Part III: After the Webinar
Congratulations, you just completed a major webinar event. You had reasonable attendance, there were no technical glitches and the audience was engaged. You should be able to relax, but here are a few other things you may want to consider:
1. Tell your audience about upcoming webinars. Before you sign off and before you take the last question, pause to thank them and also tell them about the next upcoming webinar. It often helps webinar attendance to schedule two or three webinars in a row, and allow prospects to sign up for more than one with a single visit.
2. Conduct a post-webinar survey. This is conducted in a screen before the webinar closes. Ask them what other subjects they’d like covered in upcoming webinars. Perhaps list some suggestions. Make the survey short. Avoid questions on how well they liked the webinar. It doesn’t provide much useful information and it looks like you are asking for a complement.
3. Send the immediate follow-up email. This consists of one of two emails; a) “Thanks for attending, you’ll receive the links to the slides and replay shortly, or b) Sorry we missed you.
4. Track attendance in your CRM, Email, or Lead Scoring system. Capturing a prospects attendance at a particular webinar provides a data point on a prospect. Attendance patterns may give you valuable interest information. Too often, this information gets lost if there is no automated way to capture it between systems. Fortunately APIs are becoming prevalent for the exchange of registration and attendance information.
5. Send other relevant materials. For those interested in the subject, send them other relevant materials. For example, a whitepaper or a reference to an industry survey.
6. Answer the unanswered questions. There are often unanswered questions that can’t be addressed during the webinar session. If you send an answer, it provides another positive and trust building interaction.
7. Call to make sure their questions are answered. Avoid stalking your prospects, but you might consider calling them to make sure they did have an opportunity to get their questions answered. It’s a good conversation opener. Another possibility is offering a free assessment or evaluation during the webinar. For example, “Have your landing page evaluated.” Or, “Get your complementary security check.”
8. Track returns and forwards. Statistically, I find that 95% of attendees and non-attendees will not listen to a replay of your webinar. However, they often download the slides. This way they can skim the subject quickly. Making sure you can track this opens and also see when your email is forwarded gives you an idea of their perceived value in your material.
9. Repurpose your material. Turn your webinar into a whitepaper, blog post, newsletter or virtual seminar. Repurpose, repurpose and repurpose.
10. Get Ready for your next webinar. Making sure you have a regular heartbeat with prospects can be accomplished with a webinar series. Prospects learn to expect the fourth Thursday of the month as a time when they can learn about your subject.
As mundane as these thirty suggestions are, they form the basics of a successful webinar. They provide a starting place. So, I have a request. If you have tips or suggestions on how you run your webinars, please add them as a comment. Thanks.
Do great things.
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)