Did you know that on average, email drives 79% of all webinar registrations? Email is, without a doubt, the best way to promote your webinar and ensure you’re presenting to a packed audience. You can’t afford to get your email strategy wrong.
In our latest webinar, I partnered up with the email experts at AWeber to show you the secrets to all but guarantee you’ll nail your next webinar email. We cover:
- How to stand out in the inbox
- Tricks to increase delivery rates
- Words to avoid in your email copy
- Tried and true follow-up email templates
Get the slides from the webinar below, and if you didn’t get a chance to register for this webinar, don’t worry — you can always watch it on-demand here.:
We received several great questions during the webinar that we’ve answered below with the help of Aweber’s expertise.
Do you have email subject line tips for increasing open rates and registrations?
Subject lines can be personalized and create a sense of urgency. Webinars are a time-based events — use the limited time remaining to encourage immediate action. Here are a few suggestions to try:
See what other people are doing. Sign up for other webinars to see what they are using for their webinar email subject lines. There may be one that provides great inspiration for your business.
Ask a quesation. If you’re starting from scratch, try asking a question as your subject line. Examples:
- Are you going to join us?
- Do you want solutions to [whatever your audience’s challenge is]?
- Can we save you a seat?
Always be testing. Keep a document of subject line ideas, then test two versions every webinar to a 50/50 split of your audience. Optimize with the one with the stronger open rate.
How can I maximize email deliverability and avoid the dreaded spam filter?
The best way to protect your deliverability is growing a healthy, engaged list of subscribers. Set proper expectations with your subscribers at the time of signup and constantly deliver on those expectations. Over time, invite feedback from your audience to build rapport and deliver personalized content based upon their interests.
If you host webinars regularly, do you keep segmented lists in your email platform for webinar-related notifications? How do you manage this?
Most email platforms will let you tag your subscribers based on forms they signed up from, webinars attended or links clicked in emails. Using a tagging feature to create a segmented list of anyone that registered, attended or clicked on the follow-up email is a great idea.
This way you can analyze if your webinar attendees are more valuable than those who did not attend a webinar, and alter your marketing campaigns accordingly.
What is the best time to send emails to an international audience?
This will depend on your specific audience. To start, isolate your international audience to identify existing open or click patterns based on when you’re currently sending emails.
If you do not have that data, try sending a survey asking your international audience when they prefer to receive emails. Include time windows, like 5:00am – 9:00am, so your audience is clear.
Another suggestion is to test sending emails on various days or times over the course 30-60 days. Analyzing traffic data to your site from international audiences may indicate which days/times to start testing.
What’s the optimal email cadence for a very targeted audience of employees or customers? How many emails are too many?
Your cadence of sending should be influenced by the expectation you set. Have you told your employees or customers that you’ll be sending “one email a day for the next seven days” when they signed up for your emails? If not, set those expectations and follow that cadence. Then monitor unsubscribe activity, which will indicate at which point your audience may reach message fatigue.
In order to avoid complaints, what is the maximum number of webinar-notification emails you should send? How do you send multiple emails without sounding repetitive.
Similar to the prior question, your cadence of sending should be influenced by the expectation that you set.
For a webinar series, I suggest testing the eight-email template that was shared in the demo. It is designed to follow patterns of webinar audiences (i.e. known procrastinators and the tendency to forget about the webinar).
You avoid sounding repetitive because each email in the eight-part series is focused on one messaging theme that addresses the phase of the webinar lifecycle: save the date, rsvp reminder, here is the recording, etc.What is the optimal email length for both webinar invitations and follow-up emails?
There is no standard answer — the length of the email should be based on what’s necessary to communicate your message.
Webinar invitations don’t need to be long. Your only goal is to communicate the value of the webinar and provide your subscribers with a clear CTA link or button. This can be accomplished with one paragraph, a link, a call to action button and your signature.
Follow-up emails are based on the same concept. Attendees primarily care about the recording link. We’ve seen tremendous open and click rates on these emails when we keep it simple, providing a sentence or two, plus the link.
Some webinar invite email examples can be found here.
Can you use your own emails for webinar invites and the follow-up email with the recording?
Absolutely! You can use your own emails to send webinar invitations with a link to your webinar registration page. You can also download your webinar recording and embed the video link in your follow-up email.
Do you recommend offering incentives, such as giftcards or free samples/trials to drive registrations?
At GoToWebinar, we’ve used incentives in the past to encourage attendees to stay for the entire webinar. But you really want people to come for the content, not the goodies, so we don’t recommend offering incentives during the registration process.
What are your tips for building an email list?
The number one way we build our email list is with educational content. Webinars are (naturally) our primary tactic, but we also offer ebooks and other downloadable content that are promoted on social, our blog, and through PR.
Co-marketing is also really effective, allowing us to grow our subscribers by extending our reach to our partners’ audiences.
How do you create and share your webinar presentation?
We use PowerPoint to create the slides. Then with GoToWebinar we can share the presentation with our audience. When co-hosting a webinar from different locations, you can hand-off keyboard and mouse control so your co-presenter can share their screen and advance their slides. For more answers to GoToWebinar technical questions, visit our FAQs page.
What is the average webinar attendance rate?
According to our benchmark data in The Big Book of Webinar Stats, average attendance rates for marketing webinars are 36.6% and customer training and onboarding webinars average 42.1%.
Typically we see anywhere from 28-32% on our lead generation webinars and 32-45% for our customer webinars.
How do you use audience feedback to inform future webinar topics?
What typically works best is encouraging a lot of questions throughout a webinar. Those questions often spark ideas for relevant webinar topics. We’ve also generated ideas from the exit survey we provide after each webinar.
Is there a way to share past webinars without requiring users to fill out a form?
You can download your webinar recording from “My Recordings” in your GoToWebinar platform. Then embed that video in an email or on an ungated webpage.
What’s the most convenient time for an audience to attend a webinar?
According to our benchmark data, attendees prefer webinars on Thursdays at 11 am. If you’re scheduling a webinar for audiences across the US, the optimal time is 12:00pm Pacific/3:00pm Eastern.
If you have more questions, please ask them in the comments below.