I have been following a discussion thread on a LinkedIn group where a commenter asked whether any webinar vendors provide a special registration option for people who are interested in your webinar topic, but know they won’t attend the live session. It would be a way for them to provide their contact info and tell you that they want a link to the recording and any other associated materials, but don’t want to get login instructions and reminders about the live event.
I am not familiar with this feature in any web conferencing product I have tested. Sure, you can add a custom field on your registration page for “Do you plan to attend the live event?”, but that doesn’t accomplish the goal of not bothering archive-only registrants with emails about the live session.
I keep going back and forth on the benefits and drawbacks of this approach. On the plus side, it might help you as an organizer make a better estimate of the number of people to expect at your session versus the number of people who registered. And it gives your audience options in how they want to interact with you.
But would it also cannibalize the audience for your live event? When you drop below a certain number of live attendees, it can greatly reduce interaction, benefits from Q&A, and the ability to get representative data and feedback from polls and surveys. What if an archive-only registrant finds that they have time free to attend your session after all, but now has no information on how to log in?
And if people just sign up to watch the archive, is there a compelling reason for them to do so sooner rather than later? How do you know when to follow up with them?
It’s an interesting thought problem, and one without a universal answer. I can certainly see how having the option could be valuable for certain types of events in certain situations. Now which vendor is going to be the first to build this functionality into their registration system?
By Ken Molay, president of Webinar Success
Originally posted on The Webinar Blog