step. You need to let the client to decide for attending your webinar and buying the product or service by adding a lot of value. What you can include in the pre-
webinar phase? Text, videos, blog posts plus the usual notifications from the webinar platform used. You can offer prizes and special bonuses to the participants to the live webinar to make sure that they are even more incentivised to participate. It is proven that the live webinars convert more than the recorded ones and replays so you need to focus on that.

Even if the prospects will not attend the live webinar they are already on your list – remember? They will have access to the replay, to see your offer for what you want to sell and will be exposed to your marketing messages for as long as they will be on your list. So don’t think any second about being frustrated if they don’t attend the live webinar. The main purpose is to educate, entertain and bring value, solidifying your expert status in the same time.

If you need inspiration for what to include in your pre-webinar phase register to webinars presented by other successful marketers in your niche, see what they are doing and model what seems to work. Be creative, don’t just copy & paste as this is wrong. By modelling you use a blueprint that is proven to work and don’t need to reinvest the wheel.

That’s all for today, in tomorrow’s episode we are going to dive into the monetization models for webinars and finding the right products and services to be presented during webinars.