Regardless of how good your webinar is and how much time and effort you have put into getting registrants, you still need to ensure registrants actually turn up on the day of the broadcast. In fact, it is common to have only 20 to 30% of registrants actually attend the live webinar. However, there are many ways you can increase the attendance rate of your live events, such as the ones listed below:
1. Sending SMS Reminders
Since the average person checks their mobile phone 85 times a day on average, according to a recent study, this means that sending an SMS reminder prior to your webinar is definitely not going to go unnoticed. In order to be able to do so, make sure you also ask for people’s mobile phone numbers when registering to the webinar, and underline it is only going to be used to send an SMS reminder, as most people would be reluctant to share their contact details. There are many webinar tools and SMS tools that allow you to schedule reminders. Pick any tool and remember to personalise the SMS by including the registrant’s first name, and send a total of two reminders. The first reminder should be sent a few hours prior to the webinar starting and the second one, a few minutes prior to the webinar starting.
2. Offering a Gift
Another fantastic way to attract a higher attendance rate to your webinars is by promising to all attendees (not registrants) a gift such as free tickets, additional free training, complimentary access to resources, etc… When you decide on your giveaway, make sure your webinar marketing material underlines the benefit of the gift and underlines that it will only be made available to attendees and cannot be claimed by registrants only.
3. Sending Regular Email Reminders
Although most live webinar platforms such as gotowebinar.com automatically send email reminders prior to the webinar, create your own, customized reminders. Your email reminders should be sent daily 3 days prior to the webinar and should include the reasons why they should attend, a countdown, an overview of what will be shared during the broadcast, a reminder of the gift included for attending and some further content as a webinar teaser.
4. Broadcasting at 2 different Times of the Day
Most webinar audiences are usually split into two categories: people who are available during the day and people who are available in the evening. In order to cater for both types of audiences, offer two different broadcast times for people to attend, one in the late morning and one in the early evening. By doing so, you’ll not only increase your registration rate, but also increase your attendance rate significantly.
5. Sending a Last-minute Registration Notification
Another fantastic way to increase your attendance rate, is using the “notify all registrants” feature on gotowebinar.com This feature allows you to send an email to all registrants when a change is made to the webinar. We personally use this particular feature about 5 minutes prior to the webinar starting, by simply changing the title of the webinar to “STARTING NOW”. When you do, gotowebinar.com will offer the option to notify all registrants with your new headline “STARTING NOW” as the email subject line.
6. Removing Replay Options
Should you wish to increase your webinar attendance rate even further, not offering the replay tends to help. Usually, people will register in order to receive the replay instead, and because there is no urgency to when they can watch the webinar, most of them don’t. Therefore, underlining that the webinar will not be recorded and a replay won’t be made available, is a good way to ensure the majority of people attend the live event.
7. Limiting the Number of Attendees
Most live webinar platforms put a limit to how many people can attend your live broadcast. For example, when using the “starter” gotowebinar.com membership, you have a limit of 100 attendees. Therefore, make sure you let your registrants know that registering doesn’t necessarily guarantee them a place, and should they be late, they run the risk of being unable to join the live broadcast. Adding this element of genuine scarcity to your marketing material tends to increase the attendance rate dramatically.
8. Offering the “add to calendar” Option
When sending out the email confirmation upon people registering to your webinar, remember to add the “add to calendar” option. When you do, most people will click on that option so the event is featured in their calendar and will not only ensure they are constantly reminded of it, it will also ensure they don’t commit to anything else during that time.
9. Pick the Right Day
Another element that can really make or break the attendance rate of your webinar is the day of the broadcast. The best day to run a webinar depends hugely on your audience, so there is no “one size fits all” answer to the question “what day of the week should I run my webinar?”. However, the best way to find out is either by surveying your audience, or testing different days and drawing your own conclusions.
10. Including a Congratulations Video
A good habit to adopt when creating your webinar registration page, is also creating a “thank you” page. In other words, a page people get redirected to upon registering. On that page, include a video congratulating people for registering, reminding them of all the points made in your marketing material, such as the time and date of the event, the limit there is on the number of attendees, the giveaway shared to attendees, an overview of the content that will be shared and instructions on how to join the live broadcast. By doing so, you’ll make your webinar memorable, answer the frequently asked questions and eliminate any barriers for people to attend.
In order to create such pages, we use “lead pages”, a tool that allows you to create registration pages integrated with your live webinar platform (such as gotowebinar.com) and that allows you to create “thank you” pages registrants get redirected to.
