Webinar
Marketing
10 Tips for Promoting Online Seminars
Knowing how to promote a successful webinar or online seminar
is one of the best ways to generate highly qualified sales leads
or educate and up sell existing customers. Here are some tips
based on learnings we've experienced with our
clients when promoting webinars.
1. Define objectives
It sounds obvious, but you really need to think about what you
are trying to do with a webinar, so that you can measure your
success and ROI after the fact. Is your objective;
- To acquire leads and bring in new sales?
- To educate existing customers on a new product/service?
- To obtain research or feedback on an existing offer?
If you are looking to acquire leads, one effective approach is
to focus on third party opt-in
email list rentals. If you are increasing awareness of a new
product or doing research among existing customers, then conducting
a permission-based
internal email campaign could be the most efficient use of
your resources.
2. Set expectations
After setting objectives, setting your internal expectations is
the next most important step, and too often overlooked. Do you
expect to cover all costs within 1 week of promoting your seminar,
creative and development costs of optimizing your registration
micro-site, running the webinar software/hosting and sending follow
up reminder and thank you/missed you emails? If so, you may need
to be more realistic, especially if you have low product margins.
Often acquisition campaigns are longer term strategies that will
generate new leads which may need 3 to 12 months to remarket to
via email, phone and personal visits before recouping costs.
3. Estimate response
What will my response be? Ah, the $69,000 question! Well, of course
response rates always depend on many variables, but mainly 3 things:
your offer (e.g. the quality of unbiased webinar content), the
creative (how well are you communicating the benefits, not features
of your product for your webinar), and the targeting (are you
using job title targeting in your email lists?). Web traffic is
also very seasonal, and timing during the week for email broadcasts
is important - typically Tuesday to Thursday mornings are optimal
for maximizing response while people are at their desks reading
email.
4. Determine your target cost per registration
In our experience with promoting technology hardware or
software online seminars to acquire new customers using opt-in
email list rentals exclusively, a typical cost per registration
(CPR) for a promotion with good unbiased content, a brand-name
guest speaker and optimized creative and landing/registration
process is around $50 to $100 US (this cost goes down to much
less when mining an existing customer database, but this is just
an example of the potential cost of acquiring new leads). If for
example, you have a profit margin of $300 per sale and close 1
in 3 leads to make a sale, that would give you a cost per acquisition
(CPA) of $150 to $300 US.
5. Maximizing attendance
Usually the actual turn-out rate from those registered is about
40% to 60%, so you will need a strategy for following up on those
who registered but didn't show. We usually suggest an email sent
a few days after your event, with follow-up with links to a copy
of the agenda and presentation and link to your offer such as
a free product trial etc.. Be sure to show the details of the
agenda to be covered, broken down by 5 to 10 minute increments,
and indicating each speaker to ensure registrants are clear on
why they should attend. Try providing incentives to sign up by
a certain date, and information on redeeming those incentives
when registrants attend your webinar. (Tips
6 to 10 next page...)
Contact us for a specific
opt-in email list recommendation and quote.
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