WIth every webinar client we work with, as part of the process of developing an invitation strategy to recruit registrants, the question becomes “how many times do we reach out to them?”. Clearly there is, and should be, a concern about touching the audience too much or too frequently.
The first part of answering this concern goes to assuring solid targeting of the audience and a clear understanding of its preferences. Each industry’s prospective audience has a differing level of tolerance for the number of touchpoints. An insurance audience, for instance, become much less enamored of more than 2 touchpoints than, say, a retail audience.
Secondly, the number and frequency of touchpoints is greatly influenced by the relevance of the topic. Using the above example, if you are communicating to a life insurance audience about trends in health information systems, you can bet their patience will run out quickly! On the other hand, if your topic is about multi-channel marketing, and your retail audience is concerned with e-commerce and merchandising, you’ll be afforded much more license in how you communicate with them.
The next part of answering the question of how many times, and how often, a prospective audience may be recruited for a webinar goes to the goal of the campaign itself. Is the client’s desired outcome to be raised brand awareness, enhanced thought leadership or fresh demand generation? If the former two, the best approach is a conservative one involving less number and less frequent touchpoints. When the client desires lead generation specifically, a decision has to be made which balances the need for demonstrable outcomes and the potential for alienating the audience. We’ve found that unsubscribe rates are easily controllable by making informed decisions about number and frequency at the outset of a recruitment effort, while being willing and flexible to adjust the invitation strategy if needed.
The overall approach with webinar audience recruitment is to begin efforts about 3 weeks prior to the planned event. This time frame alone impacts the number of times a prospect can be touched. Traditional rule of thumb for most marketing departments is two promotional emails within such a time period. However, if a message is highly relevant and well-targeted, and HTML and plain text are interpolated throughout the recruitment effort, it is entirely appropriate and effective to touch the prospective audience more than twice and within a shorter period of time between touchpoints. Our rule of thumb is to touch no more frequently than every 3 business days and to ALWAYS drop a brief, plain-text message within 48 hours of the event.
Posted by Bret Smith
Co-Founder and Principal
WebAttract, LLC