Successful Webinar with Email MarketingAlthough hardly the most modern form of digital marketing, the humble webinar continues to be relied upon.

In fact, it’s thought that over 60% of businesses use webinars as part of their content marketing strategy. Therefore, if you’re planning one yourself, you’re in good company!

But how do you raise attendees levels? How can you be sure to engage the right people at the right time to guarantee they’ll tune in and soak up every word spoken during your webinar?

The answer is simple: email marketing!

Here’s how to make your webinar a rip-roaring success with email marketing:

1. Pick the best, must-attend title

It’s always worth bearing in mind that the subject line for your email will usually include the title of the webinar itself.

You therefore need to follow the tried-and-tested rules for awesome email marketing subject line creation; keep it short, relevant and entirely in the interests of the intended audience.

Make it a must-attend title by ensuring it promises to answer a question that is constantly on the audience’s mind.

2. List the benefits of attending your webinar

Why should people bother clicking-through and signing up for your webinar? Just because it’s free?

That won’t work – you need to give them a solid reason for diverting a chunk of their time to your broadcast.

Think about what’s in it for the audience. Within the main body of your email, list the benefits of attending the webinar in simple bullet-point form with short sentences for each one.

If you’ll be introducing a new way to perform an outdated task – tell them. If you’re going to unveil a statistic about your industry that they simply won’t believe – tell them.

Give your audience no excuse but to sign-up, and they’ll do just that.

3. Send reminders – but don’t over do it

It’s important to avoid overselling your webinar. People will attend if they want to after the first reminder email – you can’t force them to sign-up if they’re showing little signs of interest.

Most experts will agree that 3 is the magic number when it comes to how many email campaigns you should deploy per webinar. Any more, and you’ll sound desperate – sorry.

4. Make the attendance procedure clear

Depending on how you’re hosting the webinar, there may be one or two things you need confirmed attendees to do on the day of the event.

Email is the perfect place to explain the process involved, so take advantage of this medium by clearly detailing what they’ll need to do. Try and keep it to no more than three steps and highlight in bold any links or login information they’ll need to use come the big day.

5. Don’t forget the post-webinar stuff!

Once the webinar is over, it’s vital that you get back in touch with attendees via email.

The post-webinar email should contain at least one (or, ideally a combination) of the following:

  • A “thank you” for taking the time to attend
  • Links to further, supporting content on your website (blogs, ebooks, podcasts, etc)
  • A link to the recording so they can watch it again

The more you do after the webinar, the more chance you’ll have of people returning for the next one you stage.

Final thought

It’s estimated that the average attendance rate for webinars hovers at around the 40% mark. That means you need to work doubly hard to get as many subscribers to sign-up as possible.

Follow our simple tips above, and you should end up with an email marketing campaign that perfectly complements your webinar and which drives as many attendees as possible to your hard work.