Webinar Marketing (Page 2 - Continued...)
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.

6. Be sure to do the math
When email marketing, these days the best managed brand-name opt-in email lists for B2B web sites will get you in the neighborhood of a 25% to 40% open rate (November, 2005). From those opens, a click-through rate of 5% to 10% can be average for a clearly articulated offer, with decent creative and a call-to-action. So, for the typical B2B technology email list, a minimum mailing is 5,000 emails at a cost of around $400/M or $2,000. So, you can expect 50 to 150 pre qualified clicks. For a well optimized landing page, converting 40% to 50% of those qualified clicks (unique visitors) into leads or registrations should be your goal. With a free trial or relevant offer, we've seen as high at 60% conversion rates from click to registration.

7. Get a high profile guest speaker
If your business is not yet the "Kleenex" of your industry, don't worry. We've seen webinars or online seminars who partner with a major brand name player get as many as 3 to 5 times more registrations than those without. We've done promotions for seminars which included CISCO and IBM with lesser known small to mid-sized businesses get more sign-ups than they expected. And generally, an hour is the very high-end of the attention span of most webinars. We would more likely suggest 20 minutes to 1/2 hour for the presentation including your guest speaker and product segment, with the rest left as time for questions and discussion.

8. Optimize your registration page
On average, every extra data field that you require in your registration process will lose 5% of potential leads, so less is always more. Think about what you are actually going to do with the information - for example, name, company web site, email and phone # are often the critical points for a lead. Don't ask for any more than you absolutely have to. Be sure not to include too many outbound links which will distract/lose your visitors, and prevent sign-ups - keep them focused. If you must, be sure to have outbound links open in a new browser window, or pop-up without menu navigation, with a "Close" function. Be sure to valid each data field to ensure complete and correct, especially email and phone #s (ask your webmaster how to do this with JavaScript). Also, to help stimulate excitement in the event and demonstrate interest, try showing the actual number of registrations in real-time after they hit 10 or more.

9. Test, test and test again
Testing email subject lines is the biggest single lever for response for webinars or online seminar promotions using email marketing. If you have a speaker from Gartner Group or Jupiter Research, you MUST include that brand name in the subject line or else you are missing out on leveraging their brand awareness. Try using short and long copy in your email, change the FROM to a person at your company. Always use message personalization (Dear John). For email list rentals, an A/B split test of two offers/creatives is usually free, so take advantage of that!

10. Remind, execute, and follow-up
A good communicator always does three things. First they tell you what they are going to do, then they do it, and then they remind you what they did. Same goes for webinars. One month prior to your online seminar, send out your invites. Then one week prior, send a reminder. Then for those procrastinators, send out a final reminder the day before. You may want to incent the first 50 with a free giveaway to ensure sign-ups come fast and furious. After the seminar, send out a thank you or missed you email with links to the presentation, and product offering. For leads that aren't responsive by email, be sure to follow up by phone (Return to Page 1...).