To ensure the effectiveness and success of webinar follow-up campaigns, organizers often use automated sequences.
Why Automate Follow-up Sequences
Automating webinar follow-up sequences is crucial for maintaining a structured and efficient process. These sequences improve overall webinar communication and offer several benefits.
With the help of automated follow-ups you can:
- Streamline the process by organizing and simplifying the follow-up tasks.
- Improve efficiency and ensure timely and consistent communication.
- Reduce the need for manual work and save time for more strategic activities.
- Minimize the follow-up errors, such as missed reminders or incorrect timing.
Webinar Follow-up Strategies: Types of Automated Sequences
Webinar organizers rely on different types of automated sequences to engage and convert registrants or participants at various stages. Here, we’ve highlighted some of the more commonly used automated follow-up sequences, to help you improve the efficiency of webinar campaigns:
Post-Registration follow-up sequence
This sequence begins immediately after an individual registers for the webinar. It typically includes:
- Registration confirmation & acknowledgement emails
- Webinar information emails, like topic, speaker details, date and time, platform, etc.
- Pre-webinar instructions, such as compatible devices and required bandwidth
- Preparation materials and resource-briefing about the webinar
- Reminder emails at designated intervals to keep participants informed
Post-Webinar follow-up sequence
This sequence starts after the webinar concludes, and aims to maintain engagement with attendees. Post-webinar follow-up emails generally include:
- Thank-you emails expressing gratitude for attendance
- Feedback survey emails to gather participant’s thoughts and suggestions
- Webinar highlights, key takeaways, or summary of the webinar
- Emails with webinar recording link and webinar video clips
- Additional webinar-related reference material, based on attendee feedback and responses
Nurturing follow-up sequence
This sequence is designed to convert attendees and registrants into leads and, eventually, customers. It involves catering to your webinar audience’s requirements and interests to keep them interested and involved with your content and business. This email follow-up sequence can include:
- Asking about their future webinar topic preferences
- Sharing exclusive links to an upcoming webinar or event, based on their selection
- Offering personalized offers or discounts
- Sending regular, noteworthy company updates
If you have had an initial meeting with potential customers post-webinar, in the follow-up sequences, you can include:
- Case studies related to their industry
- Webinar and event invitations relevant to their field
- VIP access to exclusive events, like product launches
Nurture campaigns require more dedicated and targeted follow-ups, which is why having a single sequence might not be effective. It is ideal to customize these follow-ups based on the funnel stage of your prospects post-webinar.
Steps to Automate Webinar Follow-ups
- Select a webinar platform that supports automation features and integrates well with your existing tools. Platforms like Airmeet are popular choices for their comprehensive customization and automation capabilities.
- Ensure your webinar platform is integrated with your email marketing tool/CRM system to allow seamless data transfer and automated email triggers.
- Design engaging follow-up templates for each stage based on different event stakeholders (attendees, speakers, etc.), such as confirmation, reminder, thank-you, and feedback request emails.
- Use the webinar platform’s custom delivery feature to schedule email sequences. Define triggers for each email, such as upon registration and webinar reminders, as needed.
- Automatically send feedback surveys to attendees shortly after the webinar concludes, to gather their thoughts and suggestions. You can also use the webinar platform’s survey tools.
- After the webinar concludes, set up automated thank-you emails for attendees, including a summary of key points and a link to the webinar recording.
- For effective follow ups with the no-shows, send an email with the webinar summary and the recording link.
- For all attendees and registrants, set up personalized automated nurture campaigns that provide additional educational content, custom offers, and information about upcoming events, to keep them engaged and guide them through the sales funnel.
- Use real-time analytics offered by webinar and email marketing platforms to track and analyze the performance of your automated follow-up sequences.
Automated Follow-ups: Potential Challenges and Best Practices
| Potential Challenges | Best Practices |
| Difficulty in maintaining personalization at scale | • Use dynamic content and merge tags • Implement AI-driven personalization • Categorize event stakeholders between registrants, attendees, speakers, and sponsors (if any) • Segment audience based on webinar engagement |
| Unable to schedule follow-ups appropriately | • Be mindful of time zone differences • Schedule sequences only on week-days • Leverage webinar solutions to customize delivery time • Create multi-touch sequences in proper intervals |
| Inaccurate audience segmentation | • Create detailed segments based on webinar interactions • Utilize comprehensive data offered by webinar platforms for advanced segmentation • Build separate sequences for highly engaged and less-engaged attendees |
| Errors in technical integration | • Ensure your webinar platform offers API integration support • Test systems beforehand to avoid any mishaps during follow-up campaigns • Create real-time data sync across systems, and regularly audit the data |
Conclusion
Carefully curated webinar follow-up strategies are essential to getting the most out of your webinar. It helps establish & maintain connections, improve communications, and boost lead generation. Automating this process gives you an upper hand and increases the efficiency of the overall webinar journey with your prospects and potential customers.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, you can personalize every aspect of your follow-up template, including subject lines, even in automated follow-up emails and sequences.
Follow-up emails like study materials, preparation tips, and timely webinar reminders contribute greatly to improving the overall attendance and attendees involvement during the webinar.
It is important to have separate follow-up strategies for both because attendees have already shown interest and engaged with the content, so follow-ups would be focused on maintaining connections and driving conversions.
On the other hand, the registrants who did not attend the webinar require a different approach because the primary goal here is to re-establish interest, build engagement, and then convert them into potential leads.
Not exactly. While you can reuse the basic structure of the template, it is recommended to avoid using the same template. Your future webinar follow-up templates should be properly customized, based on webinar stakeholders’ specific preferences, interests, behaviors, and responses.
