Seasoned webinar and teleconference hosts use email to promote their events, driving targeted prospects and customers to attend. Through trial and error, we’ve discovered some best webinar practices regarding email:
Make sure your email invitations are well-formed and tested, before they leave your desk. A good rule is to send out both text-only emails and HTML emails, and see how those on your list respond. For B2B audiences, HTML is preferred, because it is more attractive and professional-looking, while B2C audiences seem to respond better to personalized text-only messages from people they know.
If you are going for HTML messages, make sure all your images appear correctly and your links work. Send the message out to yourself first, and then test each link. We’d also recommend looking over the phone numbers and even testing those. If you are using a bridgeline for your conference call or on-phone portion of your meeting, you should be able to call the number and hear the operator ask for your ID code. As you can probably imagine, a typo in a phone number or access code will actually prevent people from joining your call or webinar.
Plan an email campaign that supports your event, in front of your active mailing list. Often it helps to come up with ideas that are really event-related. You can ask your audience for questions in advance in a follow-up email or say something about your guest speaker, if you have one. Always try to offer more than “just a reminder” right up to the last hour before your presentation, and then send that reminder out to everyone who has signed up.
Following up is also important, after a webinar or online event. Using two lists, one for registrants and one for attendees, send out a survey using an online survey company. Here you can ask for suggestions about the day and time of your events, the interest level in the subject or presenter and for other details that may be helpful to know for next time. And if you can, have your next webinar already set in the calendar and offer a registration for that one. You can also offer your replay (be sure you have one) to both lists, and if it’s a free event, you can let people know it is OK to pass it along to interested friends. Keep track of your replays by creating a shortened URL link (like bit.ly) that can track how many opens you’ve received.
Webinars, online meetings and teleconferences are great ways to supplement the quality of content your company makes available to customers and prospects. Keep refining the webinars, and don’t overlook finessing your appearance when it comes to the email campaigns that support them.
By Gary Jesch
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