You can put on what you think is the best webinar in webinar history, but if your audience doesn’t take the action you want, it was all for naught.
Every webinar has an objective: increase brand awareness, drive free trials, generate sales, etc. It’s your job to guide your audience to the next step so you can accomplish that objective.
But that begs the question, how do you prompt them to follow through on the goal of your webinar? Here are five strategies for persuading your webinar audience to take action:
Include a clear call to action.
Your call to action (CTA) is the most obvious way of getting your audience to take action. Your CTA can be anything from “download your free ebook” to “purchase now and save 25%.”
At the end of your webinar – once you’ve delivered value and gained a level of trust– include a strong call to action with clear next steps.
This CTA should be the logical next step and should relate to the webinar. For example, don’t try and drive sales from a top-of-funnel thought leadership webinar. Instead, offer an exclusive piece of content or invite attendees to your next webinar.
Poll attendees.
Instead of just including a CTA at the end of your webinar, go a step above and poll your audience to find out where they are in the buyer’s journey. The poll responses will help you segment your audience by buying stage so you can follow-up with the best next step for each person.
If your audience’s poll responses reveal a high level of interest in your product, extend the webinar for 15 or so extra minutes to tell them more about your product and give a demo. This way your attendees get the information they want and the exact point they’ve shown a strong interest.
Send your attendees a follow-up email.
Send your follow-up email within 24 hours of your webinar. This way, it’s still fresh in their minds, which increases the chance they’ll respond. Ensure that the content of your email is crystal clear, so they can’t confuse what you want them to do:
- If your aim is for them to buy something related to your webinar, include an actionable verb at the start of your CTA, such as “Buy now.”
- If you’re presenting them a time-sensitive offer use urgency in your wording to persuade them to take action immediately, like “Hurry!” or “Limited-time offer.”
- If you’re linking to a blog post summing up your webinar, the recording of your webinar, or its presentation slides, stress that there’s high value waiting for them on these webpages (you should also put in additional on these pages).
Differentiate hot and cold leads.
Hopefully, your webinar has generated a bunch of new leads – how you follow up with them will determine your conversion rates. It’s important to properly categorize your webinar attendees so you know how to follow-up and what action you want them to take.
When segmenting hot and cold leads remember that hot leads:
- Display a high engagement level during your webinar like asking questions, responding to polls, and staying on for the whole webinar
- Respond favorably to earlier marketing engagement like web content and previous webinars
- Reply with more detailed information when registering (provided you ask for more than name and email)
- Fit within your buyer persona
In contrast, cold leads will:
- Not engage as much during the webinar
- Exit the webinar earlier than the rest
- Not provide as much information about themselves
Have your salespeople follow up with hot leads with personalized and relevant messages. Nurture your cold leads by determining where they are in the buying cycle following up with them with educational content that solves their problems.
Use retargeting ads.
Create a retargeting audience using a remarketing tag on your webinar registration page or create a remarketing list with registrants’ name and email addresses.
Then create retargeting ads that keep your brand top of mind and encourage your audience to take action.
Leave nothing to chance.
Never assume that your webinar audience will take the action you want them to take. Be explicit, understand what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re at, and always follow up with them. Do these three things, and your conversion rates will increase.
