If you’ve been trying to grow your webinar subscriber list but with little or no success, we’ve got you covered. This article aims to bring you several strategies you can employ to boost your webinar audience growth.
Webinar Audience Growth – Why is it Important?
It’s common knowledge that, today, webinars have immense power to grow businesses. But what role does growing an audience play in all of it?
Simple.
The greater the number of people who attend your webinar consistently, the higher your chances of converting them into loyal, paying customers, and therefore, the better your ROI and revenue.
Here are some more nuanced reasons why webinar audience growth is important:
- Increased Reach and Impact: A larger audience denotes that your message will reach a greater number of people. This will amplify your webinars and also help establish your brand as a leader in the industry.
- Enhances Credibility and Authority: A growing webinar audience will also help build your brand image, authority and credibility, and this, in turn, will help attract even more attendees.
- Better Engagement and Interaction: A larger webinar audience means a more diverse range of perspectives, observations and questions, which can boost participation, interaction and audience engagement throughout the session.
- Improved Feedback and Learning: A larger audience also means a diverse range of attendee feedback, which will help you understand audience expectations and experiences at a more granular level.
- Higher ROI: A larger audience helps you expand and target your post-webinar nurture campaigns to a wider set of people, increasing chances of conversions, sales and higher revenue.
- Increases Networking Opportunities: Growing your webinar audience can help boost the quality and quantity of networking opportunities, favoring both the webinar attendees and the host, which can lead to building valuable partnerships and collaborations.
How to Grow Your Webinar Subscriber List
Here are some tried and tested ways on how you can successfully grow and build a strong subscriber list.
1. Optimize your Registration Process
Simplifying the webinar registration process is an effective strategy for maximizing your webinar attendance. No matter how well you’ve promoted your webinar, prospective registrants will most likely abandon the registration page if it isn’t optimized for ease and convenience.
Craft a Dedicated Landing Page
Ensure that your webinar landing page, from where people will sign up for the event, is well-designed and visually appealing.
A good webinar landing page should have:
- A clear, simple, catchy headline that communicates the value proposition of webinar
- A brief description of what potential attendees can expect from the webinar
- A dynamic CTA button that will push people to sign up for the event
Simplify the Registration Form
Make sure the registration form on the landing page is crisp and straightforward, including only the most important fields, like name, email address, and perhaps, company name.
Also, consider offering them a single-click registration option, preferably via their social media or Gmail accounts, which will considerably reduce their effort and increase the conversion rates.
Employ A/B Testing
Confirm the effectiveness of your webinar landing page through A/B testing. You can test different elements, like headlines, images, visuals, CTA button colors, sizes and text, etc.
But make sure to change only one element in every variant so you know what works and what doesn’t.
Doing this will help you identify elements that resonate best with your target audience, and you can optimize your landing pages based on your findings to drive more registrations.
2. Leverage Email Marketing
Another great way to grow your webinar subscriber list is through email marketing. Here are some best practices to increase your webinar attendance:
Build a Targeted Email List
Leveraging email marketing successfully depends on the quality of the email list you target.
While creating targeted email lists, consider investing time and effort in audience segmentation, based on factors like their location, the industry they work in, their job title, etc. This will help you tailor your messaging accordingly, and can improve click-through rates.
Craft Compelling Email Campaigns
Your email should include a simple but attention-grabbing subject line, the key benefits that attendees will receive from attending the webinar, and a clear call-to-action button that leads them to the registration page.
Employ Email Automation and Reminders
- Announcement of the Webinar: Send an initial email announcing the webinar, its topic, speaker(s) invited, and the schedule.
- Employ Early Bird Offers: Send out exclusive emails to potential participants and encourage registrations by highlighting the early bird discount that only they can avail.
- Send Regular Reminders: Send out reminders to registrants so they don’t forget about the event, but not too many of them, to ensure maximum attendance.
These can be scheduled, for instance, like this – one email reminder a week before the event, another reminder two days before the event, and one last email on the day of the event, a couple of hours before the session commences. - Schedule Post-Webinar Follow-Up Emails: Send out post-webinar follow-ups to all the attendees, as well as the absentees, which includes the recording of the webinar, the presentation slides and some additional resources that they can benefit from.
Also include a CTA that leads them to making a purchase of your product and service, as this could be an opportunity to nudge people who derived value from the webinar to take favorable action.
3. Promote Well on Social Media
Social media can not only help you reach and engage your webinar target audience, but also attract new subscribers so you can grow your webinar subscriber list.
Identify the platforms where your target audience is most active on, and create an exclusive promotional campaign for that platform.
For example, if your target audience mostly includes senior business professionals, LinkedIn is probably the platform for you to target. Contrarily, if you cater to a much younger audience, who may or may not have entered the workforce yet, then perhaps you would want to focus on TikTok or Instagram.
Also, if your budget allows it, consider running targeted ads on social media that will help you drive more registrations, and increase your subscriber count.
4. Offer Exclusive Content and Incentives
Exclusive content and incentives serve as a powerful way to drive registrations and grow your webinar audience.
The types of incentives you can offer are:
Discounts and Special Offers
- Early Bird Discounts: Offer the webinar ticket fare at a discounted rate to your prospects who register early for the event, which will create a sense of urgency and result in immediate action.
- Limited Time Offers: Provide other offers or discounts to potential participants, which will be available for a limited period of time only.
- Bundle Deals: You can also offer your webinar package with some complementary products at discounted rates.
- Group Discounts: For prospective participants who wish to register in bulk or in groups, offer a tempting discount. This will encourage other prospects to consider inviting their peers or colleagues, increasing your overall registration number.
Exclusive Content and Resources
This plays a key role in building credibility, as valuable resources can truly empower participants to learn things beyond the webinar session’s content.
You can consider the following options:
- Offer exclusive access to the additional resources of your webinar, which can come in the form of e-books, case studies, templates, etc.
- Provide Behind-the-Scene Access: You can provide insider information like a sneak peek that the attendees can only access if they join the webinar; which will also add value to their experiences.
- Influencer Participation: Feature influencers as guest speakers in your webinar, creating an exclusive opportunity for participants to join the webinar and gain valuable insights from them.
Create a Sense of Exclusivity
In addition to offering offers and exclusive content, create a sense of exclusivity in your webinar content by accompanying certain strategies, like:
- Personalized Experiences: Provide the attendees with an opportunity to interact with the experts during or after the webinar, which will foster a more personalized and exclusive experience.
- Exclusive Content Teasers: Share some teasers of your exclusive webinar content that will eventually be revealed during the live webinar, building curiosity among participants.
5. Collaborate with Affiliates
Partnering with other businesses or affiliates can be a real game-changer in boosting webinar audience numbers. When you collaborate with a company or an influencer, you gain access to their audience as well, increasing your chances to promote your webinar to a much larger audience.
Identify potential partners or affiliates that share a similar target audience as yours, consider offering exclusive promotions and content for their audiences, cross-promote, and boost your webinar subscriber list.
6. Analyze and Optimize
One of the most effective but under-utilized tools in every event marketer’s arsenal is analytics. Post-webinar, it is absolutely essential to dedicate time to run through your webinar platform’s analytics dashboard and dig into the numbers.
Check for the registration rate vs. attendance rate, conversion rates, engagement metrics like chat, poll participation, question submissions, etc., and any other metric that your platform gives you access to.
Also, conduct post-webinar surveys to gather feedback from your webinar participants and see where you need to improve.
Based on these factors, you can understand the gaps in your webinar planning or execution, address them in subsequent events, and continue to deliver stellar webinar experiences to your audience – all of which will help you build your army of webinar loyalists.
Bottom Line
The basic fact that most event marketers miss out on is that providing audiences with a well-curated webinar that provides them with value, keeps them engaged and leaves them enriched is all it takes to keep them coming back as return attendees.
But that is not to say that the promotional campaigns you plan, the landing page you create, and the offers you provide, and everything else that goes into putting together a webinar are not important.
The best webinars are those in which all these factors come together.
The audience is bound to keep returning to your events and spread the word about the webinars if they have a good experience. Investing in the best practices mentioned in this blog will bring you a lot closer to a wider and more loyal webinar audience.
FAQ
Publish blog posts, infographics, and videos related to your webinar topic. Include calls to action directing readers to register.
To reduce webinar drop-off rates, focus on delivering engaging content that captures attention from the start and maintains it throughout. Integrate interactive elements like polls and Q&A sessions to keep the audience involved and interested.
Additionally, ensure that the technical quality of the webinar is high, with clear audio and visuals, to prevent any distractions or frustrations that might lead to drop-offs.
