If you ask me, the fun part of producing a webinar is collaborating with speakers and helping them bring out their best content and passion to ENGAGE and inspire the audience.

But before you can engage an audience, you have to first ATTRACT them to hear your message. This can be the most challenging, nerve wracking part of producing a webinar, since your webinar is one of hundreds that your prospects can attend.

According to Content Marketing Institute’s recent study, at least 51% of successful B2B organizations have added demand generation webinars to their marketing mix this year. If you want to attract more registrants and rise above competition, your webinar invitation must speak to your target audience’s immediate need. You need to show relevance.

If your webinar invitation does not make a connection by addressing an urgent need, then your webinar campaign has a very high probability of flat-lining.  You will not understand why your campaign failed unless you have the ability to track and analyze your daily metrics.  You also need to understand how to use metrics as actionable intelligence to ensure you meet your registration goals.

How My Client’s Recent Webinar Almost Flat Lined and Tanked

I’m going to share some email marketing highlights and lessons learned from tracking daily metrics that not only saved a recent webinar from missing my client’s minimum targets for registering 400 people, but significantly overachieved that goal.

The webinar topic, which we all thought was timely and relevant,  was a case study on how composites, a light weight durable material, had numerous use cases beyond aerospace and high tech.  We wanted to go beyond the aerospace and high tech markets, and reach an audience of engineering managers who were also decision makers on specifying materials.  Our goal was to have them consider expanding their materials horizon for using composites on “legacy” items such as bridges, pipes and cars.

The case studies were designed to educate the audience on what composites are, how they work, and show that, when applied properly, they will provide unbeatable weight, strength and durability advantages that yield better business outcomes.

We had two solid, credible presenters with expertise and passion in this space who had great examples to share. They helped us craft what we thought was a compelling invitation, with a strong value proposition for registering.

Our best practice is to execute email marketing three weeks before the “go live!” date, as that gives us an opportunity to start tracking the registration metrics, and then compare them daily against our performance benchmarks to validate whether we’re on track. If we’re not on track, we make adjustments to our audience recruitment strategy.

There are three key metrics we review daily, and throughout the email marketing campaign, as they are reliable predictors for webinar success:

1. The open rate, which is expressed as a percentage of how many delivered emails were uniquely opened.

2. The unsubscribe rate, which is the percentage of people who received an email asked to be removed from subsequent emails.

3. The Click Thru Ratio, or CTR, which measures, as a percentage, the number of people who came to the registration landing page and actually completed the form to register.

By all signs, after our first touch point (email blast), we had a very strong open rate on our delivered emails of 11%.  As we expect to see between a 6% – 15% open rate, this was encouraging.   The unsubscribe rate at .79% was higher than we preferred, but was within a benchmark range of less than 1%.

A few registrations trickled in, and four days later, we emailed our 2nd touch point and noticed a drop in our open rate from 11% to 5.65%.  NOTE: This is where the nerve wracking part of producing a webinar can begin!

After a few more days, we knew we had a serious problem, and it was deeper than only having 32 people register.  We had a CTR of only 2%!  Historically, our CTR benchmarks vary between 22% and 55%. We’re used to seeing  a minimum of  22 people out of 100 who arrive at the landing page, register.  Sometimes we see 55 out of a 100 people register.

The Click Thru Ratio (CTR) is our gold standard for determining how well the invitation messaging is resonating and whether we are targeting the right audience. The higher the CTR, the higher the registration and attendance.  Period.

After Analyzing the Dismal 2% CTR, Here’s How We Saved the Webinar, and Actually Beat our Client’s Registration Targets

1.  We reviewed our invitation messaging to make sure it was informational and educational.  We determined it was a solid message, but we kept drilling down to come up with a better hypothesis on why we had such a low CTR.

2.  Upon closer inspection, we determined that once people arrived at the registration landing page, something happened to diminish their initial interest.  Our presenters, while very credible subject matter experts, were first and foremost providers of commercial testing software for composites.  This probably created the perception that the webinar would focus more on their services, than truly educate attendees on the benefits of using composites beyond aerospace and high tech.

3.  Whenever possible, one of our webinar best practices is to always include a person who is seen as a neutral third party or trusted adviser. This includes thought leaders, authors or publishers/editors of well known industry publications, as they are able to provide the audience with an unbiased perspective on industry trends, challenges and opportunities. To augment our two experts, we needed to quickly find, and add, a neutral third party as our trusted adviser on the webinar panel.

4.   Since having a panelist who was also considered a neutral third party, was not part of the original webinar engagement plans, we encouraged our client to support us in finding this person.

5. We also suggested delaying the webinar for a few weeks, as we needed additional time to revise the messaging and re-launch. While we would have preferred not to reschedule the go live date, our client and speakers were all in agreement that this was the best tactic to optimize our outcomes.

6.   With the help of our two panelists, we  recruited a respected senior editor of a well-known trade publication who agreed to be the featured speaker.

7.  The 32 registered engineers received a personal email that we were rescheduling the webinar, and we thanked them in advance for their understanding.

8.  A new message and invitation was created.  This time we highlighted the editor as the keynote presenter, and included his title, headshot, and the publication’s logo. The campaign was re-launched, and we waited for the daily tracking results.

The Final Results of Our Client’s Webinar

Because we used our daily tracking metrics to benchmark performance, we were able to adjust our audience recruitment strategy to ATTRACT the right audience, and beat their minimum registration targets.

Here are the strong results we produced for our client:

  • Attracted 638 participants, over a 150% increase from the client’s goal of 400 registrants
  • Increased CTR from 2% to 22%
  • Engaged and retained over 85% of the peak audience to be online during the start of the Q/A section, which is reserved for the last 15 minutes
  • Overall unsubscribe rate dropped to .30%
  • 96% of the attendees said that the webinar exceeded, was above, or met their expectations.

To learn about the benchmarks and metrics you need to track before, during and after a webinar, to generate higher webinar success, download my free eBook: WebinarReady™ – A Step-by-Step Guide for Hosting Successful Webinars.

Also, check out my Slideshare presentation on the 6 Key Metrics That Impact Webinar Performance