How to Maximize Webinar Attendance and Engagement | 5 Strategies

Live webinars are a powerful lead generation and engagement tool. Successful webinars drive revenue and establish your organization as a thought leader in its space. However, maximizing webinar attendance takes effort. Nothing is more disheartening than spending time and advertising money promoting your webinar—only to have a handful of folks attend.

Many best practices focus on maximizing registrations, but webinar attendance is what matters most. When prospects attend your webinars, you have the opportunity to engage in real-time and build the relationship. This can be an invaluable milestone in the buyer’s journey. But, we all know our work inboxes get bombarded by webinar invitations each day. And if you manage to beat the competition, how do you convince the busy executive that barely has time for lunch to attend? Luckily, we’ve got a few tips that will help:

Offer High-Value, Actionable Content

A successful webinar starts with a strong webinar topic. No one wants to sit through a commercial for your product. With all the webinar invitations your prospects receive, you must ensure your topic is relevant to your audience and stands out from the rest. Take a look at your website analytics and other metrics to find topics that generate interest and more importantly, leads. Choose a topic that is aligned with your content strategy and addresses a pain point for your prospects. Choose a speaker that is credible, personable, and prepared to field questions about the topic.

Keep It Brief

Ideally, your webinar duration will be around half an hour. Limit the webinar to an absolute maximum of 45 minutes. Committing to an hour is simply too long for most people these days. Be sure to leave time at the end for a live Q&A.

Remind, Remind, and Remind Again

Ensure you have a thoughtful email cadence in place prior to delivering your first invitation. Send at least 3 reminders to people who register – we recommend 1 week before, 1 day before and 8 am on the day of the webinar. This can be automated using your marketing automation platform or webinar platform.

Offer a Small ‘Thank You’ Gift to the Attendees

• Promote the reward visually in all invitation emails, reminder emails and the registration landing page.
• Remind attendees about the ‘thank you’ gift at the beginning of the webinar as part of the housekeeping notes. Mention that they need to attend the full session in order to ensure the platform captures their webinar attendance correctly.
• Send the reward to attendees soon after the webinar. Take advantage of your marketing automation tool’s integration with your webinar platform and rewards platform to do this quickly and easily.
• Customize the reward email with follow-up content and a call to action. It will be your best-performing email so use this opportunity to drive engagement.

Encourage Feedback

Perhaps attendees already joined your webinar without the use of a gift. Great! There is still an opportunity to sweeten the follow-up. Drive additional engagement and further qualification at the end of the webinar by asking attendees to complete a survey on their experience. Deliver a ‘thank you’ gift for attending the webinar and sharing their thoughts. The customer feedback will facilitate sales rep follow-ups and product enhancements. And of course, it will help you ensure your next webinar is even better than the last!

Webinar attendance is important to building relationships with your prospects. However, all is not lost if you do not get as many attendees as expected. Not everyone will attend your webinar but even the no-shows may end up as customers. Be sure to share the recording with all who registered, and continue to use it as a valuable piece of content in your marketing arsenal. Webinar recordings can serve as an evergreen lead generation asset. Record your webinar, promote the recording, and extend the lifespan of your content.